Month: December 2017

Bullies Of A Feather Play Together

I see that our clueless ambassador to the UN has taken a page from the bullying manual written by her ruler, Trump.

Recently the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on the the situation of Jerusalem…..Amb. Haley has threatened the world…..

Consider it a not-so-veiled threat. The UN General Assembly votes Thursday on whether to reject President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and US Ambassador Nikki Haley is warning that the US will be paying very close attention. “When we make a decision, at the will of the American ppl, abt where to locate OUR embassy, we don’t expect those we’ve helped to target us,” she tweeted. “On Thurs there’ll be a vote criticizing our choice. The US will be taking names.” In a letter circulated to other countries, Haley reiterates the point, reports the Guardian. “As you consider your vote, I encourage you to know the president and the US take this vote personally,” she writes, adding that she’ll be reporting back to Trump on the nay votes.

It’s unclear whether the US pressure will work. When the Security Council voted on a similar measure Monday, the other 14 members of the council voted against the US. However, because the US has veto power on the council, the measure failed anyway. No such vetoes are in play during the General Assembly vote, which is being held at the request of Arab and Muslim states, reports the BBC. A draft of the non-binding resolution asks the General Assembly to declare the American move “null and void,” and Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour predicts victory: “The General Assembly will say, without the fear of the veto, that the international community is refusing to accept the unilateral position of the United States.”

The American Conservative has touched on this attempt at a Trumpian bully……

Haley’s petty, threatening remarks compound the embarrassment of the U.S. veto she cast earlier this week. Having lost the Security Council vote 14-1, an effective diplomat would at least be seeking to conciliate and appeal to governments that might be willing to abstain instead of voting against the U.S. position. A smart one would be recommending that the president rethink his position. Instead, Haley directly challenges every member of the U.N. and makes an implicit threat that they will pay a penalty if they don’t vote as the U.S. wants. That will make it very easy for Haley to keep track of the names of all governments that vote against the administration’s position, since it will be almost every single member state.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/haleys-petty-threats-at-the-u-n/

This person, Haley, is a clueless diplomat, if you can use that term to describe her, this arrogance will do NOTHING but make her look foolish and a dumb-ass like her employer.

If she makes good on these threats then she will open the door for China and Russia to step into the void where the US use to occupy to gain more influence around the world.

None of this will “Make America Great Again”…another promise broke but who’s counting?

ISIS Update

Once the noise of the tax cuts bill calm down and after the holidays maybe the country will wonder what the Hell happened to ISIS……you remember them, right?

What’s going on with them?  Are they defeated?  Will they come back elsewhere?

Awhile back I wrote about the US giving ISIS fighters a free ride out of a besieged Syrian town…..but has the US been negotiating with ISIS?

On January 28, 2017, months after then-candidate Donald Trump vowed to wipe the Islamic State off the face of the earth and bomb the group into smithereens, the businessman-turned-president issued a presidential memorandum ordering Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, in consultation with other national security cabinet members, to submit to the White House a comprehensive war plan within thirty days. The president’s memo was as clear as a glass house: “It is the policy of the United States that ISIS be defeated.” It was the Pentagon’s duty to report back with a strategy that would accelerate the military campaign and bring the United States closer to that objective. While the memorandum was overshadowed a day later by Trump’s first travel ban, the January 27 executive order was nonetheless a public communication to the American people that the forty-fifth President of the United States would provide whatever resources the commanders needed to win the war.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-negotiating-the-islamic-state-23661

For months there has been a conspiracy theory flying around social media that the US had been arming terrorists….how true could this be?

While the mainstream media opted to protect the United States government by treating anyone who dared to question the government’s role in the rise of ISIS as crazy conspiracy theorists, a new report is forcing the MSM to admit that those “conspiracies” were true all along.

Now, mainstream media outlets such as Reuters and USA Today are suddenly reporting that the United States and its close ally, Saudi Arabia, were instrumental in supplying weapons and ammunition to ISIS. Both reports cite an investigation conducted by Conflict Armament Research (CAR), which looked at 40,000 items recovered from Islamic State militants between July 2014 and November 2017.

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/conspiracy-theorists-right-msm-admit-cia-armed-isis/

Remember all those stories of the “foreign fighters” that were flocking to join ISIS?  Well, what happened to all those fighters?

An estimated 40,000 people traveled from around the world to take up arms for the Islamic State group as it occupied territory in Syria and Iraq and declared a caliphate in 2014.

A few hundred are believed to still be fighting as IS struggles to survive, having lost most of its territory to campaigns by Western-backed Syrian and Iraqi coalition armies.

But what happened to the rest?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/islamic-state-happened-foreign-fighters-022212559.html

On a closing note:  A report on the leader of ISIS al-Baghdadi…..

I have written about this person a lot…..

https://lobotero.com/2017/12/04/hes-dead-hes-alive-hes-dead-again-hes-been-captured-nope-hes-dead-again/#comments

And now another story……

US forces have captured ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and he’s now held at one of the US bases in Syria, the conservative Turkish daily Yeni Şafak claimed on Sunday.

According to the report, al-Baghdadi was captured in Iraq, then transfered to the US base in Syria’s Ras al-Ayn and then to the US base in Rmeilan. Additionally, US forces allegedly captured and transfered 7 high-profile members of ISIS. One of these 7 terrorists was an Iraqi citizens, others were foreigners.

The report provides no additional details on the issue.

This dude has more lives than your local alley cat…..

Wish I had something clever to add….ISIS lost the battle fir the Levant (Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon) but the war is far from over…..much like the War on Terror.

Can “True” Conservatives Survive?

In this eras of Trump real conservatives, if you listen to Bannon they are RINOs, are trying desperately to hang onto their beliefs and their base…..but they are losing their grip the minions in Congress are making it difficult for a conservative to embrace the GOP.

The GOP for a couple of decades could depend on the blue collar worker for support but that support is sliding…..

Our news feeds this year have been saturated with dispatches from Donald Trump’s America. Media outlets deployed journalists to regions besieged by rapid globalization, technological advances, and demographic change, where they attempted to explain the anger that inspired voters to embrace a figure like Trump. Their written pieces created a kind of niche journalism, presenting stories of what our nation failed to address with its transitioning economy. A number of these articles were accurate and empathetic portrayals of struggling communities, but too many of them patronized their subjects and reeked of condescension.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-gop-can-hang-on-to-the-working-class/

Then there are the Christian conservatives some are solidly embracing Trumpism which is giving the GOP some concern…….(key word in that sentence is “some”)…….but will they continue to support the GOP?

Republican nominee Roy Moore lost the vote in Alabama on Tuesday. To many, that defeat was comforting: Moore’s troubling background included lawlessness, extremism, and allegations of child molestation. He may not have lost by much—but with a tenfold increase in write-ins and a drop-off of 800,000 voters, it appears that Moore was too much for principled conservatives in Alabama.

Indeed, after crunching the numbers, economist Lyman Stone suggested that Moore had the lowest white evangelical support of any Alabama Republican in the 21st century:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-republican-party-doesnt-own-christian-conservatives/

To be honest I do not see the GOP turning their backs on Trumpism right now….they are getting what they have desired for 30 years…a tax cut for the wealthy and the promise of attacks on Social Security and Medicare to start….Congress is thumping their chest with pride now….

Now will that support remain next year?  Damn good question.  I would say that it will depend on the events that are forming as I type.

Will the US continue to be a conservative state and maker no mistake matters not who is elected we are a conservative state….but a good question if you know what is meant by a conservative state……let me offer you some help…..

Over the last several years, amidst the swirls of overt corruption, immigrant “hordes,” rising “national security” concerns, police militarization, bloated empire, and the so-called deepening of the “deep state,” conservatives and libertarians of all stripes have pondered the meaning of the modern state. Most recently, Paul Moreno has brilliantly considered the rise of The Bureaucratic Kings, Alex Salter has wisely questioned the relationship of anarchy (the Bohemian, Nockian variety) to conservatism, and, though I have yet to read what the always thoughtful Jason Kuznicki of Cato recommends, there is also James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Believe me, I am intrigued.  Each of these authors and recommenders, of course, owes an immense debt to the pioneering work of Robert Higgs’s magnum opus, Crisis and Leviathan (1987), and Higgs, in turn, had followed in the footsteps of such 20th century greats as Christopher Dawson, Robert Nisbet, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/birzer/the-origins-of-the-modern-state-a-conservative-view/

A lot to take in but if you consider yourself a conservative then I think you need to read and understand…..

Peace out

Will Grenada Be A Deja Vu Moment?

Does anyone remember 1983?  My daughter was 12 years old and I had returned from working in the Middle East……what else was there?

The US invades the tiny island of Grenada……

The situation on Grenada had been of concern to American officials since 1979, when the leftist Maurice Bishop seized power and began to develop close relations with Cuba. In 1983, another Marxist, Bernard Coard, had Bishop assassinated and took control of the government. Protesters clashed with the new government and violence escalated. Citing the danger to the U.S. citizens in Grenada, Reagan ordered nearly 2,000 U.S. troops into the island, where they soon found themselves facing opposition from Grenadan armed forces and groups of Cuban military engineers, in Grenada to repair and expand the island’s airport. Matters were not helped by the fact that U.S. forces had to rely on minimal intelligence about the situation. (The maps used by many of them were, in fact, old tourist maps of the island.) Reagan ordered in more troops, and by the time the fighting was done, nearly 6,000 U.S. troops were in Grenada. Nearly 20 of these troops were killed and over a hundred wounded; over 60 Grenadan and Cuban troops were killed. Coard’s government collapsed and was replaced by one acceptable to the United States.

(history.com)

Some say that the invasion was a distraction from the bombing in Beirut….why is this important to recall?

China is helping the government of Grenada prepare a national development plan 34 years after the Caribbean island nation was invaded by US-led forces due to concerns in Washington that its government was too close to the Soviet and Cuban communist regimes.

The country is best known for its spices and beaches, but if the Grenadian government accepts the multibillion US dollar plan it would become the first in the world to opt for the wholesale adoption of a Chinese development blueprint – increasing Beijing’s influence in the region.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2124925/china-set-move-united-states-backyard-national

WE have another Repub president….one that is a war hawk….one who has already thrown down the gauntlet to China…..will he invoke the Monroe Doctrine (considering he knows what it is and what it means)?

Could this become another distraction moment for Americans?

Closing Thought–20Dec17

I have written several posts about the deaths of special ops troopers in the West African country of Niger and there has been a story around the death of Green Beret La David Johnson….there has been so many theories around why his body was not found with his comrades and found 2 days after the others…..there has been an update to the story…..

An American soldier killed during an ambush in Niger with three comrades wasn’t captured alive by the enemy or executed at close range, the AP has learned. A military investigation found evidence he apparently fought to the end. Dispelling a swirl of rumors about how Sgt. La David T Johnson, 25, of Florida, died, the report has determined that he was killed by enemy gunfire from an offshoot of the Islamic State group. A 12-member Army special forces unit was accompanying 30 Nigerien forces when they were ambushed in a densely wooded area by as many as 50 militants carrying small arms and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Officials familiar with the investigation say Johnson was hit as many as 18 times by a volley of machine gun rounds and that he was returning fire.

The bodies of three US Green Berets who died during the firefight were located on the day of the attack, but Johnson’s remains were found two days later. The gap in time led to questions about whether Johnson was taken away by the enemy. The report found there were no indications he was shot at close range or had been bound or taken prisoner, as several media reports have suggested. Officials say that during the attack, Johnson and two Nigerien soldiers became separated with the others as they tried to get to a vehicle to escape. The report concluded that Johnson, who was athletic and a runner, was in the lead and got the farthest away, seeking cover in the brush. Officials say there were a number of enemy shells around Johnson, and evidence that he appeared to fight to the end.

Hopefully this will be all there is to this…I am sure that his wife and family want an end to this drama so that he may rest in peace…..

I must be off for now….I will be back later with more stuff….have a good evening my friends…..chuq

We Were Under Attack

In case you have been glued top the TV on this train wreck….no an actual train wreck not the Trump White House…..the world was under attack, a cyber attack, and according to the US it was North Korea that attacked……

It’s official, according to Trump aide Thomas Bossert: The US publicly blames the massive “WannaCry” ransomware attack earlier this year on North Korea. “We do not make this allegation lightly. It is based on evidence,” Bossert writes in the Wall Street Journal. He accuses Pyongyang of being “directly responsible” for the “cowardly, costly, and careless” attack that hit hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 100 countries. “We are not alone with our findings, either. Other governments and private companies agree,” Bossert writes. “The United Kingdom attributes the attack to North Korea, and Microsoft traced the attack to cyber affiliates of the North Korean government.”

“North Korea has acted especially badly, largely unchecked, for more than a decade, and its malicious behavior is growing more egregious,” writes Bossert, who says Pyongyang must be held accountable. The May attack froze computers around the world. Users were asked to pay a ransom to unlock them, but those who paid up didn’t have their data restored. A senior administration source tells Reuters that the US government has determined with a “very high level of confidence” that the Pyongyang-linked Lazarus Group was behind the attack and that the White House will make a more formal statement Tuesday.

I know that the US wants to blame North Korea for everything that goes wrong…but in case this accusation is true I have just one question……(Replace Russia with North Korea and eliminate the word election)……

Answer that one question if you please………justify your existence.

Is She A Russian Stooge?

It was fun watching Clintonians go about character assassination of the Green Party’s Jill Stein….and when we thought it was all over Stein is once again in the news…..this time as part of the Russian meddling investigation….

In her first comments to the press, former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said she will cooperate fully with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into “collusion with the Russians” during the 2016 campaign, and is currently searching for relevant documents. Stein denies holding any substantive communications with the Russian government or RT, its state-owned media property.

Stein says her involvement in the inquiry, first reported by BuzzFeed News, came as a surprise when they were first contacted last month. After a subsequent dialogue between attorneys representing Stein and lawyers from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the ex-candidate received a formal request for cooperation. Although she says the possibility of testifying before Congress has not yet been broached, Stein says she would be “happy to do so” if asked.

https://theintercept.com/2017/12/18/jill-stein-will-hand-over-russia-related-communications-to-senate-commmittee/

Since I could not support Clinton and I would hate myself if I voted for Trump Stein was the most logical vote for me…..with that said….if there was any collusion between the Green Party and Russia or any form of meddling in the election then I damn well want to know.  Unlike Trump supporters I refuse to look the other way at these accusations.  I want to know.

The Speaker Speaks–Dec. 2017

Some may say that I am a prick.  And they are probably right.  Why would I say this?

The tax bill that passed in Dec 2017 is nothing but a boost for the wealthy….the middle class gets a boost for a couple of years then it disappears but the wealthy gets to keep all their benefits….it will create jobs…horseshit!

All that aside….I have the Speakers words and his promises on vid and in print and I will be sure to play this for the conservs whenever they try to run in my district…..

https://www.speaker.gov/press-release/speaker-ryans-floor-remarks-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act

The “Swamp” just got richer…..

The Tax Vote

The GOP has NO shame….how can they stand before the nation and lie and lie and lie……

Can we move the f*ck on?

Did you hear the Speaker go on and on….all of it lies….tax reform did not happen tax cuts for the wealthy did…..they stole the future and did not need a weapon to do so…..

Most Americans do not understand a word of economics why else do you think they can lie and get away with it…..but Vox has made it simple for everyone to understand the whole picture……a  fellow blogger Gronda Morin posted it on his site and I wanted to let my readers see what the truth of the matter…….

VOX Graphs To Explain Economy/ US Congress Needs To Learn the Basics

If you study the graphs it makes it painfully clear just how bad the f*cking of the American people will be…..this bill does NOTHING to change any of the math…..

The GOP has been foaming at the mouth since January to do what they have wanted to do to the American people for 30 years.

After all the glowing promises of the GOP…..after all the talking points were spread around…….

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/12/19/house-and-senate-vote-heres-13-worst-things-trump-gop-tax-scam

OOPS!…….. they’ll have to do it again on Wednesday because of a legislative hiccup. Tuesday’s vote, largely along party lines, was 227-203 and capped a GOP sprint to deliver a major legislative accomplishment to President Trump. In a last-minute glitch, however, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that three provisions in the bill, including one that would allow parents to use college savings accounts for home-schooling expenses for young children, violate Senate budget rules. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said the House would vote on the package again on Wednesday, after the Senate removes the problematic provisions and passes the bill, per the AP.

Next year they will come for everyone’s Social Security and Medicare…..wait for it.

Honey Is Better Than Vinegar

That was an old saying that my grandmother was fond of……she would use it at every opportunity…..maybe Fearless Fosdick should pull his head out of his ass (if that is possible) and look at the world with a reality glance (if that is possible).

Everyone that has listened to the mindless ramblings of Fearless Fosdick then they will know just what he has in mind for countries like North Korea…..his answer is to go to war…..

But China seems to have a different approach than that of the US……

Despite Pyongyang’s recent ballistic missile and nuclear activity and threats, Beijing continues to resist US requests to apply greater economic pressure on North Korea. This measured response aside, nuanced but highly significant changes in China’s thinking on North Korea are clear. China may now be willing to envision both a future in which North Korea is not a sovereign state and a greater role for the Chinese military in any contingency. This Peace Brief reviews this thinking as well as potential Chinese motivations to intervene militarily in a Korea contingency and the implications for US policy.

https://www.usip.org/publications/2017/09/chinas-evolving-north-korea-strategy

China is capable of finding a way around war…..something the US seems to not have an interest in doing at this point.

Then thee is Iran which is more than likely the next victim of the US war machismo…..China has found another way of handling Iran than has eluded Fearless Fosdick……

Freed from crippling nuclear sanctions two years ago, Iran is drawing unprecedented Chinese funding for everything from railways to hospitals, they said.

State-owned investment arm CITIC Group recently established a US$10 billion credit line and China Development Bank is considering lending US$15 billion more.

“They [Western firms] had better come quickly to Iran otherwise China will take over,” said Ferial Mostofi, head of the Iran Chamber of Commerce’s investment commission, speaking on the sidelines of an Iran-Italy investment meeting in Rome.

The Chinese funding, by far the largest statement of investment intent of any country in Iran, is in stark contrast with the drought facing Western investors since US President Donald Trump disavowed the 2015 pact agreed by major powers, raising the threat sanctions could be reimposed.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2122435/china-pumps-billions-iranian-economy-western-firms-hold

For once granma’s idea may be the better idea…Honey is better than vinegar.