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Please, TSA Workers, Don’t Come Back

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Understandably, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees are no more enthusiastic about working when their paychecks are delayed than is anybody else on the planet. That's why they've been calling-in sick in increased numbers—some to seek temporary work elsewhere in order to pay their bills—as the more-theater-than-reality"government shutdown" drags on. But, isn't this an opportunity for us all?
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The New York Times Smears the President

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The Donald has been on a red hot twitter rampage, and he's completely justified. Actually, we didn't think the Russian Collusion Hoax could get any stupider until we saw the New York Times' Friday evening bushwhack. 

The trio of authors, apparently self-tortured victims of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, actually had the gall to print a story in the once and former Gray Lady of journalistic rectitude which was nothing more than an ugly smear on the sitting President of the United States—one that would have done Joe McCarthy proud:
In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation. 

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.
It doesn't get lower than that. The only thing that they didn't mention was presidential Treason, but it's hard to say that "working in behalf of Russia against American interests" would constitute anything less.
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Pompeo At It Again: Calls For Venezuela Coup

From his recent Middle East tour, which included a stop in Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the US would "restore" the Venezuelan constitution. He declared that the Venezuelan people and government should rise up against the recently-elected government in the name of "freedom and democracy." The irony of his calling for democracy in Venezuela while touring Saudi Arabia was no doubt noted. Tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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Back to the USSR: How to Read Western News

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The heroes of Dickens' Pickwick Papers visit the fictional borough of Eatanswill to observe an election between the candidates of the Blue Party and the Buff Party. The town is passionately divided, on all possible issues, between the two parties. Each party has its own newspaper: the Eatanswill Gazette is Blue and entirely devoted to praising the noble Blues and excoriating the perfidious and wicked Buffs; the Eatanswill Independent is equally passionate on the opposite side of every question. No Buff would dream of reading the "that vile and slanderous calumniator, the Gazette", nor Blue the ''that false and scurrilous print, the Independent".

As usual with Dickens it is both exaggerated and accurate. Newspapers used to be screamingly partisan before "journalism" was invented. Soon followed journalism schools, journalism ethics and journalism objectivity: "real journalism" as they like to call it (RT isn't of course). "Journalism" became a profession gilded with academical folderol; no longer the refuge of dropouts, boozers, failures, budding novelists and magnates like Lord Copper who know what they want and pay for it. But, despite the pretence of objectivity and standards, there were still Lord Coppers and a lot of Eatanswill. Nonetheless, there were more or less serious efforts to get the facts and balance the story. And Lord Coppers came and went: great newspaper empires rose and fell and there was actually quite a variety of ownership and news outlets. There was sufficient variance that a reader, who was neither Blue nor Buff, could triangulate and form a sense of what was going on.

In the Soviet Union news was controlled; there was no "free press"; there was one owner and the flavours were only slightly varied: the army paper, the party paper, the government paper, papers for people interested in literature or sports. But they all said the same thing about the big subjects. The two principal newspapers were Pravda ("truth") and Izvestiya ("news").
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Bolton Had Pentagon Draw Up "Far-Reaching Military Options To Strike Iran"

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The Wall Street Journal published an Iran bombshell Sunday morning, confirming the White House had the Pentagon prepare "military options" to strike the country last year. The sudden request, seen as an unprecedented Iraq-style "shock and awe" attack on Iran, caught the Pentagon off guard, to the point that "State Dept. and Pentagon officials were rattled by the request" which officials further told the WSJ was "mind-boggling" and "cavalier" in terms of how brazen it was. 

The request for military options came in early September after the United States accused Iran-backed militias in Iraq of firing three mortars at the US Embassy and diplomatic compound in Baghdad, and at a time that riots and political instability were spreading throughout some major cities in Iraq, especially in the south. It was also an opportunity for noted Iran hawk and national security advisor John Bolton to push for "far-reaching military options to strike Iran" — a regime change project he's pushed in public many years prior to taking his White House post last April.

The WSJ reports:
The request, which hasn’t been previously reported, came after militants fired three mortars into Baghdad’s sprawling diplomatic quarter, home to the US Embassy, on a warm night in early September. The shells—launched by a group aligned with Iran—landed in an open lot and harmed no one.

But they triggered unusual alarm in Washington, where Mr. Trump’s national security team led by John Bolton conducted a series of meetings to discuss a forceful American response, including what many saw as the unusual request for options to strike Iran.
Though it's unclear if the strike options ended up on President Trump's desk following the formal request from the National Security Council, or if they were ever seriously considered by the White House, “It definitely rattled people,” one former senior US administration official described. “People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran,” the source said.
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Campaign Finance Reform Helps Special Interests

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One of the new Democratic House majority’s top priorities is so-called campaign finance reform legislation. Contrary to the claims of its supporters, campaign finance reform legislation does not limit the influence of powerful special interests. Instead, it violates the First Amendment and burdens those seeking real change in government.

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Trump’s Hail Mary Becomes Bolton’s Nightmare

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National Security Advisor John Bolton is making the rounds in the Middle East to try and salvage what’s left of the long-standing plan to balkanize Syria and overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in the wake of President Trump’s announced troop withdrawal.

What began as a political Hail Mary for Trump has morphed into a foreign policy quagmire for Bolton and the bloody-minded neoconservatives he is the tip of the spear for.

Bolton first met fellow war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to announce their conditions under which US troops would leave Syria. The big sticking point was getting the Turks to guarantee the safety of the Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), that have been the US proxy forces in securing that part of Syria east of the Euphrates river for future plans vis-à-vis Iraq and Iran.

His condition for the US’s withdrawal from Syria is just another impossible demand placed on Turkey, who can no more guarantee the Kurds’ survival than Russia could implement the Minsk II agreement in Ukraine.

This is yet another big lie neocons like Bolton have been parroting since Trump’s announcement. They are desperate to convince us their mission in Syria is a humanitarian one. The Kurds are their casus belli of the day, dressed up for the liberal interventionist left to rally around.
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How a NeoCon-Backed “Fact Checker” Plans to Wage War on Independent Media

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Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the US government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond.
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Mike Pompeo Says the US is a Force for Good in the Middle East. No, Really!

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the US a “force for good” in the Middle East. A closer look at the evidence reveals this to be the greatest lie ever told in the era of “fake news.”

“The good news is this: The age of self-inflicted American shame is over, and so are the policies that produced so much needless suffering,” Pompeo said to an audience at the American University of Cairo, Egypt on Thursday.

“In just 24 months, the United States under President Trump has reasserted its traditional role as a force for good in this region,” Pompeo said. “We have rediscovered our voice. We have rebuilt our relationships. We have rejected false overtures from enemies.”

While taking breaks from blasting the Obama administration, Pompeo also referred to the US as having “always been a liberating force, not an occupying power.”
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Trump Foreign Policy for 2019 - Is it for real or more bait and switch?

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Never before has any presidential administration been as all over the place in terms of national security and foreign policy as is that of Donald J. Trump. Indeed, one might well argue that there is no overriding policy at all in terms of a rational doctrine arrived at through risk versus gain analysis of developing international situations. Instead, there has been a pattern of emotional reactions fueled by media disinformation supplemented by “gut feelings” about a series of ultimately bilateral relationships that frequently have little or nothing to do with American national interests.
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