Hezbollah is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States. Should they be? Some argue that they are defending their homeland from Israeli conquest. Others argue they are trying to kill innocent Israelis without just cause or legitimate state backing. What is the truth? Tune in to find out!
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From The USS Liberty Veterans Association Blog.
https://usslibertyveteransblog.com/uss-liberty-veterans-association-banned-forever-from-the-american-legion-national-convention/
“Why would the leaders of a Federally chartered veterans association claiming a mission “To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America,” “To foster and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism,” and “To make right the master of might” ban a group of American veterans who are the victims of War Crimes committed by our “best ally and only friend in the Middle East” from attending any American Legion National Convention forever?
Did I just answer my own question?”
Bombing the Iranian-backed PMU near Balad Airbase.
Like, you know, whatever.
In Washington, though, Pompeo has managed to maintain Trump’s confidence while remaining on speaking terms with a foreign-policy establishment that is deeply unsettled by the President. “He’s in a sense become the real adult in the room,” Ian Bremmer, the founder of the geopolitical advisory firm the Eurasia Group, told me. “It is less the case than he would like, but vastly more the case than anyone else.” Pompeo’s Republican friend told me, “He’s not an enabler of Trump. He does a lot to try to manage him.” Others believe that Pompeo is merely posturing. He is a politician who knows his audience; he wants to give the impression that “he generally agrees but he’s working with this wild man,” another former senior State Department official, who has met with Pompeo privately, told me. “He always has this sheepish ‘I know,’ but won’t show his hand.” He suggests, without being specific, the former official added, that he’s got “his finger in the dike.”
When it comes to personnel, Pompeo has sent the right signals to the G.O.P. establishment by hiring a few Republican opponents of the President. He tapped Elliott Abrams, who wrote an anti-Trump op-ed in 2016, to be his special envoy to Venezuela. (Trump blocked Tillerson’s attempt to hire Abrams.) He asked Jim Jeffrey, George W. Bush’s deputy national-security adviser, to serve as the special envoy for Syria, even though he signed a Never Trump letter. This spring, Pompeo appointed the Fox News contributor Morgan Ortagus to be his spokesperson, although she, like Pompeo, had publicly opposed Trump in 2016, prompting the conservative magazine The National Interest to observe that “Mike Pompeo’s house has become a hall of NeverTrump.”
In each case, Pompeo carefully managed the President. “He’ll be meeting with Trump about something else and then, like, at the end of the meeting he’ll be, like, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m bringing on Jim Jeffrey,’ ‘Oh, by the way, I’m bringing on Elliott Abrams,’ ” the Republican close to Pompeo told me. Trump agreed to the moves, but only because the jobs did not require Senate confirmation. “It’s fairly clear he has a deal with the President where if there’s no confirmation hearing, where people can talk about the 2016 race, then he can hire whoever he wants,” a senior Administration official told me. …
This gets at a central challenge of Pompeo’s tenure: turning Trump’s tweets and “instincts” into a coherent foreign policy, as his policy-planning chief often put it. Pompeo insists on that goal, though doing so often involves essentially ignoring the President himself. On Syria, for example, Pompeo, Bolton, and other officials disagreed with Trump’s order to immediately withdraw U.S. forces, but they sought to manage him rather than confront him, as Mattis did, while enlisting other allies, such as the Israelis and members of Congress, to lobby Trump for a reversal. In public, Pompeo defended the decision, arguing, in defiance of the facts, that it constituted a continuation of Trump’s policy. Eventually, Trump agreed to keep some troops in Syria. …
Until now, Pompeo has derived his power by being better than anyone else at anticipating where Trump is going to end up and managing to get himself there. As Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, put it, Pompeo has cultivated a “special skill,” figuring out “how to get Trump moving in the direction he wants.”
The risks of getting publicly out of synch with Trump, however, have gone up for Pompeo this summer, as tensions with Iran rise. The President, a self-styled grand global dealmaker, has said that his goal after withdrawing from the nuclear deal is to bring Iran back to the negotiating table for a better deal. Pompeo, an Iran hawk far longer than he has been a Trump supporter, has been driving the Administration’s hard-line “maximum pressure” strategy. The possibility of a real divide with Trump emerged in June, after Iran shot down a U.S. drone. Pompeo and his internal rival Bolton, a longtime advocate of Iranian “regime change,” initially backed a retaliatory military strike, and Trump agreed, only to reverse himself when planes were already in the air. Even before that incident, Fred Fleitz, Bolton’s former chief of staff at the N.S.C., had told me that Bolton and Pompeo are closely aligned on Iran, at least. “He and John are on the same sheet of music,” Fleitz said.
Or maybe not says Nia Harris and Cassandra Simpson at Lobelog.
So where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed’s stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018, the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million, again according to its SEC filings.
It may cost a lot to ‘defend” America but at least we can brag that we have the best weapons ever, like the F-35:
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (Lightning II) at Eglin Air Force Base in 2016. (By Michael Fitzimmons)
The F-35, by the way, is already the most expensive weapons system in history. As of March, its acquisition price tag was $400 billion. However, the cost of operating and maintaining the fleet over the next several decades stands at an estimated $1.45 trillion.
Careful readers will be surprised to learn that the operational test fleet is actually performing worse than the F-35s in the active Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy squadrons. The test fleet is made up of 23 F-35s equipped with specialized instruments to record flight and combat data for later analysis to determine the program’s overall effectiveness. According to the latest available figures, the F-35s in the active forces managed a fully mission capable rate of only 27 percent. Nothing to crow about either.
But, no problem. Defense (haha) industry stocks are doing great.
Nevertheless, neither the slaughter of passengers nor the subsequent deluge of shocking revelations have had any long-term impact on the stock price.
You insane conspiracy kooks. — Uh, I mean the Journal of the American Medical Association:
An influential medical journal published a study Monday that links fluoride consumption during pregnancy with lower childhood IQs—a finding that could undermine decades of public-health messaging, fire up conspiracy theorists, and alarm mothers-to-be.
The research was expected to be so controversial that JAMA Pediatrics included an editor’s note saying the decision to publish it was not easy and that it was subjected to “additional scrutiny.”
“It is the only editor’s note I’ve ever written,” Dimitri Christakis, editor in chief of JAMA Pediatrics and a pediatrician, told The Daily Beast. “There was concern on the journal’s editorial team about how this would play out in the public eye and what the public-health implications would be.”
About three-fourths of the United States drinks fluoridated tap water—which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared one of the 10 greatest public-health achievements of the 20th century because it dramatically reduces tooth decay.
A handful of earlier studies have suggested that prenatal fluoride exposure could affect neurodevelopment, but many experts considered those to be substandard. The new study, vetted by the premier medical publisher in the U.S., is seen as more rigorous.
“When we started in this field, we were told that fluoride is safe and effective in pregnancy,” said study co-author Christine Till of York University in Toronto. “But when we looked for the evidence to suggest that it’s safe, we didn’t find any studies done on pregnant women.”
They recruited 512 pregnant women from six Canadian cities and measured their exposure several ways: analyzing the amount of fluoride in their urine; looking at how much tap water and tea they drank; and comparing the fluoride concentration in the community drinking water.
Then, when the women’s children were 3 or 4, the researchers gave them IQ tests and crunched the numbers to see if they could find any trends.
“We saw an association between prenatal fluoride exposure and lower IQ scores in children,” study author Rivky Green said.
Specifically, they found a 1 mg per liter increase in concentration of fluoride in urine was associated with a 4.5 point decrease in IQ among boys, though not girls. Another translation: The boys of mothers with the most fluoride in the urine had IQs about 3 points lower than the boys of mothers with the least amount.
When the researchers measured fluoride exposure by examining the women’s fluid intake, they found lower IQs in both boys and girls: A 1 mg increase per day was associated with a 3.7-point IQ deficit among both genders.
The results are significant enough to warrant a change in behavior, Green said. “What we recommend is lowering fluoride ingestion during pregnancy,” she said.
They complain that:
It’s all but certain that anti-fluoride activists, no matter how outlandish their ideas, will seize on the new study results as proof they were right all along. The findings also pose a conundrum for health-care providers and their pregnant patients.
Perhaps the fact that the “authorities” have been wrong all along has something to do with people who disagree with them being right? Nope, the correct kooks are still kooks and they always will be. Just like everyone who opposed invading Iraq or disbelieved in Russia Russia Russia-gate:
In fact, fluoride has been a boogeyman in conspiracy circles for decades. When water fluoridation became widespread in the U.S. in the 1950s, some claimed it was a Soviet plot to physically and mentally weaken Americans. The far-right John Birch Society, among others, accused the U.S. government using fluoride to usher in socialism—a conspiracy theory famously satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Doctor Strangelove.
Some modern conspiracy theorists have claimed fluoridated water is a form of mind control, while others falsely link it to Adolf Hitler. Some allege a corporate conspiracy: They think the dentistry industry or food companies are fluoridating water for their own purposes.
Actually, what the kooks said all along was that it lowers intelligence. What a bunch of idiots and morons, right?
This is where people need to stop paying attention to the messenger and listen to the message. This is all a set up for future elections.
Remember him? He was the 22-year-old entrapped by Robert Mueller’s FBI into … Actually, he didn’t do anything at all! All that happened was the government informant who had infiltrated his family tricked him into saying some bs about loving Osama, before the actual cops coerced the youth into ridiculously claiming that his grandfather ran an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, where they all practiced terrorist poll vaulting in the basement. I am not making this up. The FBI did. The L.A. Times once published the video of the “interrogation.”
They gave him 24 years. It was, how do you say, shocking but not surprising.
(They tried to imprison his father too, but his jury, to some of their credit, deadlocked.)
But now, due to the tireless work of journalists and lawyers who have stayed at it all this time, his false conviction has finally been overturned and he’s been freed from the penitentiary.
The whole town of Lodi, California was scandalized as hell over this fake sleeper cell terrorism case. They’ve had a large Pakistan population there for decades and have never had any problems. Until the worst enemies of freedom in the world, U.S. government employees, our supposed security force, came and fabricated this threat, and falsely imprisoned this innocent person for 15 years out of his one shot at existing as a human person.
Those responsible for this travesty should be forced to mop up depleted uranium dust in Iraq with microfiber washcloths for the rest of their lives. But we all know there will never, ever, ever, ever be accountability of any kind for the cops, the prosecutors, the judges, the jurors or the prison officials who conspired to violate the rights of this American — nor all the local TV and newspaper jackals who went along with pushing this obvious hoax. But they know who they are. And they must hate their own sorry guts for being such weasels and mercenaries. So at least there’s that.
Now let’s talk about the Miami 7, the New Jersey military base Pizza Plot, the JFK Airport fuel tank plan, the drone attack on the Pentagon scheme, the Portland, Oregon Christmas tree, the NY subway plot (There were a couple of these. I mean the slow kid from down at the bookstore, not the Zazi case. Zazi was a legit bad guy.), the Garland, Texas cartoon contest shooting, and on and on and on.
It took a while for W. Bush and Obama’s wars to start generating their own real blowback and backdraft attacks on the United States. So for a while, they just had to improvise by entrapping idiots into fake plots. How else were they going to scare your mom into supporting an endless regional war against a few hundred guys?
Orange Alert! They caught another terrorist! Sleepy little Lodi, California this time! We better fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here some more!
Crude but it works.
