Tucker Carlson excoriated famous liberals and a few anti-Trump GOP who called for the harassment, assault and murder of a group of Kentucky high school students who were falsely accused of bigotry against a Native American man, Nathan Phillips, at a pro-life demonstration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Based on an out-of-context "staredown" between student Nick Sandmann and Phillips, high-profile liberals across Twitter went on a blitzkrieg of fake news over the weekend - falsely claiming that the Covington High School group harassed Phillips while chanting "build the wall" - which never happened.
Once footage emerged of the entire incident, however, it became clear that the left had gotten it completely wrong; Phillips had approached the teens - many wearing MAGA hats, while a group of Black Israelites considered to be a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League hurled racial insults at the students.
After the truth emerged, famous liberals who were previously frothing at the mouth went on a mad scramble to delete their tweets full of hate, slander and disinformation. The internet never forgets, however, and neither does Tucker Carlson:
MUST WATCH: This @TuckerCarlson monologue calling out famous adults who put the Covington Catholic High School boys in danger, some even fantasizing about assault & murder, is one of the best he’s ever done. pic.twitter.com/xQYGcYyihG
President Donald Trump is back on Twitter, this time saying White House press briefings have pretty much stopped because of coverage from the “fake news” media.
Political observers have noticed that in the last few months, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders only holds press briefings once every 3-4 weeks. If one takes Trump’s non-briefing from early January out of the equation, there hasn’t been an event in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room since Sanders’ last formal conference on December 18.
According to Trump, the reason for this is that Sanders is poorly treated by the press pool, so there’s no point when “the word gets out anyway!”
The reason Sarah Sanders does not go to the “podium” much anymore is that the press covers her so rudely & inaccurately, in particular certain members of the press. I told her not to bother, the word gets out anyway! Most will never cover us fairly & hence, the term, Fake News!
Newly-elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) issued a grave warning on climate change, urging young people to take action and fight against what she described as “our World War II.”
In an interview at the MLK Now event in New York, held in honor of Martin Luther King, Ocasio-Cortez spoke to writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about the urgent need to address man made global warming.
“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?” Ocasio-Cortez asked Coates. “This is the war — this is our World War II.”
.@AOC on millennials and social media: “We’re, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” pic.twitter.com/HjhbVyfFN4
“How are we saying let’s take it easy when 3,000 Americans died last year?” the New York congresswoman asked. “At some point these chronic realities do reach a breaking point.”
Ocasio-Cortez is likely referencing a United Nations report that found there are only 12 years left to limit climate change before we start to face serious environmental catastrophes.
The U.S. Supreme Court revealed on Tuesday that it will let President Trump restore to the military’s ranks a long-standing and historic ban on transgenders.
That had been the rule since the American military was created, but was abruptly changed under the orders of Barack Obama, who advocated for those choosing alternative sexual lifestyles.
The Daily Caller revealed that the high court provided no explanation for its decision to allow the enforcement of the restored traditional ban while its critics sue in court to try to remove it.
“As is typical of orders of this nature, the court gave no reason for its decision, though Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan noted their dissent,” the report said.
After Trump announced the return to the traditional standard, his opponents filed suits in federal courts, and federal judges in several states decided that they would overturn the president’s decision.
The Trump administration then petitioned the Supreme Court to decide directly on the legality of the issue.
Those who sued complained that the decision violated the First Amendment, equal protection, and due process. Their arguments didn’t address the fact that there is no right to participate in the armed forces.
The government called on the high court’s intervention because the lower courts’ rulings “require the military to maintain a policy that, in its own professional judgment, risks undermining readiness, disrupting unit cohesion, and weakening military effectiveness and lethality.”
A second request then was submitted, that the justices could let the ban be enforced while the litigation continues, and that request was the one that was granted.
President Trump had used social media to announce his decision to change the decision made by Obama.
The military then released an implementation plan that recognized that those with a history of gender dysphoria may enlist but said they will be serving in the military in their biological sex.
Active personnel who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria may continue to serve provided they do so in their biological sex, the report added.
Reuters said it was a 5-4 decision that let Trump enforce his policy, which reversed Obama’s.
But judges jumped into action to oppose Trump when he decided to reverse Obama’s ruling.
Just before the 2016 election, Obama Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter lifted a longstanding ban, declaring transgender individuals could serve openly in the military.
That sometimes put the American taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in sex-change costs for those individuals.
Because of the treatments, they also would be undeployable for much of their time in the military.
“The military is not a social club but rather a fine-tuned fighting machine of men and women who defend our freedom,” said Staver. “It is not a right but a privilege to serve.”
Staver said the “duty of military officers is to appropriately lead and prepare their personnel to serve and protect, and they cannot do that when there is confusion, dysfunction and distraction.”
(THE HILL) — Fox News anchor Bret Baier and his family were in a car accident while vacationing in Montana on Monday, which CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert described as serious.
“We just found out that he and his family were in a car accident in Montana,” Colbert said, referring to Baier, who was scheduled to be a guest on CBS’s “The Late Show.” “Bad, like, jaws of life to get him out of there.”
“They’re all in the hospital but they’re going to be OK,” he continued. “And we just want to say: We hope you’re doing better.”
The Russian government agency responsible for censorship on the Internet has accused Facebook and Twitter of failing to comply with a law requiring all servers that store personal data to be located in Russia.
Roskomnadzor, the Russian censorship agency, "said the social-media networks hadn't submitted any formal and specific plans or submitted an acceptable explanation of when they would meet the country's requirements that all servers used to store Russians' personal data be located in Russia," The Wall Street Journalreported today.
Roskomnadzor said it sent letters to Facebook and Twitter on December 17, giving them 30 days to provide "a legally valid response."
NEW ORLEANS - Saints fan are packed into the Superdome, cheering their team on against the Los Angeles Rams. And while crowd noise is normal for home teams, Saints fans may be getting a bit too crazy.
Take a look at this, after DeMario Davis' interception, the Who Dat Nation got so loud, pieces of the ceiling from the Dome fell to the ground.
Apparently part of the ceiling fell near the media workroom in the Super Dome after DeMario Davis’ interception. That’s how loud #Saints fans are right now. pic.twitter.com/jkv0vEJeYZ
She said one the custodians says of all her 19 years working at the Superdome she has never seen this happen.
The Superdome ceiling debris has been cleaned up.
One of the custodians said she’s been working Saints games for 19 years and had never seen this happen before. Another has been working games for nine years and said the same thing. pic.twitter.com/lNhWvO7OcM
In a surprisingly candid admission, two former Federal Reserve chairs have stated that the Federal Reserve alone is responsible for creating all recessions in the United States.
First, former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke said that
Expansions don’t die of old age. They get murdered.
To clarify this statement, former Chair Janet Yellen placed the murder weapon in the Fed’s hands:
Two things usually end them... One is financial imbalances, and the other is the Fed.
Think that through, and you quickly realize that both of those things are the Fed. Is there anyone left standing who would not say the Fed’s quantitative easing in the past decade was the biggest cause of financial imbalances all over the world in history? Moreover, whose profligate monetary policies led to the Great Financial Crisis that gave us the Great Recession?
So, the Fed loads the gun with financial causes and then pulls the trigger. In fact, I think it would be hard to find a major financial imbalance in the US that the Fed did not have a hand in creating or, at least, enabling. Therefore, if those are the only two causes, then it is always the Federal Reserve that causes recessions by its own admission.
And, yet, those Fed dons look so pleased with themselves.
Yellen went on to say that when the Fed is the culprit, it is generally because the central bank is forced to tighten policy to curtail inflation and ends up overplaying its hand. (She didn’t mention that the Fed’s monetary policy may have a hand in creating financial imbalances.)
Exactly, nor did she mention that the inflation they were “forced” to curtail always happens because of financial imbalances the Fed created or enabled. That is why I call our expansion-recession cycles, rinse-and-repeat cycles. Therefore, the Fed is only forced by its own ill-conceived actions. First you have to create the imbalance, which causes the economy and stocks to inflate, then you have to pull the trigger to shoot that down by tightening into a recession, which the Fed always does:
Bernanke elaborated on Yellen’s point, accusing the central bank of, in essence, murder. It takes an aggressive act on the part of the monetary authority to bring an expanding economy to a halt and cause it to shift into reverse.
Yellen and Bernanke were speaking at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Atlanta earlier this month in the company of current Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
As I demonstrated in my two earlier articles this week (“Does Inverted Yield Curve Indicate Recession?” and “What is an inverted yield curve and what does it mean?“), the Fed carries out this act of econocide by getting the yield curve to invert via its forced interest changes. As shown in those articles, every recession has been immediately preceded by a Fed-created inversion of the yield curve — the Fed’s smoking gun.
The Fed Fix Is Almost In
As noted in those articles, today’s yield curve has already slipped into its penultimate inversion. First (on December third), three-year notes started paying more interest than five-year notes. (The five-year was at 2.83% interest, while the three-year hit just over that at 2.84%.) In essence, investors were betting the economy would be a tad better in five years than it would in three.
Within a matter of weeks, the three-year notes were paying more than seven-year notes. Then, just about Christmastime, they started paying more than eight-year notes, inverting the yield curve even further out. The orange recession indicator light comes on when they take the next step of paying more than ten-year notes; and above that we go full recessionary red! The first three came all within in a month, so the rest may come just as quickly.
In fact, we’re so close that one more rate increase by the Fed could pull the trigger. This is why Powell can be so reassuring about pulling back soon on targeted interest-rate increases. He knows he’s already operating with a hair trigger because of the Fed’s other tightening action in rolling bonds off of its balance sheet.
Like a skilled sharp-shooter, Powell recently said the Fed is “watching and waiting” before it pulls the trigger with its next rate increase. At the same time, he suggested his balance-sheet reduction won’t end for awhile (and, of course, the Fed knows that its balance sheet reduction is skewing the yield curve faster than the Fed’s targeted interest-rate increases.
I’ve said before that those interest-rate increases are now just playing verbal catch-up to what the balance sheet reduction is doing in the open market. In other words, the balance sheet reduction is pulling the Fed’s targeted interest rates up, regardless of what is says, so it is pressed to state it intends an increase just to keep up with the effects of balance-sheet reduction. Last summer the Fed tactic admitted this when…
The Fed raised the target range for its benchmark rate by a quarter point to 1.75 percent to 2 percent, but only increased the rate it pays banks on cash held with it overnight to 1.95 percent. The step was designed to keep the federal funds rate from rising above the target range. Previously, the Fed set the rate of interest on reserves at the top of the target range. -Bloomberg
In other words, the Fed had to change the way it calibrates some interest rates because other factors than their change in their stated target rate were driving rates up. In order to keep bank demand for Fed funds from pushing the rate above 2%, the Fed set its stated rate at 1.95% to create some headroom. That’s explained as…
Officials have said that, as they drain cash from the system by shrinking the balance sheet, a rise in the federal funds rate within their target range would be an important sign that liquidity is becoming scarce…. The increase appears to be mainly driven by another factor: the U.S. Treasury ramped up issuance of short-term U.S. government bills, which drove up yields on those and other competing assets, including in the overnight market.
And that is what is now happening, but they are still planning to keep tightening by reducing their balance sheet. What is not said there is that the major reason the US Treasury is ramping up its issuance of government bills is that the Fed’s unwind is forcing them to refinance maturing bills on the open market as the Fed now refuses to refi those bills. I’ve maintained for a couple of years that the unwind will drive up other interest rates, causing problems throughout the economy.
Gunsmoke And Mirrors
So, the Fed’s recent talk about reducing the number of rate increases in the Fed’s interest target is slight of hand because the Fed’s unwind is doing the heavy lifting here, driving up rates faster than the Fed changes its stated target rate. Powell assures everyone the Fed will slow down its interest-rate increases, even as the Fed pushes right ahead with its balance-sheet unwind, which is doing the most to invert the yield curve.
Powells only defense against concerns expressed about balance-sheet reduction was…
“We are looking carefully at that, and the truth is, we don’t know with any precision,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told reporters on Wednesday when asked about the increase. “Really, no one does. You can’t run experiments with one effect and not the other.”
Not too reassuring to hear the Fed Head say no one really has any idea what impact its balance-sheet unwind will have on other interest rates. Does the Fed not know, or does the Fed just not want to say what it does know?
For additional cover as to whether the yield-curve inversions the Fed creates will cause a recession this time as they did in all previous times, Yellen, protested, as I noted in an earlier article this week, that this time is different:
Now there is a strong correlation historically between yield curve inversions and recessions, but let me emphasize that correlation is not causation, and I think that there are good reasons to think that the relationship between the slope of the yield curve and the business cycle may have changed.
It’s not every day that the Fed admits total culpability for the death of every expansionary period. Nor that it admits that the inflation its expansionist monetary policies create force it to become the culprit. Nor that it routinely overplays its hand.
Apparently, the Fed Heads are so comfortable with all of this (hence the smarmy looks in their photos above) that the economic murderers can confess in broad daylight every murder they are responsible for with complete impunity, even as they tell you where the bodies are buried. However, because they still have their next economic massacre to commit right before your eyes and don’t want you to stop them, they wish to assure you that “we can’t possibly know what will happen” now or “this time is different. Things have changed.”
The words “I can’t know what will happen” when a gunslinger is twirling his cocked and loaded pistol with his finger on the trigger, should not give you comfort.
Perhaps all these confession now will enable them to smile even bigger when the slaughter is over, and they know they did it this time in broad daylight.
Of course, there is one major difference this time. In all previous times, the Fed didn’t have the most massive balance-sheet unwind pushing interest rates all around so it had to rely more on its conventional tool of incremental changes in the its targeted interest rate. The new existence of that big gun mean it can who you it is putting away the little gun to disarm you because it has a cannon pointing at you from just inside the woods to your left. Thus, Powell said disarmingly,
More rate hikes wasn’t a pre-set plan and the forecast of two moves was conditional on a “very strong outlook for 2019.” - MarketWatch
In other words, keep your eye on the rate hikes I keep talking about (the little gun), not on the big balance sheet reductions that we put on autopilot so we don’t have to talk about them. Like a great hunter, Powell said the Fed can be patient.
Some analysts believe the Fed’s runoff of its balance sheet is hurting financial markets and want the central bank to end the program.
Gee, ya think? A runoff that intends to force the US government to refinance an additional $2 trillion over the next 3-4 years on the open market might be hurting financial markets more than a quarter-point increase in the Fed’s interest target every few months?
One analyst who disagrees with Powell is Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group:
“It’s no coincidence that accidents begin to pick-up the deeper you get into tightening … QE inflated markets to very high valuations. It’s wishful thinking to believe QT isn’t going to have an impact.”
By shrinking its balance sheet, the Fed is draining the liquidity that sent stocks booming. - CNN
Some of the Fed’s colleagues at other central banks also agree and express concern about what this will do to them:
Last month, Irjit Patel, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, pleaded with the Fed to slow plans to shrink its balance sheet. If the Fed doesn’t shift course, “a crisis in the rest of the dollar bond markets is inevitable,” he wrote in an op-ed in the Financial Times.
Other Fed members are just as aware of the Fed’s institutional murder rates as Bernanke and Yellen. St. Louis Fed President James Bullard told the Wall Street Journal this month that a recessionary risk is being telegraphed by what is now happening in the yield curve and that the Fed is causing the flattening of the curve toward inversion. So, these guys all appear to be well aware of what they are doing.
However, to maintain the distraction, Bullard also said,
In separate remarks to reporters …. he was open to a revisiting the balance sheet runoff but doesn’t think it is damaging markets as some argue. Bullard [said] that if the balance sheet runoff was impacting bond market as some suggest, then yields would be moving higher instead of the steady decline seen since November.
The latter would be happening, except that money has been pouring rapidly out of stocks and into bonds due to the rate increases the unwind created in September and October. What he ignores is the fact that rate increases were so substantial they sucked massive amounts of money out of the stock market in a flood of capital flight because all of a sudden treasury interest looked quite enticing. That, of course, pushed those rates down some in November.
So, “Nothing to see there, folks. Keep your eye on the little gun; and, oh, did we tell you that we have murdered every economic expansion in history?”
Who’s your daddy?
Now that we’ve heard the confessions from the murderers and have experienced the diversions that will allow the next murder to happen as much in plain sight as the confessions just happened, let’s look at the case from another angle: What has been keeping the stock market alive and hopping over the past decade?
Let me lay out evidence that it is clearly the Fed.
Exhibit A: What turned around the market’s major crash in 2009? The Fed’s QE1. Does anyone think the market would have turned around without that massive intervention? Was that intervention with hundreds of billions of dollars mere window-dressing, or was it the greatest financial intervention to a financial crisis the world had ever seen?
Exhibit B: What turned the market around the next time it “corrected” as soon as QE1 ended? Was it not instant QE2? More hundreds of billions of dollars?
Exhibit C: What saved the market when Republicans played roulette with the nation’s credit rating in the summer of 2011 and shot themselves in the foot politically when Standard & Poor’s gave the nation its first credit downgrade before Republicans even had the chance to let the nation default? Was it not the immediate promise of an ever bigger, indefinitely ongoing new kind of QE called Operation Twist, which morphed into QE3?
Exhibit D: Then, when markets tumbled in 2015 and 2016, because the Fed was backing off from monetary stimulus, their colleagues in other countries jumped in with their own QE. More than $5 trillion worth in 2016! All told, the world’s central banks have pumped in $15 trillion since then.
But now they are all stopping!
Exhibit E: The prosecution presents a full picture of all central-bank stock salvation:
The Fed may claim that it does not attempt to rescue markets and that it looks only at economic indicators, yet somehow every time the market took a major plunge in the graph above, the Fed was instantly on the scene with a new invention of monetary stimulus in massive doses. Of course, “correlation is not causation.” Correlation is pretty interesting, though, especially when it happens at every plunge, except the one at the top that is plunging much further than any other time on this graph … because one thing IS different: No one is stepping in with salvation this time.
If the Fed has been the salvation of the market again and again, lifting it higher and higher, what happens if the Fed and other CBs let the stock market drop? Do you think they won’t do that? The highest authorities in the Fed just told you they did it every other time. First, they create massive “financial instability,” as Yellen said, otherwise known as “bubbles,” which grow due to the Fed’s infinite capacity to create monetary stimulus. They let these grow until inflation finally “forces” them to tighten until they crash them.
The prosecution presents Exhibit F:
This one is the Fed and all its major partners in crime. When did stock markets start to plunge all over the world? Wasn’t it as soon as global QT started to reverse at the end of that graph in 2018? Ah, but “correlation is not causation.” Except that it kind of is when you keep finding correlation everywhere you turn.
If the defense wants to argue the US market is not utterly dependent on the Fed’s constant protection, let me ask, “What did the market do in September of 2018 when the Fed removed one little word from its market-soothing speeches? Accommodative. Just as it watched its balance sheet-reduction up to full rewind speed.” It took its biggest plunge by far in the entire ten-year recovery period. As nearly everyone was saying, nothing bad suddenly emerged in the economy. All that changed was the Fed to merely implying it would be less accommodative to market concerns as it moved to full unwind.
If you still think the Fed isn’t going to kill the economy this time, I have one more question for you: When was the last time the Fed raised rates in the middle of a major market “correction?” How about never. Yet, now it is raising rates and reducing money supply via balance-sheet reduction at the same time that it hints it is removing accommodation.
But balance-sheet reduction doesn’t matter, right?
“We don’t believe that our issuance [new bond to replace those rolling off the balance sheet] is an important part of the story of the market turbulence that began in the fourth quarter of last year. But, I’ll say again, if we reached a different conclusion, we wouldn’t hesitate to make a change,” Powell said. “If we came to the view that the balance sheet normalization plan — or any other aspect of normalization — was part of the problem, we wouldn’t hesitate to make a change.” - MarketWatch
In other words, “Don’t look at the big gun. Nothing to see there.” Said the people who have just told you that none of their expansions ever ended until they murdered it!
Does the Fed have motive?
Don’t ask me why the Fed will kill its own recovery. It is enough that it admits it always does. So, I’ll leave determining which of the many possible “why’s” up to you. Maybe the Fed will cop an insanity plea and say that even it doesn’t know why it does the things it does. Whatever their actual motive, this sure has the Fed’s unswerving M.O. all over it. It has their fingerprints and their multiple confessions of guilt.
Still, let me lay out a couple of motives that are popular among those many people attribute to the Fed just to show there are plenty of possible motives out there:
Maybe the Fed’s member banks, who own and run the Fed (as its only shareholders and as governing board members who have huge influence over who the additional government-appointed board members are), like to repossess things. That would be a motive.
Or maybe they want to create a new cashless, digital, global monetary system. That would be a motive.
Or maybe, if they can crash things as perennially as Japan has done for score or more of years, they can get permission to start buying stocks directly, and use their infinite money supply, as Japan, has done to take major ownership in all the stocks of the nation.
Numerous conspiracy theories spend entire books making a strong case for different motives. I won’t land on one, but will note that all that matters is that there are plenty of motives to choose from.
Sure, Yellen protested that “correlation isn’t causation,” but, on the other, she admitted causation by saying that, when the Fed is the culprit, it is generally because the central bank is forced to tighten policy to curtail inflation — inflation that only the Fed causes by creating trillions of dollars monetary stimulus. There only struggle this time to stay within their M.O. is that they have failed to create inflation in the general economy that they are supposed to govern. Maybe that is why they have pushed the expansion into the longest in history because they are obsessed with following their usual M.O., and inflation didn’t cooperate this time to “force” them to tighten into recession (their cover story).
So, we have multiple confessions of murder by known Fed ringleaders. We have numerous pieces of circumstantial evidence that support their confessions. We have many possible motives. And, even the fact that the Fed continued pushing expansion longer than it has with more and more rounds of QE can be explained by its M.O. How many times has the Fed said they don’t understand why they couldn’t get inflation to rise to their 2% target for years. They could hardly claim inflation concerns when everyone knew CPI was under the target they’ve always said they want. Now it’s there. So, everything is in place.
On the 18th of November, 1964, the FBI’s appallingly corrupt boss J. Edgar Hoover denounced Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the country.” A few days later, a Hoover deputy named William Sullivan wrote King a letter posing as a disillusioned follower and using powerful, manipulative language to urge the civil rights leader to commit suicide before evidence of his extramarital affair became public. Enclosed was an FBI recording containing evidence of the affair.
Whenever America celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day we should remind ourselves that it is a known, undisputed fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation engineered a psyop to manipulate one of the world’s greatest minds into committing suicide. It is also worth reviewing the compelling argument for the case that the FBI was behind King’s assassination as well.
Hoover, who headed the FBI for decades, obsessively despised King on a deeply personal level. He kept files on the civil rights leader in which he’d scribble hateful comments on memos he received about King, apparently for no purpose other than his own gratification and catharsis. On a memo about King receiving the St. Francis peace medal from the Catholic Church, he wrote “This is disgusting.” On the news of King’s meeting with the pope, he scribbled, “I am amazed that the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate.”
FBI headquarters still wears the name of this childish pig, a brazen admission by the Bureau that it remains very much the same institution which tried to end Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, the same institution which assassinatedBlack Panthers leader Fred Hampton, the same institution which for years ran the unconstitutional COINTELPRO campaign to infiltrate and sabotage dissident political groups, and which has continued to infiltrate dissident political groups, including Black civil rights groups, to this very day.
We received yet another reminder of the FBI’s true face the other day in an interview with its former Deputy Assistant Director Terry Turchie on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. In a passing tangent largely unrelated to the rest of the interview, Turchie made the following shocking statement in relation to the ongoing Russiagate saga:
“And I think we can expect more of this, because quite honestly the electorate in some places is putting more and more progressives and self-described socialists in positions. And ironically, years ago, when I first got into the FBI, one of the missions of the FBI in its counterintelligence efforts was to try and keep these people out of government. Why? Because we would end up with massive dysfunction and massive disinformation and massive misinformation, and it seems to me that’s where we’re at today.”
Wow.
Uhhhhhhh....Fmr FBI Assistant Director just said "When I first got into the FBI one of the missions of the FBI in its counterintelligence efforts was to try to keep" progressives out of government pic.twitter.com/l1KqQMO914
According to his LinkedIn profile, Turchie joined the FBI in July of 1972. COINTELPRO, the program in which leftist groups were actively infiltrated and undermined, officially ended in 1971, and Hoover had died in May of 1972. This was after “Hoover’s FBI” stopped being Hoover’s FBI, yet a “counterintelligence effort” was still very much alive and thriving to undermine the will of the electorate and prevent them from electing leftists to office.
This one admission, by itself, is in my opinion more than enough to justify the FBI’s total dissolution. Leaving aside any of their other malfeasance that I mentioned earlier, leaving aside the rest of their other documented malfeasance that I haven’t mentioned, this one admission by Turchie shows clearly that America’s secret police should cease to exist.
Think about it. How can anyone justify the FBI’s continued existence after such an admission? There is an extremely powerful branch of the US government which is known to have been actively undermining the democratic will of the electorate through covert means. Even if you very trustingly subscribe to the belief that the FBI no longer engages in any such practices to any extent (and that would be extremely naive), how can you justify keeping it in power knowing that it did? Where precisely in the FBI’s history is a clear, clean, unequivocal break from what it was doing then declared, documented and evidenced? For what reason was it not razed to the ground decades ago and any of its actual necessary functions transferred elsewhere?
Imagine if the Ku Klux Klan had successfully cleaned up its image in the ’90s or something. Now you’re seeing members of the KKK interviewed on CNN and MSNBC as respectable members of society, holding powerful political positions, treated like heroes, all under the same banner it held when it was lynching people of color a few decades prior. Would that not seem weird? Would you not say something like “Wait, why are we keeping that organization around? At best they’re probably just putting a nicer face on their previous toxic agendas, especially since any good intentions existing within it could simply be taken somewhere with a less horrific history.”
The only reason the FBI is being treated any differently is because it’s got such good PR, namely the entire political/media class.
Journalist Mark Ames documentsa short-lived push by the Carter administration to “transform the FBI from an extralegal secret police agency to something legal and defined.” This feeble proposition to give the Bureau an actual charter to clearly define what it is, what it does, and where the confines of its operations are was the closest America ever came to putting any kind of limitations on the powers of its secret police force, and by the time Reagan rolled around it was long forgotten.
And now you’ve got this same evil institution essentially criminalizing the act of the executive branch pursuing good relations with a nuclear superpower, launching a secret counterintelligence investigation into whether a sitting president is a national security threat for his Russia policy. This cannot be leading anywhere good.
The FBI has too much power and far too unforgivable a history to be permitted to control the reigns of the nation with the most powerful military force in the history of civilization. Get rid of it and move in a healthy direction.
(DAILY MAIL) — They first cropped up seemingly out of nowhere about six years ago, adorned in black capes with curved devil horns affixed to their heads, holding posters and black American flags as they shouted ‘Hail, Satan’ on the steps of government institutions from Arkansas and Florida to Oklahoma and Detroit. The antics and declarations seemed like a hoax to many – onlookers and journalists and politicians alike – until it became apparent that members of newly-formed The Satanic Temple were here to stay.
And they were growing, exponentially. Since TST’s founding in 2012, the organization has increased from a handful of members to tens of thousands, with chapters all over the US and the globe, from Stockholm to London and Los Angeles to Texas. And their ‘pranksterism,’ as filmmaker Penny Lane first considered it, has given way to a well-conceived ethos, forming an organized ‘religion’ for a ‘group of contrarians’ opposed to any organization at all.
President Donald Trump’s string of amazing luck — his imitation of the Road Runner continually escaping from the media’s Wile E. Coyote — continued late Friday when Robert Mueller took the all too rare step of contradicting BuzzFeed’s “bombshell” report. In less than 24 hours, Trump went from being certain to be impeached (though probably not removed), to declaring total victory over the “Fake News!” media, which has been fecklessly incapable of making anything stick to him.
Like most pundits I originally thought that, while hardly proven to be true, the BuzzFeed article appeared to be sound, and that Mueller must have extremely strong evidence that Michael Cohen lied to Congress at Trump’s direction. Part of why the story seemed solid was that, unlike with what happened recently with a dubious McClatchy report claiming Cohen (or at least his cellphone) was in Prague in 2016, neither Cohen himself, nor even his former lawyer, had made any effort at all to discredit the story.
But then, rather belatedly, Mueller dropped his extremely short but devastatingly cutting statement calling a key part of the report “not accurate.” This effectively knifed the entire piece, at least in the perception of anyone who supports Trump in the slightest, handing him a huge victory out of what appeared at first to be a devastating defeat (It sure is weird how Trump and his “Cult 45” were so eager to take Mueller at his word, isn’t? It’s almost like they don’t really think that he is untrustworthy, or leading a “witch-hunt”!).
For their part, BuzzFeed is not backing down from their story, and it very well may turn out that they are at least somewhat correct in the essence of what they published (it seems quite possible that the primary quibble Mueller has is the strength of the documentation behind the allegation Trump suborned Cohen’s perjury). But because we live in a world where perception rules everything, that does not matter, and, for all intents and purposes, the story has been “discredited.”
While Mueller would not have taken such an extreme public measure (why his office couldn’t have given BuzzFeed at least an off-the-record heads-up is beyond me) unless there is indeed something wrong with the report, it simply doesn’t make much sense that it is actual “Fake News!” In fact, one of the biggest elements of this larger story, which has been largely ignored by the news media, is that there seems to be no alternative explanation for why Cohen decided to lie to Congress in the first place.
There appears to be an extreme lack of critical thinking regarding the unique nature of Cohen’s perjury, to which he has already pleaded guilty. This was not a simple denial of something potentially illegal that he had done, about which he would have a potential self-interest to lie, even under oath.
Instead, this was him, the president’s personal lawyer, lying, very specifically, about when the attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow ended. Cohen claimed to Congress that it was at the very beginning of 2016, but it was later proven (and possibly bolstered by Trump’s own written answers) that this effort was active until at least June of that year.
People need to look at this from Cohen’s perspective given the facts when he testified, as he was still very loyal to Trump, who was already president, at that time. For one thing, there is absolutely no indication that he had personal liability should he have testified truthfully that the Moscow project ended in June.
So then why would he perjure himself to Congress in that situation? This make no sense at all, especially given that, even if he bizarrely decided to lie about this on his own in a rouge attempt to protect Trump from an embarrassing political revelation, he had to know that he would be contradicted by Trump, Trump’s son (who, it should be pointed out, vaguely testified in a manner consistent with Cohen’s perjury), and potentially others who were going to be questioned by investigators. If he assumed that they were all going to tell the truth about this matter, he was basically putting himself in extreme legal peril, for no apparent reason.
In other words, unless Cohen thought that everyone else was going to lie about the timing, it was absolutely asinine (even for a guy of limited intelligence like Cohen) for him to commit perjury over an issue where he personally had no initial jeopardy. But then there is also the nature of the lie itself which makes the idea that Cohen did this on this own particularly inconceivable.
Lying about a timeline obviously makes it particularly paramount to coordinate the lie with others. It is easy, for instance, to decide, or even guess, that you should simply deny something happened to protect others, but changing a very specific date from June (when the infamous Trump Tower meeting happened and Trump was the presumptive GOP nominee) to, conveniently, just before the primary campaign technically began, clearly requires at least some coordination.
So, regardless of the accuracy of Buzzfeed’s story, we are still left with the question of where in the world Cohen would get the idea to lie to Congress about the timing of an event in a way which apparently only benefited one man. “Occam’s Razor” screams that, being the simplest explanation, the most likely answer to that question is that the only man who benefited from the lie, a man who just happened to be in a position of extreme power, was the one who directed him to testify that it was January instead of June.
Until Mueller specifically says otherwise, I am still believing that man was Donald Trump. I am eager to see if Trump and his cult will be as accepting of Mueller’s pronouncements should he ever be able to confirm that strong suspicion.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he was grateful to Special Counsel Robert Mueller for a statement disputing a BuzzFeed News report that Trump directed his former lawyer to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal.
The NFL is looking into a report regarding a laser pointer being flashed at New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady during the AFC Championship.
