NBC News
March 7, 2019

Documents obtained by NBC 7 Investigates show the U.S. government created a secret database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers tied to the migrant caravan and in some cases, placed alerts on their passports.

At the end of 2018, roughly 5,000 immigrants from Central America made their way north through Mexico to the United States southern border. The story made international headlines.

As the migrant caravan reached the San Ysidro Port of Entry in south San Diego County, so did journalists, attorneys, and advocates who were there to work and witness the events unfolding.

But in the months that followed, journalists who covered the caravan, as well as those who offered assistance to caravan members, said they felt they had become targets of intense inspections and scrutiny by border officials.

One photojournalist said she was pulled into secondary inspections three times and asked questions about who she saw and photographed in Tijuana shelters. Another photojournalist said she spent 13 hours detained by Mexican authorities when she tried to cross the border into Mexico City. Eventually, she was denied entry into Mexico and sent back to the U.S.

Read more

This article was posted: Thursday, March 7, 2019 at 6:58 am

At a hearing for a “red flag” law to keep guns away from those at risk to themselves or others, mothers of sons killed by guns tearfully avowed they “will carry this grief for the rest of our lives” as male New Hampshire lawmakers showed their disdain by sporting fake pearls; one also wore a large rifle pin. Moms Demand Action and many others were not up for the asshats: “Bitche s, we gave birth to you.” “Don’t start fights with moms,” one wrote. “We are fighting for our children.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Congressmember, on another topic, you’re a member of the House Judiciary Committee. The chairman, Jerrold Nadler, has requested, of more than 80 people connected to President Trump, documents looking at potential violations of the law. Some people are criticizing this as a wide net, an overreach by the committee. Your response?

REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Well, you know, we submitted — Chairman Nadler submitted document requests for 81 agencies and individuals and the White House, and these are documents that have already been developed and provided to other investigations, like the Southern District of New York investigation. These are already-prepared documents. There’s nothing onerous about this request. But for two years, Republicans have blocked Democrats from doing our job on the Judiciary Committee, which is to look into obstruction of justice, public corruption and abuses of power. Those are the three areas. Judiciary Committee has wide breadth over those three areas. They’re our constitutional responsibility. These documents go to the core of those three issues.

And so, I hope that the White House does not start blocking all of our requests for these documents, because then we’re going to have to start…

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Congressmember, on another topic, you’re a member of the House Judiciary Committee. The chairman, Jerrold Nadler, has requested, of more than 80 people connected to President Trump, documents looking at potential violations of the law. Some people are criticizing this as a wide net, an overreach by the committee. Your response?

REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Well, you know, we submitted — Chairman Nadler submitted document requests for 81 agencies and individuals and the White House, and these are documents that have already been developed and provided to other investigations, like the Southern District of New York investigation. These are already-prepared documents. There’s nothing onerous about this request. But for two years, Republicans have blocked Democrats from doing our job on the Judiciary Committee, which is to look into obstruction of justice, public corruption and abuses of power. Those are the three areas. Judiciary Committee has wide breadth over those three areas. They’re our constitutional responsibility. These documents go to the core of those three issues.

And so, I hope that the White House does not start blocking all of our requests for these documents, because then we’re going to have to start…

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Congressmember, on another topic, you’re a member of the House Judiciary Committee. The chairman, Jerrold Nadler, has requested, of more than 80 people connected to President Trump, documents looking at potential violations of the law. Some people are criticizing this as a wide net, an overreach by the committee. Your response?

REP. PRAMILA JAYAPAL: Well, you know, we submitted — Chairman Nadler submitted document requests for 81 agencies and individuals and the White House, and these are documents that have already been developed and provided to other investigations, like the Southern District of New York investigation. These are already-prepared documents. There’s nothing onerous about this request. But for two years, Republicans have blocked Democrats from doing our job on the Judiciary Committee, which is to look into obstruction of justice, public corruption and abuses of power. Those are the three areas. Judiciary Committee has wide breadth over those three areas. They’re our constitutional responsibility. These documents go to the core of those three issues.

And so, I hope that the White House does not start blocking all of our requests for these documents, because then we’re going to have to start…

Today, the two looming “existential threats” are the possibility of nuclear war, and unprecedented human-caused climate change, yet neither of these seems to unduly concern our plutocrats. Capitalism thrives on war, and we forget this historical fact at our peril. Nor do they seem worried about the drastic consequences of global warming, which has been denied, ignored, or downplayed in the corporate media. In fact, it may appear that the big business oligarchs who run the US and dictate policy to a large part of the rest of the world fear very little, perhaps least of all the world’s working classes. These people suffer most from capitalism: they die in large numbers in imperialist wars and are chronically victimized by unemployment and economic crises. They are (and will continue to be) the main victims of capitalist-caused climate change.

The world’s workers have the greatest incentive, and also a long history, of fighting back against oppression. The potential (and, historically, the actual) organized power of workers is what rulers have feared and fear today; in spite of the enormous apparent difficulties in bringing this power to bear, it represents the only possibility of countering big capital. Organized workers cut into profits at home and abroad and at times have represented a revolutionary threat to corporate power. They can disrupt ruling class expansionary plans, up to and including imperialist wars. Thus, big capital fights wars on several fronts…

For the first time in years, the drumbeat of civil war has become audible across the United States. The nation looks destined to repeat history thanks to a media that is no longer able to objectively perform its job.

The predominantly left-leaning US media has just entered its third consecutive year of open warfare against Donald Trump. This non-stop assault risks aggravating political passions to the point where ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ snowballs into something completely beyond our ability to control. Like full-blown Civil War.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post, one of most prominent serial producers of partisan agitation, published an article entitled, ‘In America, talk turns to something unspoken for 150 years: Civil War’. The piece, which deftly places Democrats above the fray, opens with the following whiff of grapeshot:

“With the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III reportedly nearly complete, impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election ramping up … there’s talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war,” the Bezos-owned paper forewarned.

CNN Asks What Would Happen If Trump Refuses to Accept Defeat in 2020 https://t.co/Rw1r0TqUrz

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) February 24, 2019

With a level of audacity and self-righteousness that has become a trademark of the Left, not once did the article float the possibility that just maybe the mainstream media is complicit in the ongoing deterioration of political discourse, or that the Democrats are just as much to blame as the Republicans for the political fallout that now presents a grave risk to the Republic.

Midnight in the Americ…
Robert Bridge
Best Price: $26.07
Buy New $27.80
(as of 12:25 EST – Details)

As…

Chinese telecom giant Huawei has filed a lawsuit against a United States law that bans American government agencies from purchasing the Chinese company’s equipment, calling the ban unconstitutional.

Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world’s biggest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, said in a statement on Thursday that it had filed the lawsuit in the US district court in Plano, Texas, arguing that section 889 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was in violation of the American constitution because it singled out an individual or group for punishment without trial.

Back in August last year, US President Donald Trump signed the section into law. Based on the new provision, federal agencies and their contractors are prohibited from purchasing Huawei’s equipment and services over the accusation that the Chinese government uses the company’s 5G (fifth generation) networks to spy on other countries.

Both Huawei and…

With great fanfare, politicians on the left are thinking big on tax reform: a 70 percent rate on incomes over $10 million, a wealth tax on the super-rich, estate taxes as high as 77 percent. With no fanfare at all, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has made the case for thinking small. According to the CBO, a mini-tax on sales of stocks, bonds and other holdings could boost revenues by scores of billions a year.

The estimate came in December 2018 when the CBO released its list of options for cutting the federal deficit. For the period 2019-2028, a Wall Street tax of 0.1 percent would bring an extra $777 billion into the Treasury. Market declines were predicted early on, along with lower capital gains and lower trading volumes. Even so, after factoring in all the headwinds, the tax still produced average annual revenue increases of almost $78 billion. The numbers rose as the years went by: the inflow totaled $534.5 billion in the closing half-decade, compared to $242.2 billion from 2019-2023.

The tax is called a financial transactions tax, “FTT” for short. The United States had one from 1914 until 1965; it could be coming around again as lawmakers try to cope with “the defining challenge of our time,” income inequality.

Such a levy would instantly become the single biggest non-income tax on wealth in America. Five days a week and after-hours, the financial markets execute millions…

Obsessed Russia-gaters just can’t accept that  the Assange indictment has nothing to do with the 2016 election, writes Caitlin Johnstone. 

By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlinjohnstone.com

When it was first revealed in November that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under secret charges by the Trump administration, I spent the next few days being told by Russia-gaters that this was proof that I have been wrong about their demented cold war cult all along, because #MuellerTime is fast approaching. At long last, they vehemently assured me, Assange was going to prison for working with Russia to deprive Queen Hillary of her rightful throne.

None of those people have come back to apologize or admit that they were wrong when subsequent evidence disproved their claims. None of them ever do.

As it turns out, whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in a secret case investigating Assange for his 2010 role in the WikiLeaks publication of military war logs and diplomatic cables. Manning served seven years in prison for leaking those documents to the transparency advocacy outlet before her sentence was commuted by President Obama, meaning, obviously, that this sealed case has nothing to do with the 2016 leaks Russiagaters have been fiendishly obsessing over. Indeed, The Washington Post reported Tuesday that “U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, say the case is based on [Assange’s] pre-2016 conduct, not the election hacks that drew the attention of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.”

So there you have it. Democrats like Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden who have been cheering for Assange’s arrest have actually been cheering on the Trump administration’s prosecution of a journalist for publishing facts about Bush administration war crimes. They thought they were supporting the agenda to punish Assange for publishing leaks that hurt the Hillary campaign, but in reality they were defending two Republican administrations while helping to manufacture support for a prosecution that would set a devastating precedent for press freedoms…

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation
March 6, 2019

Lamar Mayor Darnell Byrd-McPherson thought she was the victim of a “hate crime” last month after finding her car one morning covered with a “yellow sticky substance.”

In a statement she sent to WPDE in early February, a defiant McPherson said, “Love conquers hate and my husband and I refuse to be intimidated by those who perpetrated this act of vandalism which I classify as an act of hatred.”

She said that during the 70s “crosses were burned in the yard of our home when my Mother was involved with the civil rights movement.”

As WPDE reported, “Byrd-McPherson referenced how bills are being introduced to address hate crimes in the South Carolina General Assembly. She added hate crimes are on the rise in the state.”

Police investigated the incident and determined it was just pollen.

From Newsweek:

“We found it to be pollen,” [Darlington County Sheriff’s Office Lieutenant Robby Kilgo] explained in an interview with Newsweek. “There was no reason for us to collect a sample.”

The report that was taken included details of an examination by two sheriff’s officials (a sergeant and a deputy) “immediately came to the conclusion that the substance had a yellowish tint to it and that it’s a type of powder similar to pollen.”

Though the possibility was raised that the car’s mysterious coating could have been pollen and not the result of foul play, McPherson remained convinced someone was behind it.

“It’s something,” she said. “Something that’s sticky that’s stuck to my car and took two different solutions to get it off.”

Kilgo explained that once the mayor was intent that she had been attacked, the local agency referred the matter to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division or SLED.

“Due the suspicion from her of it being a hate crime, we couldn’t say no,” he said.

What a great way to…

Parkfield Community School has been forced to suspend its ‘No Outsiders’ classes until after Easter, while a consultation takes place with parents. Tensions between the school and parents have escalated due to a row surrounding LGBT lifestyles being taught in classrooms.

The ill-feeling from angry parents has even boiled over into threats against the assistant headteacher Andrew Moffat MBE, who is gay. He claims to have received “nasty emails” including one which warned he “wouldn’t last long.”

The primary school, which has around 740 pupils, is located in a predominantly Muslim area. It has come under fire from Muslim parents for implementing an LGBT programme which seeks to challenge homophobia, because homosexuality is strictly forbidden in Islam.

Few critics ever analyzed why Trump’s appearance and comportment resonated with his base and intrigued neutrals who otherwise might have been repelled by his agenda and personal history. American men in their sixties and seventies often do strange things to retain their youth and vibrancy. They can dye their hair, tan their skin, remove their wrinkles, or substitute loud clothes for a declining physique. Trump did all that and more. He appeared loutish to the Beltway establishment. But unlike aging Hollywood celebrities, he became more rather than less resonant and empathetic to the middle class for the strained effort, as if proof that even aging billionaires were patched together creaky everymen and insecure humans after all. Trump did not put on Beltway politicians’ customary flannel shirts and jeans at state fairs or farm shows, but showed up out of place but nonetheless unadulterated and authentic with his trademark baggy suit and loud, long tie.

Most Americans in 2015–16 also did not quite know, and did not care, where Trump’s odd accent came from. But they grasped that it was certainly not Washingtonian.

Trump’s grammar and diction were also not schizophrenic like those of suburban politicians of the Clinton or Obama sort. Trump never faked a black patois when speaking to minorities or tried on corny homespun drawls when campaigning in bowling alleys or state fairs. Trump sounded lowbrow all the time to all the people. Thereby, he came across as transparent and regular, as if a Georgia farmer would rather hear a Queens accent than Hillary Clinton struggle with ‘y’all.’

Ship of Fools: How a S…
Tucker Carlson
Best Price: $4.38
Buy New $8.90
(as of 05:55 EST – Details)

It is difficult to tell to what degree…

De Blasio accepts federal monitor to oversee New York City Housing Authority

By
Josh Varlin

7 March 2019

The Trump administration and the administration of Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio jointly announced last month an agreement for the appointment of a federal monitor to oversee the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), in a move that is a step toward the privatization of the largest public housing system in the United States.

Some weeks later, US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson announced that he had appointed Bart Schwartz to the post. Schwartz is a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who worked under the direction of Rudy Giuliani, a current member of Donald Trump’s legal team and former New York City mayor.

Schwartz was accused of a conflict of interest in 2017 by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), when he was a receiver in an SEC case against the hedge fund Platinum Management. Schwartz used about 40 percent of Platinum’s funds in the receivership process before being forced to withdraw, after it became known that he had been hired four years prior to defend the “ethical propriety” of a Platinum loan.

The former prosecutor assumes the post as NYCHA’s federal monitor in the midst of a crisis that is deeper than ever, with the Authority needing tens of billions of dollars to update its facilities, and amidst frequent loss of heating for thousands of tenants during the winter months. NYCHA admits that approximately 2,800 of its apartments where young children live have been found to have lead paint contamination, although it has systematically attempted to cover up the scale of the problem.

NYCHA residents, more than 400,000 in all, are subjected to vermin, lead paint, leaks, lack of heat,…

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
March 6, 2019

Since the United States government began tracking the cause of death in 1999, suicides, alcohol, and drug-related deaths have skyrocketed to record levels.

The new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Americans are dying younger as life expectancy continues to drop.

Feelings of hopelessness and despair are overwhelming many in the U.S. So much so, that people are turning to alcohol, drugs, and suicide to numb the pain of their lives.  Government enslavement and the stranglehold on the economy are making life even more difficult on those already struggling to get by. And this is seen in new death numbers released.

The national rate for deaths from alcohol, drugs, and suicide rose from 43.9 to 46.6 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017, a 6 percent increase, the Trust for America’s Health and the Well Being Trust reported Tuesday. That was a slower increase than in the previous two years, but it was greater than the 4 percent average annual increase since 1999, reported USA Today.

Perhaps most disturbing, is that the deaths from suicides rose from 13.9 to 14.5 per 100,000, which amounted to a 4 percent increase. That was double the average annual pace over the previous decade.  Psychologist Benjamin Miller, chief strategy officer of the Well Being Trust, says broader efforts are needed to address the underlying causes of alcohol and drug use and suicide. “It’s almost a joke how simple we’re trying to make these issues,” he says. “We’re not changing direction and it’s getting worse.”

That’s because people have no control over their lives anymore.  The government controls every aspect of everyone’s lives and social media helps to compound the issue by often making people feel like they don’t have enough or can’t “keep up with the Joneses.”Human beings need to and deserve to…

At a time of heightened anti-Muslim discrimination and hatred, the Democratic establishment has taken unprecedented steps to single out a Muslim representative for her criticisms of AIPAC and the U.S.’s relationship with Israel. After first publicly rebuking Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Democratic establishment, led by House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, began drafting a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, amounting to an indirect censure.

The move has spectacularly backfired, threatening deep fissures in the Democratic Party as accusations of anti-Semitism tear apart the Labour Party in the U.K. The rush to heed calls for a resolution has only further exposed the Democrats’ close ties to pro-Israel groups and, more alarmingly, has given a tacit green light to the racism and Islamophobia that fuels the Trump administration and its supporters.

The Democrats’ focus on Omar has invited accusations of hypocrisy, given their silence in the face of Trump’s many anti-Semitism comments and a long history of anti-Semitism in the GOP. Unfortunately, the Democrats’ outsized response made them appear in more agreement with Trump, who dismissed Omar’s apology as insincere and called for her expulsion from Congress.

Worse, Democrats have left Omar more vulnerable to the fresh wave of racism and Islamophobia unleashed by the right following her comments, including a poster in the West Virginia statehouse smearing her in connection to the 9/11 attacks. The FBI is now investigating a threat to kill Omar after a photo of graffiti that read “Assassinate Ilhan Omar” was circulated on social media.

With the escalating backlash from progressives in the House, as well as the Islamophobic threats of violence toward Omar, House leaders delayed the vote and sought to pacify criticisms by amending the resolution to include language condemning anti-Muslim bias. Reps. Eliot Engel and Nita Lowey, who publicly reprimanded Omar, clarified their stance to distance themselves from this Islamophobic…

Photograph Source Jessie Oni / Voice of America

On February 15th, Donald Trump declared a state of national emergency in order to fund his “great, great” border wall without having to go through Congress. There is, of course, no emergency, despite the rape fantasy that the president has regularly tried to pass off as public policy. In speech after speech, including his declaration of that emergency, he has told the same story: the United States needs a border wall to prevent sex traffickers from driving women into the country, bound with duct tape.

“Women are tied up,” he typically says. “They’re bound. Duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases they can’t even breathe.”

It’s a scenario he’s only continued to elaborate over time. “They have tape over their mouths, electrical tape, usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good. And they have three, four, five of them in vans, or three of them in back seats of cars.” As they approach ports of entry, he swears, the vehicles carrying them “get off the road, and they drive out into the desert and they come in, they make a left turn — usually it’s a left, not a right.”

Fact-checkers and experts in border sex trafficking have been quick to insist that they know of no such incidents, however elaborately imagined — not one. Instead, most women and children forced into prostitution, they report, enter the country through legal ports of entry.

Border…

In just over a week’s time, on March 15th, primary and secondary school students around the world concerned about climate change and the refusal of most politicians and business leaders to take it seriously, will be holding a series of School Strikes and other activities centred around climate change and the environment.

A Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, is credited with initiating the movement, which aims to give students around the world a voice in their future, even if they are too young to vote.

The movement is run by students and for students, and while parents, grandparents and other adults are encouraged to actively support their children and other students, it is the children who speak at the proposed rallies and work out their activities, not the adults.

While this may have some obvious drawbacks, it also has many advantages, not the least of which is that young students get to learn about politics, personal assertiveness and responsibility, and why their world operates in the way that it does.

At the very least, perhaps a few of these students might become the voices of sanity for tomorrow.

As a sixty-four year old grandparent, for many years I have been ashamed and appalled at the blatant stupidity, self-interest and destructive greed that so many in my generation have demonstrated in their attitudes towards the economy and the environment.

Through luck and hard work I am fortunate to own a small house, but unlike so many others of my age, I don’t…

Zero Hedge
March 6, 2019

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is backpedaling after pissing off Amazon, costing New York City 25,000 – 40,000 jobs after they decided to abandon plans for a New York City HQ2. 

AOC’s money-shuffling chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti offered Bloomberg Television a vastly different message to AOC’s February 14th celebration of ‘defeating Amazon’s corporate greed‘ – which NY Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) described as putting her own “narrow political interests” above her community.

“What she was vocal about was the process by which it happened,” explained Chakrabarti, completely ignoring the fact that the hill AOC died on revolved around the $3 billion in tax breaks the company would receive (which she repeatedly suggested was being “handed” to Amazon).

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not completely ruling out Amazon coming back to New York if the process is done with community input, a top aide says https://t.co/vbRgosMIyM pic.twitter.com/EV9iG78xqE

— Bloomberg Politics (@bpolitics) March 5, 2019

In fact, AOC was vocal about far more than “the process by which it happened.”

• She said Amazon wouldn’t be a “good or healthy neighbor for NYC”

Nothing Amazon has said or done – including selling facial recognition technology to ICE & its intent to fight against worker unionization – would lead us to believe it could be a good or healthy neighbor for NYC. https://t.co/BwASshxJ9F

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 1, 2019

• She railed against “giving $3 billion away to Amazon” in the form of tax breaks, calling it “dressed-up trickle-down economics”

While there isn’t enough money for hot water in NYCHA, we’re giving $3 billion away to Amazon.

“Ocasio-Cortez called the Amazon deal “dressed-up trickle-down economics.”

“What we’re seeing here is a complete public cost for a private corporate…

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” The people at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree, saying that to avoid some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, the world must slash carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and completely decarbonize by 2050.

Such dire warnings are not new. In 1970, Harvard University biology professor George Wald, a Nobel laureate, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, predicted in an article for The Progressive, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” The year before, he had warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Despite such harebrained predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Leftists constantly preach such nonsense as “The world that we live in is beautiful but fragile.” “The 3rd rock from the sun is a fragile oasis.” “Remember that Earth needs to be saved every single day.” These and many other statements, along with apocalyptic predictions, are stock in trade for environmentalists. Worse yet, this fragile-earth indoctrination is fed to the nation’s youth from kindergarten through college. That’s why many millennials support Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.

American Contempt for …
Walter E. Williams
Best Price: $9.55
Buy New $11.46
(as of 12:40 EST – Details)

Let’s examine…

Washington Examiner
March 6, 2019

President Trump’s campaign promise to “take back the country we love,” once deemed racist by Democratic sympathizers, is now finding its way back into mainstream acceptance as Democrats hope to win the White House in 2020.

Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 Democratic presidential opponent, used the phrase over the weekend when speaking in Selma, Ala., to mark the 54th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

“Let us celebrate this 54th anniversary, but let us not mistake what our mission must be,” Clinton said. “I know that if we, if we do our part, we can take back this country and put it back on the path that was begun and forged here in Selma 54 years ago.”

Clinton said this week she won’t run again in 2020, but other Democrats who are running are also making use of the phrase. Before she declared in January that she was running for the White House, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., conveyed her plan to turn the rhetoric into reality at the 2017 California Democrats State Convention.

“Democrats, we know we have a long road and many fights ahead. It may get harder before it gets easier. But I’ll tell you how we take our country back. It starts with you,” the former California attorney general said, according to her prepared remarks.

Read more

This article was posted: Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 7:33 am

Britain rejects International Court of Justice order to return Chagos Islands to Mauritius

By
Jean Shaoul

6 March 2019

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ordered Britain to hand back the Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, to Mauritius “as rapidly as possible.” This follows its landmark ruling that the UK’s occupation of the Chagos Islands was unlawful.

The court held that the process of decolonization of Mauritius “was not lawfully completed” in 1968 and that “all Member States” had an obligation to cooperate with the United Nations “to complete the decolonization of Mauritius.”

The decision by an overwhelming majority of 13 to 1, with only the US voting against, follows the UN General Assembly’s decision in 2017 to refer the legal status of the Chagos Islands to the ICJ, the UN’s highest court.

The Chagos Islands make up the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), located halfway between Tanzania and Indonesia. Diego Garcia, the largest island, is the site of one of the largest US airbases with some 4,000 US troops as well as British troops stationed there. The implication of the ICJ’s ruling is that the UK’s leasing of Diego Garcia to the US is illegal.

The ICJ’s ruling will be discussed at the UN general assembly, which has already voiced its opposition to Britain’s position by referring the issue to the ICJ in 2017.

The ICJ’s ruling has no binding status. The British government, determined to hold onto its colonial possessions, has rejected both the ICJ’s order and its unanimous ruling that it has jurisdiction because it relates to a UN process of decolonization, not a dispute between two states.

Speaking in Parliament, Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan accused the UN General Assembly of a “misuse of powers” and…

Newsbusters
March 6, 2019

Apparently, when President Trump took time to hug the American flag on the CPAC stage on Saturday, he triggered people on the left and sent them into a tailspin. And in a report during Tuesday’s edition of Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN reporter Jeanne Moos dedicate time to hype negative responses on Twitter and by late night comedians, while lampooning the President for his display of affection for the flag.

After coming back from a commercial break towards the end of the program, Burnett quipped about how “Trump gets his snuggle on with old glory” before handing it off to Moos.

“Ever since the flag hugger-in-chief did this the other day. (…) The President holding and murmuring sweet nothings to the stars and stripes has led to strife,” Moos declared as she began her report. Of course, she wasted little time in jumping to comparisons of groping and sexual misconduct:

“If that flag could tweet,” did it “say #MeToo”? The one man’s grope is another’s patriotic caress of Old Glory, which the White House glorified by tweeting a photo captioned “America!” And Donald Trump Jr. Instagramed, “oh hell yes”.

Moos pointed to Late Show host Stephen Colbert, who suggested: “I believe that’s the first time a flag has ever volunteered to be burned.” She also found humor in Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel using the hug to make perverted and unfunny faux infomercials:

Read more

This article was posted: Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 7:34 am

From TruthDig and KCRW:

American soldiers born decades apart in the state of New York, Ron Kovic and Maj. Danny Sjursen are two crucial dissenting voices that have experienced first hand the futility and brutality of America’s interventionist wars. Kovic, a marine veteran who was paralyzed in the Vietnam war, has spent the rest of his life fighting against the U.S. war machine. The film Born on the Fourth of July, starring Tom Cruise, was based on his book, works he’d hoped would combine with his activism to dissuade young people from buying into the toxic patriotism that leads Americans to fight destructive, ultimately pointless wars.

In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Kovic tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer, “I couldn’t stop speaking against that war. I was arrested a dozen times, every single day was life and death. Every single day I know that there could be another young man like Ron Kovic being paralyzed, another young man from a town or a farm somewhere in this country, being killed in that war that had to stop.:

Yet Sjursen, who says he watched the film based on Kovic’s life before he was even of age to join the military, explains he sadly wasn’t able to hear past what he calls the “faux patriotism” that pushed him to attend the military academy West Point, as well as do tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I think the fact that I didn’t learn the lessons from Ron Kovic’s story,” Sjursen laments, “[is] proof of the power of the masculinity that is associated with military service, and this notion of nationalism and patriotism. It’s so prevalent that it’s, in some ways, if it’s not fought every day…it will continue despite the lessons before us.”

Listen to their brutally honest discussion about the vital need to reframe patriotism in the age of the “forever wars” and the current state of the military industrial complex.

Yesterday, Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) filed suit in federal court to block the Trump administration’s Title X “domestic gag rule,” which places serious limitations on abortion providers and referring doctors. This filing follows on the heels of parallel action from a coalition of 21 attorneys general led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, Oregon Governor Kate Brown, and Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum. The suit names Alex Azar, current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and alleges, “The Final Rule would impose burdensome and unnecessary restrictions that would reduce access to care, interfere with the patient-provider relationship, and undermine Congress’s intent in enacting Title X of the Public Health Service Act nearly five decades ago.”

Joining Oregon and New York in the lawsuit are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.

As Rewire.News explained last month after the final version of the gag rule was announced:

The gag rule would ban Title X family planning providers from making referrals for abortion services and require providers to physically separate their Title X practices from their abortion services. Physical separation could mean everything from building new entrances and exits, to opening completely new facilities and hiring more staff.

Calling the gag rule “unconscionable and unethical” in a statement following the administration’s February 22 announcement, PPFA president Leana Wen called reproductive health care a “basic human right.”

“This rule compromises the oath that I took to serve patients and help them with making the best decision for their own health,” said Wen. “Patients expect their doctors to speak honestly with them, to…

“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation

You think you’ve got rights? Think again.

All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.

Our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs.

Consider a case before the U.S. Supreme Court (Mitchell vs. Wisconsin) in which Wisconsin police officers read an unconscious man his rights and then proceeded to forcibly and warrantlessly draw his blood while he was still unconscious in order to determine if he could be charged with a DUI.

Battlefield America: T…
John W. Whitehead
Check Amazon for Pricing.

To sanction this forced blood draw, the cops and the courts have hitched their wagon to state “implied consent” laws (all of the states have them), which suggest that merely driving on a state-owned road implies that a person has consented to police sobriety tests, breathalyzers and blood draws.

More than half of the states (29 states) allow police to do warrantless, forced blood draws on unconscious individuals whom…

Immediately after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu forged an alliance with the fringe political group, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), a widespread outrage ensued.

The anger did not emanate only from the Center, Left and Arab parties, but from some in the Right as well. Even the pro-Israel lobby in the US, known for its hawkish political views, spoke out against the sinister union.

“The views of Otzma Yehudit”, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) tweeted, “are reprehensible. They do not reflect the core values that are the very foundation of the State of Israel.”

But what if they do? And what if “Otzma Yehudit” is but a different political articulation of mainstream Israeli views, reflecting the very “core values” that even AIPAC has been blindly defending since its inception in 1953?

Prior to the alliance between Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, Rafi Peretz’s far-right Jewish Home, and Otzma Yehudit, which was struck on February 20, Israel was hardly a liberal democracy that shunned racism and embraced political pluralism. Indeed, it must be understood that the inclusion of Otzma Yehudit in Israel’s mainstream political scene is consistent with the moral corruption of Israeli politics as a whole.

To protest the alliance between Netanyahu and the fanatical leaders of Otzma Yehudit is to suggest that mainstream Israeli politicians don’t represent the very chauvinistic, racist and violent ideals that the…

Since 2006 WikiLeaks has been censuring governments with governments’ own words. It has been doing the job the U.S. constitution intended the press to do, says Joe Lauria.

By Joe Lauria
in Sydney, Australia

In his 1971 opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote: “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.”

That’s what WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been doing since 2006: censuring governments with governments’ own words pried from secrecy by WikiLeak’s sources—whistleblowers. In other words, WikiLeaks has been doing the job the U.S. constitution intended the press to do.

One can hardly imagine anyone sitting on today’s U.S. Supreme Court writing such an opinion. Even more troubling is the news media having turned its back on its mission. Today they almost always serve the governors—not the governed.

Lauria: Media serve governors–not the governed. (Cathy Vogan)

The question is why.

Consolidation of media ownership has increased obedience of desperate journalists; entertainment divisions have taken over news departments; and careerist reporters live vicariously through the power of those they cover, rejecting the press’ unique power to hold those officials to account.

It comes down ultimately to lifestyles. Men go to war to protect and further their lifestyles. The press cheers them on for residual material betterment and increase in status.

Millions of lives erased for lifestyles.

It used to be accepted in television that news departments would lose money and would be supported by the entertainment division. That’s because news was considered a public service. TV newsmen—they were almost all men in those days—were former wire service and newspaper reporters. But greed has put the presenters’ personalities before public service, as entertainment masquerades as news. Newspapers have…

PJ Media
March 6, 2019

On January 7 of this year, I published an article at PJ Media about Amazon removing doormats featuring Qur’an verses from sale because the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found them offensive. In that article, I asked:

How long will it be before Hamas-linked CAIR starts demanding that books that criticize jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others also be dropped by Amazon?

The answer turned out to be 51 days.

It’s the British government and the BBC, rather than CAIR, that are likely behind this, but Amazon has just dropped the book Mohammed’s Koran by the renowned British activist Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin — and apparently only because its censors dislike Robinson. In the last two weeks, Robinson spectacularly embarrassed the BBC by exposing the bias and dishonesty of its reporter John Sweeney. The retaliation has been swift and severe: Robinson has been banned from YouTube and Facebook, and now his book has been withdrawn from sale.

Coauthor Peter McLoughlin states:

[T]his is the twenty-first century equivalent of the Nazis taking out the books from university libraries and burning them. Can you think of another scholarly book on Islam that has been banned by Amazon? Mein Kampf is for sale on Amazon. As are books like the terrorist manual called The Anarchist Cookbook.

McLoughlin is correct that Amazon’s behavior has been wildly inconsistent. He adds that Amazon officials are steadfastly mum on why the book was banned:

[They] refuse to reinstate the book and refuse to explain why it has been banned. So they have banned the No.1 best-selling exegesis of the Koran. I can’t get my head round it. Every few weeks for the past 18 months they had emailed me asking to put it into special sales programmes, as it was selling so well. For 18 months they sought to profit even more from the sales.

“As dark as my vision…