Day: October 23, 2018

Gimme Your Money!

Closing Thought–23Oct18

Our Dear Supreme Leader’s infamous tax cuts have exploded the deficit…..

Thanks in large part to Republican tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations, the latest tallies are jaw-dropping.

The U.S. budget deficit is reaching levels that are abnormally high for a robust economy, and lawmakers from both parties are proposing ideas that would make the deficit swell even further.

The government spent $895 billion more than it brought in from taxes and other revenue sources during the past 11 months, the Congressional Budget Office said this week, a 33 percent increase from one year before.

Even the Supreme Leader was shocked and he has a plan to lessen the deficit……

President Trump instructed his cabinet secretaries Wednesday to reduce their departmental spending by 5 percent or more next year.

“Some of you will say, ‘Hey, I can do much more than five,’” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting.

……after the U.S. Treasury reported that the budget deficit hit a 6-year high of $779 billion in fiscal year 2018. The 17 percent year-over-year increase in the deficit was driven in large part by the tax cuts pushed through Congress by Republicans late last year, along with a $300 billion increase in spending for this year and next.

The Trump administration has been hinting recently that it would seek to cut spending for fiscal 2020, with Kevin Hassett, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, saying last week that “deficit is absolutely higher than anyone would like” and that “you’ll see a much more aggressive stance” soon as far as the budget is concerned.

(yahoo news)

Will that include the Pentagon?  If so we can kiss that new Space Force good-bye for now.

I have a feeling that the Pentagon will be exempt.

Now watch the game that the GOP will start about Social Security, Medicare, etc……it is always the fault of so-called “entitlements” that explode the deficit…not the mindless policies of the GOP (that is sarcasm)…..

Make Those Villains Pay

The US and its allies have made the villains of our wars pay for their treachery.  First it was the Nazis at Nuremberg and later it was Saddam  of Iraq.  The Allies thought that someone would have to pay for the atrocities that was committed by the Nazis and since Hitler had avoided trial by eating a bullet….someone had to be the example.

After the Allies got the Nazis to surrender they set about rounding up and arresting Nazis so they could be put on trial (except for the Nazis that got a free rode with Operation Paper Clip).

For the Germans it was the Nuremberg trials (1945-1949)…….

No trial provides a better basis for understanding the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949.  Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters are generally disappointed.  What is shocking about Nuremberg is  the ordinariness of the defendants: men who may be good fathers, kind to animals, even unassuming–yet who committed unspeakable crimes.  Years later, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote of “the banality of evil.”  Like Eichmann, most Nuremberg defendants never aspired to be villains.  Rather, they over-identified with an ideological cause and suffered from a lack of imagination or empathy: they couldn’t fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated decisions.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nurembergACCOUNT.html

If that is too much to read…then watch this……

These were show trials and to  pretend they were anything other than that is disingenuous….why do I say such a thing?

Easy the judges were from the Allied countries so to say that it was a “fair” trial is laughable.  (do not get me wrong….these d/bags deserve to be punished for their crimes against humanity)

All I am saying is if the Allies truly wanted this to have an air of legitimacy then the judges should have come from the neutral countries during WW2…Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland.

Isolationism? Fascism?

In the days of Hillary and her pundits on the tube we were lead to believe that Trump was an isolationist……those incessant babbling from the pundits and what happened?

It’s nearly impossible to read major newspapers, magazines, or online publications in recent months without encountering a plethora of articles contending that the United States is turning inward and “going alone,” “abandoning Washington’s global leadership role” or “retreating from the world.” These trends supposedly herald the arrival of a new “isolationism.” The chief villain in all of these worrisome developments is, of course, Donald Trump. There is just one problem with such arguments; they are vastly overstated bordering on utterly absurd.

President Trump is not embracing his supposed inner isolationist. The policy changes that he has adopted regarding both security and international economic issues do not reflect a desire to decrease Washington’s global hegemonic status. Instead, they point to a more unilateral and militaristic approach, but one that still envisions a hyper-activist U.S. role.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/where-trumps-alleged-isolationism-32996

I admit that I do not like many of Trump’s foreign policies but as an analyst I just do not see a lean toward isolationism……just another broken promise?

Then there are those that kept saying that the election of Trump and some of his policies were ushering in a time of fascism in the US……actually the calls for fascism were loudest in Europe from the pundits……what happened?

Were fascism to ascend again in Europe, international security would be menaced and the liberal international order be even more imperilled. However, Europe’s current far-right parties fail to meet the minimum fascist criteria.

Just as the taxonomy of European far-right parties is not settled, there is no unanimously agreed definition of 1930s fascism. Differences over generic fascism or a recognisable fascist ideology punctuate the scholarly literature.

Even the two fascist exemplars, Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, had important differences as well as similarities. However, the fascist movements that arose after 1918 and their shallow imitators—like Franco’s Spain and the Romanian Iron Guard—can be distinguished from today’s far-right movements.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/10/10/fascism_has_not_returned_113881.html

To be honest I could find fascism in the policies of Reagan and both Bush….just as those “people” on the Right want to find aspects of the Dems that they think smacks of socialism…..

These two stories were nothing more than sensationalism and speculation that drives the MSM these days….

Turn The Page!

How About Syria?

When was the last time you saw the word “SYRIA” in the headlines or on the front page of a newspaper?

And now the old professor seems to be the only person that actually cares about the events taking place in Syria.

ISIS has been herded into a Southern region of Syria….where there has been a couple of pot shots fired into the region and all parties seem to be playing some sort of game…..

For instance…the US is only pretending to fight ISIS…….

The U.S. occupation force and its Kurdish proxy SDF in northeastern Syria are supposed to fight the Islamic State in its last hold out northeast of Euphrates. But the operations against the handful of towns ISIS (grey) still holds – launched only after long and unexplained delays – shows little progress. Last week it received a serious setback.

After several days of sandstorms (vid) hindered U.S. air support, ISIS counterattacked on October 11 against the U.S. led SDF. Suicide bombers blew up SDF checkpoints as ISIS broke through the lines. It retook several villages and on October 12 raided a refugee camp for local civilians that the U.S. coalition had set up near Al Bahrah (on the upper left of the map). Some 130 refugee families with about 700 persons were taken prisoners and brought to Hajin, a small city at the northern end of the ISIS held area.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/10/syria-us-again-only-pretends-to-fight-isis.html

Not to worry the US has re-started a tried and true technique….body count….

Aymenn al-Tamimi, a researcher for the right-wing, and generally hawkish Middle East Forum, has faulted new statements this week from the Pentagon as having greatly exaggerated the number of foreign ISIS fighters, and the number still joining ISIS, in an attempt to try to justify the continued US military presence in Syria.

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Joe Dunford told a conference on Tuesday that ISIS remains “resilient, determined and adaptable,” and claimed that 100 new foreign fighters are recruited by the ground every single month.

Though ISIS was wildly successful at attracting foreign fighters during its prime, when it established a “caliphate” spanning much of Syria and parts of Iraq. With no real territory left, however, it is hard to imagine recruitment is anywhere near so high for them.

Tamimi noted that ISIS’ distance from the Turkish border means that’s no longer a place to get recruits, and getting in through Iraq would be no easier. These claims seem to be built around the need to keep using ISIS to justify keeping troops in Syria, and Tamimi noted that it would “be much harder for the US to explain its presence as an official counter-Iran mission.”

(antiwar.com)

Not to worry….Our Dear Supreme Leader has said that we have defeated ISIS…..

President Trump declared in an interview Tuesday that the U.S. has defeated the Islamic State, even as the military says it will still take months before forces are driven from Syria.

“We’ve defeated ISIS,” Trump said in an interview with the Associated Press. “ISIS is defeated in all of the areas that we fought ISIS, and that would have never happened under President Obama.”

The comments came the same that day that a military spokesman told reporters in the Pentagon that it was unclear whether the remaining fighters could be wiped out by the end of this year.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/trump-declares-victory-over-isis-the-pentagon-says-thats-still-months-away

Since Iran is also fighting in Syria…what happens if they stay….will the US remain as well?

President Donald Trump speaks frequently about bringing U.S. troops home and avoiding costly wars in the Middle East. But last month, the administration changed its position in one key area: the Syrian civil war. America will remain in Syria, National Security Advisor John Bolton said, “as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders.” He described the new policy as a strategic shift from countering ISIS to containing Iran.

Today, NBC News reported that the new strategy will include ramped up diplomatic and political efforts, but stay within the limits imposed by the current congressional authorization for the use of force in Syria. Part of the Trump administration’s strategy will be to withhold reconstruction aid from areas where Iranian and Russian forces are operating, in an attempt to further choke off funds to Tehran. While the strategy appears to seek to avoid direct confrontation between U.S. and Iranian forces, Washington has made it clear that American forces will defend themselves as necessary.

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2018/10/if-iran-never-leaves-syria-will-america-stay-forever/152072/

I try to keep my readers up to date on the conflicts that this country is fighting….since the media does not deem these wars as important enough to report on…..I feel I must step in ans fill the gap.