A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues is up. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud. read on...
The shooting at a Republican baseball practice in Virginia shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s the result of months of establishment agitprop. From Kathy Griffin posing with Trump’s severed head to a Trump-like Julius Caesar killed in Central Park play, the media has fixated on strife between the two establishment parties.
This isn’t an accident. It’s designed to keep Americans distracted and at each other’s throats as the economy slowly implodes and the wars expand with horrific toll.
The election of Trump provides a unique opportunity to create partisan battle lines. Social media is rife with venom and hatred as the alt-left faces off against the alt-right. Factions are established and receive support behind the scenes from George Soros, the Koch Brothers, and the Democrat “resistance,” a ludicrous moniker cooked up by the Democratic National Committee under its new chairman Tom Perez. The DNC announced it will throw a million dollars at its Summer of Resistance. This will further widen the political divide. Polarization is increasingly intense and the establishment propaganda media is fanning the flames. Violence is escalating. Antifa leftists attack Trump supporters and they respond in kind. Activists are now openly carrying weapons. read on...
The executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Daniel McAdams, told RT he believes that sanctions were imposed under “ridiculous pretexts” and are ultimately designed to hinder any attempts of the current US administration to improve Russia-US ties.
“[Members of] Congress try to tie the president’s hands, trying to remove his ability to make foreign policy, and they are doing it for a simple reason – they do not want the relations with Russia to improve,” McAdams told RT. He added that by striking an agreement with the Democrats on the issue “Republicans are launching a pre-emptive strike against their own president.” read on...
Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) and his legislation (HR 1666) to end the US government’s war in Afghanistan were the subject of a short and informative report on WNCT-TV in Greenville, North Carolina this week. “Here we are sworn by the Constitution to have the responsibility to debate to send our young men and women to die in war, and we don’t do it,” Jones states in the television report. Jones further notes that the costs of America’s longest war continue to increase despite the Congress failing to even debate the war since 2001, stating that, 16 years after the Afghanistan War began, “we’ve spent almost a trillion dollars, 2,000 Americans have been killed, 20,000 wounded.” read on...
A bipartisan bid to block President Trump's recently negotiated $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia failed in the Senate. The effort to stop the weapons sales, authored by Senators Rand Paul and Chris Murphy, fell short on a 47-53 vote, with four Republicans joining most Democrats in voting against it and five Democrats voting to preserve deals that will arm the Saudi Kingdom with some of the most sophisticated equipment available.
The five democrats who made the passage of the weapons deal possible were Sens. Bill Nelson, Claire McCaskill, Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly and Mark Warner.
Despite the failure, Politico notes that Paul and Murphy fared better on Tuesday than they did last year in a similar effort to block a Saudi arms sale under former President Barack Obama, thanks entirely to new Democratic supporters: it's curious how ideology changes ones outlook on lethal weaponry. read on...
A US military convoy in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar Province was hit by a roadside bomb earlier today, with Pentagon officials quick to insist that no one was wounded in the incident. Three civilians, however, two of them children, were killed in the immediate aftermath.
A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues is out. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud. read on...
Who better to defend Qatar from accusations it is a hotbed of terrorism-funding (as per a recent list released by Saudi Arabia et al according to which 59 individuals and 12 entities in Qatar are terrorist) than the US Attorney General who served during the September 11 attacks, John Ashcroft. At least that's what the government of Qatar is thinking, which hired the former US AG to defend the world's wealthiest (on a GDP/capita basis) nation from accusations by Donald Trump and Arab neighbors that it supports terrorism.
As a reminder, Ashcroft was U.S. attorney general under President George W. Bush from February 2001 to February 2005, years in which US policies and laws were reshaped by the so-called war on terrorism that followed the 2001 al Qaeda attacks. Under Ashcroft the US spawned the "Patriot Act", trampling over civil rights everywhere, and made pervasive spying on virtually everyone the norm, courtesy of the NSA. read on...
Interviewed Thursday at RT regarding United States actions in opposition to Syrian and allied military forces in Syria, libertarian communicator Ron Paul argued that the US should have respected Syrian sovereignty and kept out of the country. Refraining from intervening, Paul suggests, would have better aided the progress of an effort to deescalate the war in Syria. Further, says Paul, US intervention in Syria, as in many other countries, undermines American national security. read on...
One of the most interesting new disclosures today in the Comey hearing was the admission by former FBI Director James Comey that he intentionally used a “friend” on the Columbia law faculty to leak his memos to the media. Comey says that he did so to force the appointment of a Special Counsel. However, those memos could be viewed as a government record and potential evidence in a criminal investigation.
Notably, Columbia Law School Professor Daniel Richman on a faculty webpage reads that he is “currently an adviser to FBI Director James B. Comey.” Richman specializes in criminal law and criminal procedure.
The problem is that Comey’s description of his use of an FBI computer to create memoranda to file suggests that these are arguably government documents. Comey admitted that he thought he raised the issue with his staff and recognized that they might be needed by the Department or Congress. They read like a type of field 302 form, which are core investigatory documents. read on...
