Day: October 2, 2019

Closing Thought–02Oct19

When my father was alive he was a big donr to the animal funds like Sierra Club and the WWF….I always admired his dedication to these organizations and their task of helping the wildlife of this planet.

Sp an article I read recently made me feel a little sick and then made me angry…….

This was a sensitive moment for one of the globe’s most prominent charities. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) had long helped fund and equip Chitwan’s forest rangers, who patrol the area in jeeps, boats, and on elephant backs alongside soldiers from the park’s in-house army battalion. Now WWF’s partners in the war against poaching stood accused of torturing a man to death.

WWF’s staff on the ground in Nepal leaped into action — not to demand justice, but to lobby for the charges to disappear. When the Nepalese government dropped the case months later, the charity declared it a victory in the fight against poaching. Then WWF Nepal continued to work closely with the rangers and fund the park as if nothing had happened.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wide-fund-nature-parks-torture-death

That was Part One….and the rest of the series is listed here…..

Part 2: Leaked Report Shows WWF Was Warned Years Ago Of “Frightening” Abuses
Part 3: WWF Says Indigenous People Want This Park — But An Internal Report Reveals Fears Of Ranger “Repression.”
Part 4: WWF-Backed Guards Raped Pregnant Women And Tortured Villagers At A Wildlife Park Funded By The US Government
Part 5: WWF Is Investigating Two More Alleged Murders At A Park Where Rangers Are Accused Of Rape And Torture
Part 6: The US Government Spent Millions Funding WWF-Backed Forces Accused Of Torture and Murder

This is disgusting and one reason why all my charities are local ones that I can check on to be sure they are doing what they say they are doing.

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A Few Thoughts

These are a couple of stories that I came across and marked for a possible post….they never made it that far…..events moved quickly and made them a moot point…..

First thought is the ever popular NRA…popular with the GOP who gets a regular paycheck from the lobbying group……

It appears as if the NRA knew they were being played by the Russian agent…..

Top officials at the National Rifle Association knew Russians were using their ties to the gun rights group to try to bolster their status with lawmakers or the winner of the 2016 presidential election, a new report from Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee shows.

In 2015, Russian national Maria Butina, who last year pleaded guilty to conspiracy as an unregistered foreign agent, tapped her political operative boyfriend Paul Erickson to help her convince a top NRA official to come to Moscow, according to the committee report made public Friday.
“Russia believes that high level contacts with the NRA might be the BEST means of neutral introduction to either the next American President OR to a meaningful re-set in relations with the Congress under a (God forbid) President Clinton,” Erickson, a GOP political operative wrote to Peter Brownell, the chief executive of a firearm accessories company and, at the time, the incoming president of the NRA. “This simple good will trip would have enormous diplomatic consequences for a future U.S. / Russia bilateral relationship to the world.”
 
Second the whole mash up with the Ukraine phone call is what set the whole inquiry in motion…..SecState Pompeo has babbled that he had not seen the complaint and knows nothing about the phone call that started this whole thing….I appears that Pompeo is lying (go figure)…….
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was one of the people listening in on President Trump’s call to Ukraine’s president in July—the call that prompted the House to begin an impeachment inquiry. A senior State Department official confirmed Pompeo’s involvement on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reports. Pompeo had said that he opposed releasing the transcript of Trump’s conversation with President Volodymy Zelensky. He has since said the decision is up to the White House.
 
Pompeo had said he hadn’t read the whistleblower complaint in full about the phone call, and not answered specific questions about the conversation. As far as he knew, Pompeo said, per CNN, State Department officials had acted properly. Three House committees have issued subpoenas to Pompeo for documents related to the inquiry. He faces a deadline of Friday to turn them over
Pompeo has stated that ……
the House panels conducting the impeachment inquiry requested that five current and former State Department officials appear this week and next for depositions. On Tuesday, Mike Pompeo made clear that won’t happen, the Washington Post reports. The secretary of state sent a letter to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (Pompeo posted the letter in full on Twitter) outlining a number of “serious substantive and procedural deficiencies” in the request, which he called nothing more than “an attempt to intimidate, bully, and treat improperly, the distinguished professionals of the Department of State.” He faulted the committee for not providing the five enough time to prepare and said the panels are trying to block State Department counsel from coming with them.
 
He also noted the five weren’t issued subpoenas, and “we are not aware of any other authority by which the committee could compel appearance at a depositions”; therefore, the scheduled depositions “could only be read as a request for a voluntary appearance.” The officials requested have all somehow been involved in US-Ukraine relations: Marie Yovanovitch, former ambassador to Ukraine; Kurt Volker, former special envoy to Ukraine; Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent; US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland; and State Department Counselor T. Ulrich Brechbuhl. Later Tuesday, CNN reports, the chairmen of the three committees requesting the depositions issued a statement warning Pompeo that “any effort to intimidate witnesses or prevent them from talking with Congress … is illegal.” The AP reports that Volker, who resigned last week, has agreed to talk to the committees behind closed doors this week and Yovanovitch will appear Oct. 11
No problem…either they answer questions or they are in contempt and should be arrested immediately.
 
Pompeo will say whatever Trump trlls him to say……Im have NO use for people like that…….suck ass cheese eaters…..
A little more than a week after saying he had just been handed “a report about a IC whistle-blower complaint, none of which I’ve seen,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed Wednesday that he was on the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that prompted the complaint and is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry. “I was on the call,” Pompeo said from Rome, adding the US policy had been about helping rid Ukraine of corruption, per the New York Times. “We will continue to try to drive those set of outcomes,” he said when asked if he had any concerns about the call, per CNN.
 
Pompeo then elaborated on a Tuesday letter in which he accused Democrats of attempting to intimidate officials asked to appear for depositions. “They contacted State Department employees directly, told them not to contact legal counsel at the State Department,” he said, claiming the demands “deeply violate fundamental principles of separation of powers.” Late Tuesday, however, the chairmen of three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry said Pompeo “appears to have an obvious conflict of interest” and “should immediately cease intimidating Department witnesses in order to protect himself and the president,” per Bloomberg and the Hill.
Nothing about the DC Triumvirate, Trump, Barr, Pompeo is about what is best for the country….it is all about protecting a pertson…not the country or the Constitution.
 
The media is acting all butt hurt that Pompeo is lying to them……in reality Pompeo has been a lying arrogant Neocon since his days in the Congress…..to think that he has changed because he has a position of authority is just STUPID!
 
According to your president there is a “coup”….but then there has been such since he walked into office…..
 
Not for the first time, President Trump is falsely claiming a coup against him. “As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP,” the president tweeted late Tuesday. Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro had suggested the same hours earlier, telling Fox Business that the impeachment inquiry was “nothing less than an attempted coup d’état,” reports the Hill.
 
Trump also claimed a failed coup in April, reports USA Today. “They tried for a coup, it didn’t work out so well,” he said of the Mueller report at the NRA’s annual meeting. Trump is likely to expand on his defense at a Wednesday press conference. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff will jointly hold one of their own, per NBC News, while the State Department’s inspector general will brief congressional committees on documents related to the Ukraine scandal.
As usual the president uses words that he has NO earthly idea what they mean……
 
Thought process recorded.
 
“I Read, I Wrote and now You Know!”
 
“Lego Ergo Scribo”

To Impeach Or Not To Impeach

“That is the question…..whether it is nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of social media or by pursuit to end them”  Book of Chuq…..act one, scene one…….

The chants for impeachment are getting louder from Congress and those in opposition are just as loud…..personally I think this partisan divide will do NOTHING to solve the problem this country has with governance.

We know how the Dems feel and if you are paying attention then you know how the Repubs feel….with that said….do we know how the rest of the country feels?

Looks like Americans are shifting on impeachment—at least according to a new poll of 2,059 US residents conducted on Thursday and Friday, CBS News reports. Much in the YouGov poll breaks down predictably between Democrats and Republicans, but a slim majority now approve the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, with 55% on board and 45% opposed (a 6-point approval boost over a Thursday poll). Among those, 87% of Democrats approve and 13% disapprove, while 23% of Republicans approve and 77% disapprove. CBS News notes that Democrats don’t appear divided over impeachment, as some had predicted.

The poll also shows that most Republicans believe Trump either acted properly or, if improperly, still legally and within the bounds of past presidential behavior. On that front, 71% of Republicans called Trump’s apparent pressuring of Ukraine’s president a typical presidential move, while 85% of Democrats disagreed; 41% of those polled called Trump’s actions illegal, and 31% improper but legal. Does he deserve to be impeached? Overall, 42% said yes, 36% no, and 22% said it was too soon to say. On Friday, FiveThirtyEight analyzed recent polling and found an uptick of up to 10% in pro-impeachment sentiment among Americans since mid-April.

Granted most polls are only a momentary snapshot of what the opinions of the country are….

Let’s say that the House votes to impeach the whole affair moves to the Senate…..but with a majority in the Senate in bed with the GOP what are the chances that there will be an acquittal?

Not everybody thinks it will will a easy task for the GOP….

Former Sen. Jeff Flake has his own take on how the Senate would respond to President Trump’s impeachment, Fox News reports. “At least 35” Republican senators would support impeachment if the vote were held privately, he said Thursday at the 2019 Texas Tribune Festival. “I heard someone say if there were a private vote there would be 30 Republican votes. That’s not true,” he added in a Q&A. “There would be at least 35.” The frequent Trump critic talked more about it Friday, telling WBUR that “anybody who has sat through two years, as I have, of Republican luncheons realizes that there’s not a lot of love for the president.”

“There’s a lot of fear of what it means to go against the president, but most Republican senators would not like to be dealing with this for another year or another five years,” he went on. “So yeah, a private vote would go a lot differently, but that doesn’t matter because that’s just a hypothetical.” Asked what he thought of Democrats launching an impeachment inquiry, he said, “That was a pretty damning transcript. That was not anything you want your president to be doing. So I think we need to wait for the investigation to conclude and wait for likely testimony from the whistleblower him or herself before drawing conclusions.”

The saga begins and the results will be talked about for a couple of decades…..which side will be on the side of history?

A little history….back in the 90s Bill Clinton harmed national security by giving China some missiles and the tech to go with them and yet he was impeached for getting a blowjob….(has nothing to do with this impeachment but I do love to throw some history wherever I can)……

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Saudi Money Well Spent

The Royals of Saudi Arabia spends record amounts of cash every year buying the best equipment the US has to offer…..plus their troops are sent to the US for advanced training or we send our troops to train the soldier of KSA….in other words they get the best the US has to offer in equipment and/or training.

If that is a true statement then how can we explain this kturn of events?

A 72 hour military operation in southern Najran Province of Saudi Arabia was carried out by Yemen’s Houthi movement with very little media coverage. Starting on early Thursday, a major operation raged, and by early Saturday the Houthis reported a major victory.

Three entire Saudi brigades in Najran were effectively wiped out. The reports suggest between 200 and 500 Saudi soldiers were killed, and thousands more captured. Saudi arms and armored vehicles were also taken in the fighting.

Offensives against the Saudis are rare, and usually much smaller. On Sunday, the Houthis released video footage related to the operation. They described the operation as involving a number of ambushes set up around the area, and luring the brigades into a trap.

The Houthis are bragging about this, and unsurprisingly so as this is a military victory like they haven’t seen in quite some time. The Saudis, interestingly, have not made any comments at all about the fight.

The lack of comments from the Saudis speaks volumes, however, as they aren’t even trying to spin this at all. US officials quoted Saturday tried to present the loss as a sign of desperation by the Houthis, an attempt to push advancing Saudis away from the border.

Perhaps the most interesting fact that hasn’t been addressed is that this fight was going on since at least early Thursday, so when the Saudis announced they were joining a partial ceasefire on Friday (of which Najran was not a part), they did so in the middle of this huge battle.

(antiwar.com)

I guess the Saudis need a protector after all.

This lack of military success by the Saudis could explain their statement about Iran…..

In his interview with 60 Minutes, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tried to do some damage control on the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, and the ongoing war in Yemen. The focus ultimately was brought back to the Saudis’ favorite topic, Iran.

The prince warned that there is still a danger of escalation with Iran, and called on the world to unite with “strong and firm action” against Iran, saying Iran would otherwise threaten world interests.

The prince further predicted that if the world doesn’t stop Iran, oil supplies will be cut off and oil prices will hit levels “we haven’t seen in our lifetimes,” a threat the Saudis have often used to convince the world to support their position.

(antiwar.com)

The region is seldom calm but I believe that it will get even more hyper….but it may depend on who wins the election in 2020. 

Just a thought.

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