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State Department Won’t Review Clinton Ethics

Friday May 8, 2015

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When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, the Obama White House required her to sign an agreement promising to have her family’s charities, under the umbrella of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI; now known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation) submit new donations from foreign countries to the State Department for review.

The Agreement

The agreement was designed to avoid potential conflicts of interest, given her new government role. The arrangement was made by an Obama administration covering its flanks over the appearance, at a minimum, of impropriety, given the significant sums of money the charities pulled in from overseas. Many of the countries and foreign corporations who gave the most money also had issues in front of the State Department, where a positive decision could change the donor’s fortunes.
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NSA Spying: Not 'Authorized' or Not Constitutional?

Friday May 8, 2015

Yesterday's ruling by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that the NSA's bulk telephone collection program is illegal is a boost for liberty. But as the deadline to extend the PATRIOT Act looms at the end of this month, watch for Congress to actually make matters worse while calling it "reform." Tune in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report for more on the ruling and what it means...
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The Cold War Against Cuba Changed Us

Thursday May 7, 2015

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During the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA made multiple attempts to assassinate Cuba’s ruler, Fidel Castro. Let’s assume that the CIA had succeeded and that Castro had been shot dead on the streets of Havana.

It’s not difficult to imagine what US national-security state officials would be saying today: “If we hadn’t assassinated Castro, the United States would have fallen to the communists and, today, Fidel and his brother would be running the IRS, Social Security, Medicare, public schooling, and other socialist programs owned and operated by the US government.”

Soon after Castro took power on January 1, 1959, when President Eisenhower was still in office, and continually through the Kennedy administration, the CIA steadfastly maintained that a communist-ruled Cuba was a grave threat to US “national security” — a communist dagger situated 90 miles away from American shores and pointed directly at the United States.
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The Choice Before Europe

Thursday May 7, 2015

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Washington continues to drive Europe toward one or the other of the two most likely outcomes of the orchestrated conflict with Russia. Either Europe or some European Union member government will break from Washington over the issue of Russian sanctions, thereby forcing the EU off of the path of conflict with Russia, or Europe will be pushed into military conflict with Russia.

In June the Russian sanctions expire unless each member government of the EU votes to continue the sanctions. Several governments have spoken against a continuation. For example, the governments of the Czech Republic and Greece have expressed dissatisfaction with the sanctions.

US Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged growing opposition to the sanctions among some European governments. Employing the three tools of US foreign policy–threats, bribery, and coercion–he warned Europe to renew the sanctions or there would be retribution. We will see in June if Washington’s threat has quelled the rebellion.

Europe has to consider the strength of Washington’s threat of retribution against the cost of a continuing and worsening conflict with Russia. This conflict is not in Europe’s economic or political interest, and the conflict has the risk of breaking out into war that would destroy Europe.
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Is NATO Looking For a New War?

Wednesday May 6, 2015

With NATO launching its largest ever war games in the Baltic Sea this week, it is worth pondering why we see such a dramatically increased tempo of NATO military exercises so close to the Russian border. One estimate has NATO increasing its activities near Russia some 80 percent last year. And this year looks to be even more active. This week there are also NATO war games taking place in Estonia, and big exercises are scheduled this summer. NATO's rapid reaction force is set to double this year, to 30,000 troops.  Is NATO looking to repeat its disastrous 2011 war on Libya with a much larger and more dangerous target? What, beyond the need to justify its own existence a quarter century past the Cold War, is diving NATO to such an aggressive posture? The Ron Paul Liberty Report takes a look...
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In a Cop Culture, the Bill of Rights Doesn’t Amount to Much

Wednesday May 6, 2015

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“In a democratic society,” observed Oakland police chief Sean Whent, “people have a say in how they are policed.”

Unfortunately, if you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is never held accountable for violating your rights and his oath of office to serve and protect, never forced to make amends, never told that what he did was wrong, and never made to change his modus operandi, then you don’t live in a constitutional republic.

You live in a police state.

It doesn’t even matter that “crime is at historic lows and most cities are safer than they have been in generations, for residents and officers alike,” as the New York Times reports.
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The Media Misses The Point on ‘Proxy War’

Tuesday May 5, 2015

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The term “proxy war” has experienced a new popularity in stories on the Middle East. Various news sources began using the term to describe the conflict in Yemen immediately, as if on cue, after Saudi Arabia launched its bombing campaign against Houthi targets in Yemen on 25 March. “The Yemen Conflict Devolves into Proxy War,” The Wall Street Journal headlined the following day. “Who’s fighting whom in Yemen’s proxy war?” a blogger for Reuters asked on 27 March. 

And on the same day the Journal pronounced Yemen a proxy war, NBC News declared that the entire Middle East was now engulfed in a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

It is certainly time to discuss the problem of proxy war in the Middle East, because a series of such wars are the heart of the destabilisation and chaos engulfing the region. The problem with the recent stories featuring the term is that it is being used in a way that obscures some basic realities that some news media are apparently not comfortable acknowledging.
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ISIS in Texas?

Tuesday May 5, 2015

Media headlines this morning were stark and shocking: ISIS behind Texas attacks! But how credible is this claim and how credible is the organization making the claim? Also, how is it that at least one of the perpetrators has been under FBI surveillance since 2006 yet he was not stopped? How close was he to the FBI? Tune in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report for a deeper view than the mainstream media...
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The Neoconservatives: Tyranny's Fifth Column

Tuesday May 5, 2015

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The term, “Fifth Column,” came into popular use in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and thereafter as socialism and fascism were sweeping into conflict to take over the nations of the West. It means a group of guerrillas, activists, intellectuals, etc. who work to undermine a nation (or some larger organization) from within. Its activities can be out in the open, or they can be secret.

Today in America, the neoconservative political movement represents a “Fifth Column” for the forces of collectivism. Its intellectuals and activists promote themselves as conservatives who oppose the liberals, but their political philosophy has nothing to do with what is known as American conservatism, which has always stood for a limited Constitutional government and free enterprise. These values are anathema to today’s “neoconservatives” in the nation’s political, literary, and scholarly circles.

The late, Irving Kristol, editor of The Public Interest, and Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, were the founders of the neoconservative movement in the late 1960s. In their youth during the 1930s and 1940s, they were followers of the communist Leon Trotsky. Having bought into the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, they saw socialism as an ideal that needed to be spread to the West. While they and their followers subsequently modified the Marxist roots of their ideology in favor of a more gradualist methodology, they always remained adamant supporters of collectivism for America.
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Who Lost Iraq and Syria?

Monday May 4, 2015

ISIS is nearly in control of Iraq's largest oil refinery and a newly-branded al-Qaeda in Syria has taken Idlib and other significant cities. If ever there were an example of intervention gone wrong, these two countries are it. The US Iraq invasion was supposed to bring democracy to the Middle East, but instead it has brought ISIS. US "regime change" efforts were supposed to bring Western democracy to Syria but instead al-Qaeda -- backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, is remaking the country into an extremist nightmare. Today's Ron Paul Liberty Report looks at the bad news.
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