"It [the draft] is duty rather than slavery. I part with the author on the caviler idea that individual freedom (whatever that may be to the person) leads to nirvana, anyone older that 12 knows that is BS."
-(Midcan5)
"Allow me to masturbate my patriotism furiously and publicly at this opportunity."
-(Ib1yysguy)
"There is no 'equal opportunity' today unless the government makes it so."
-(apple0154 )
"abortion is not killing Its birth control"
-(Desh)
Hopefully we keep open lines of communication with Putin. Also, keep up the sanctions. Yes, both things can occur simultaneously without signaling we want war. Our energy is flourishing and I imagine will negatively affect Russian control. China's economy is taking a bit of a hit. There are ways of projecting strength without having wars. I don't know if the left gets this. The msm doesn't help in keeping the peace IMO.
Abortion rights dogma can obscure human reason & harden the human heart so much that the same person who feels
empathy for animal suffering can lack compassion for unborn children who experience lethal violence and excruciating
pain in abortion.
Unborn animals are protected in their nesting places, humans are not. To abort something is to end something
which has begun. To abort life is to end it.
anatta (07-18-2018)
The Cold War was likely faked deliberately by the Pentagon and the whole Military Industrial Complex, (which Eisenhower warned about), in order to try to hold onto the war profiteering.
The USSR was never any sort of threat, could not reach anywhere with any significant military force, was almost totally wiped out by WWII, and hardly even had much of a male population left.
They had no navy, no significant air force, any very little mobility.
Anyone who fell for the fake claims of the Cold War was just foolish.
For comparison, the USSR lost over 35 million people out of 160 million or so.
The US lost 0.4 million out of 135 million or so.
So the USSR lost almost 100 times as many people.
Kissinger: “demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.”
________
Cold War 2.0 Russia hysteria is turning people’s brains into guacamole.
We’ve got to find a way to snap out of the propaganda trance
________
Buddha: "trust the person who seeks truth and mistrust the person who claims he has found it "
1.2.3.4.5.6.7. All Good Children Go to Heaven
Stretch (07-18-2018)
Here is the truth....if Russians were not white, if they were instead -- brownish -- these people would be singing a different tune.
Listen to how these people talk about Russia than compare it to how they talk about Cuba..
Lets be friends with Russia, lets have our president basically perform fellatio on a Russian dictator on national TV --- but if anyone talks about being friendly with Cuba, they are a traitor!!!!
Gotcha68 (07-18-2018)
REINFORCING A STRONG SANCTIONS REGIME ON RUSSIA: The Administration has imposed the toughest sanctions against Russia to confront its destabilizing behavior.
•President Trump’s Administration has consistently confronted Russian activities that threaten our institutions, our interests, or our allies.
•In June 2018, President Trump’s Administration imposed sanctions against 5 Russian entities and 3 Russian individuals for enabling Russia’s military and intelligence units to increase Russia’s offensive cyber capabilities.
•In April 2018, the Administration imposed sanctions against 7 Russian oligarchs and the 12 companies they own or control, 17 senior Russian government officials, and a state-owned Russian weapons trading company and a bank it owns. •These sanctions ensure the Russian oligarchs who profit from Russia’s destabilizing activities face the consequences for doing so.
•The sanctioned state-owned weapons trading company provides military equipment and support to the Government of Syria, enabling the regime’s continual attacks against Syrian citizens.
•In February 2018, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed a new rule to bar a Latvian bank involved in illicit Russia-related activity from opening or maintaining correspondent accounts in the United States.
•In December 2017, new Russia-related sanctions were announced under the Sergei Magnitsky and Global Magnitsky programs.
•In December 2017, the Administration imposed export controls against 2 Russian companies that were helping Russia develop missiles that violate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).
•The Trump Administration sanctioned a total of 100 targets in response to Russia’s ongoing occupation of Crimea and aggression in Eastern Ukraine.
•The Trump Administration has also designated Russian actors under Iran and North Korea sanctions authorities.
CONFRONTING RUSSIAN AGGRESSION: The President is strengthening our alliances and standing up to Russia’s malign influence across the globe.
•The Trump Administration released a National Security Strategy that makes clear that Russia is undertaking actions that threaten our security and outlines steps to stop their interference.
•The Trump Administration has increased funding for the European Deterrence Initiative, providing billions to increase United States troop readiness in Europe, deter Russian aggression, and help defend our NATO allies.
•The Trump Administration has enhanced its support for Ukraine’s Armed Forces to help Ukraine improve its ability to defend itself.
•The Trump Administration is working to pressure Russia back into compliance with the INF Treaty to ensure that Russia does not gain strategic advantage from its treaty violations.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings...campaign=1600d
Abortion rights dogma can obscure human reason & harden the human heart so much that the same person who feels
empathy for animal suffering can lack compassion for unborn children who experience lethal violence and excruciating
pain in abortion.
Unborn animals are protected in their nesting places, humans are not. To abort something is to end something
which has begun. To abort life is to end it.
Did the regime changes in Iran and all thru-out Central America bother you?
You seem to only bring up things that made Putin sad instead of the broader narrative of US toppling or trying to topple governments all thru out Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa -- I mean the CIA assassinated the elected leader of Congo (Patrice Lumumba) -- because Belgium asked them to
But you seem to only be upset over all things Putin
how many times have you seen me excoriate Obama for Libya - creating a failed terrorist state?
I've posted articles about US meddling in elections,and regime change...Maybe you are relatively new here..?
The Big Enchilada is Russia because of NATO -and the huge amounts of weapons involved that could easily
start a trip wire war. I posted this - a bit dated - but a good look at that.
U.S. Troops on Russia’s Borders
https://www.justplainpolitics.com/sh...ia%92s-Borders
but we've bungled up quite a few relations ( Egyptian sanctions /Iraq / Libya) and Russia has taken advantage of all these
From reading your constant sycophancy for all things Trump -- I would venture to guess that excoriating Obama is not hard to do, you may have excoriated him for wearing a tan suit.
But I see you totally missed my point -- why is this acquiescence to Russia a sign of brilliant diplomacy -- but actually striking a deal with Iran is treason?
Why is this willingness to publicly praise and admire a former soviet KGB official, who routinely murders and jail his political opponents is a good thing -- but to try to ease tensions between Cuba and the US is something we need to be against because the black guy did it?
A lot of lifetime bureaucrats have been getting nice paychecks for a long time for basically keeping the status quo. Time to break the rut?
******************************************
When the cant and emotionalism subside, the Helsinki summit will go down in history as a turning point in this American president’s struggle to disembowel the bipartisan regime of complacency and lassitude he successfully ran against. It may also be a modest inflection point in U.S.-Russian relations.
President Trump knew what he was getting into in holding a press conference with Vladimir Putin. He knew the press would ask him whose version of Russian meddling in the 2016 election does he believe? Putin’s? Or that of former U.S. intelligence agency directors John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey? The question came and President Trump quickly moved to the missing Clinton servers and 33,000 erased Clinton emails under congressional subpoena.
Trump’s response causes the ultimate evocation to the voters in this epic battle that has been lurching and raging over America and astonishing the world for two years. Many of the president’s political supporters expressed genuine regret. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Trump had “missed an opportunity” to confront Putin publicly, and Newt Gingrich said that the president’s remarks were a “serious error,” requiring immediate correction. The departing NeverTrumpers like House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and Senators Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), and John McCain (R-Ariz.), and even Trump late-comers like Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), were more critical. The Democrats offered almost uniform expressions of shock and anger that the president had humiliated the country.
They all missed the point. The real issue surged to the surface and into the ether in a blinding flash about five minutes after the joint press conference ended in the form of a tweet from former CIA director John Brennan.
Perhaps the most virulent (and fearful) Trump-hater of all, Brennan described Trump’s public performance (not any imagined private betrayals) as “exceeding the threshold of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ and justified impeachment” as “treasonous” and “imbecilic.” Although this was defamatory lunacy, it attracted unctuous hand-wringing and robotic nodding of talking heads among Trump’s most consistent cable network detractors. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said it was clear Putin “had something on” Trump.
What Trump Didn’t Do—and What He Actually Did
The president could have made the point that former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock made last week that the intelligence community had in fact only tentatively concluded that there was official Russian meddling of a very insignificant and ineffectual kind in the 2016 election. He could have dwelt on the fact that all that has really been unearthed is about $10 million of rather vague advertisements on Facebook decrying the general condition of the country, compared to an unprecedented $250 million of Clinton attack ads against Trump in that campaign.
And he could certainly have remarked that since Brennan and Clapper both had accused Trump of colluding with the Russians, and he had done nothing of the kind (as Putin affirmed), and since there was not a shred of evidence to corroborate that allegation or Clapper’s claim that the Russians had tipped the election to Trump, and as both Clapper and Brennan, as well as Comey, had lied to Congress under oath in related matters, he, President Trump, put more faith in Putin’s account of the absence of collusion than in the defamatory allegations of the former leaders of the American intelligence community. He might even have added that the United States had interfered countless times in the internal electoral processes, even primitive ones, of dozens of countries (including Russia) over many decades, and cautioned against excessive righteousness.
Trump did none of these things. Instead, he raised the ante.
Mueller’s Indictment Stunt
The Russian meddling is nonsense. It was trivial and though it is almost inconceivable that Putin wasn’t aware of it, that could never be proved. The president stated before the world that the U.S. intelligence community was so profoundly corrupted under his predecessor that it is less plausible than the chief occupant of the Kremlin on the subject of the late American election, which the directors of the intelligence agencies cooperated in trying to rig and then to undo, in stark and criminal violation of the Constitution. The incumbent president on one side and the former heads of the CIA, ODNI, and FBI on the other are accusing one another of heinous crimes of unconstitutional betrayal of the greatest offices of the republic.
Clearly, if to some extent implicitly, Donald Trump is saying that the latest Mueller accusations against this gang of Russian intelligence officials are a stunt to try to prop up the fraud that there was something suspect in Trump’s pre-election relations with the Russians. Naturally, this sent the Democratic leadership before the television cameras of their obsequious network supporters to tell Trump to stop calling it a witch-hunt and cancel the Putin meeting.
Maybe Newt Gingrich and other supportive Republicans are right, and maybe not. The entire political process is almost stalled in this death struggle between the former political establishment and the president. Because Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a self-emasculated nonentity and his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, is a long-time chum of the old praetorian guard of Mueller, Comey, et al., Mueller can continue his farce that can’t get past pretend indictments of unextraditable Russians and further measures of semi-torture of Paul Manafort for alleged tax fraud many years before he met Trump.
Mueller will keep this charade running to the election, with Sessions and Rosenstein as nodding straight-men, and Trump can’t slice the Gordian Knot yet because of the political repercussions of firing Sessions and his deputy. The voters will have to be the jury. This controversy will settle down, and after the Senate has dealt (affirmatively) with the Supreme Court nominee, all will be quiet until the campaign really heats up after Labor Day.
Strategically, Trump is correct: Russia is a paper tiger apart from its nuclear weapons, has a GDP smaller than Canada’s, and Putin is conducting a clumsy imitation of Charles de Gaulle’s elegant restoration of France as a serious power by being a nuisance to the Anglo-Americans in order to redeem the fiasco of the French surrender to the Nazis in 1940.
The danger with Putin is to drive Russia into the arms of China and Iran, and the goodwill of the Kremlin can be had by the United States for less than continuing the present NATO pocket-picking. NATO can be reformed and Russia can be made a semi-cooperative state of convenience. These are reasonable goals and they are attainable.
Yes, There Was Illicit Meddling in the 2016 Election
What makes this controversy so unique, riveting, and infuriating, is the ability of the palsied Democratic leaders, with their media accomplices and dupes, to keep this dead pigeon of collusion alive by pretending Mueller is conducting a serious investigation; and that they may ride the traditional wave of midterm congressional losses for the administration to distract and paralyze the government with a fraudulent impeachment debate and hopeless Senate trial consuming much of 2019 and deferring the day of reckoning for the culprits of the Clinton campaign and the Justice Department and intelligence agencies.
They are trying to cover up the greatest illicit meddling in an American election in history: by American intelligence agencies. In their desperation since the defeat of the candidate they covertly supported, who would have covered it up for them, they have been trying to maintain the fraud of collusion and conflate it with the trivial and routine interventions of some Russian operatives in the 2016 election.
The president saw that the only way to resolve this is to campaign energetically in the midterms (which no president has really done before), in opposition to open borders, a rollback of tax cuts, and this dishonest and unconstitutional skullduggery. He should celebrate Labor Day by ordering the release of what the congressional committees have been demanding from Rosenstein for many months.
Trump could have handled things better in Helsinki, and should not have provoked a clarification from National Intelligence Director Dan Coats. But fundamentally he is right. And he will win.
https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/18/t...he-deep-state/
About the Author: Conrad Black
Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.
Abortion rights dogma can obscure human reason & harden the human heart so much that the same person who feels
empathy for animal suffering can lack compassion for unborn children who experience lethal violence and excruciating
pain in abortion.
Unborn animals are protected in their nesting places, humans are not. To abort something is to end something
which has begun. To abort life is to end it.
I remember when people tried to make these long lengthy dissertations of why Bush will be looked at as a liberator thru the ages because it is a good thing to force countries into accepting democracy by invading them -- it failed horribly
Now these same people are trying to get us to believe that getting on your knees and bowing down to any dictator with nukes absence of any concrete deal or policy is smart diplomacy, because Trump has a habit of praising dictators -- and while doing this, they accuse liberals of being pro-war? After decades after decades of trying to paint progressives as not being pro-war enough, after decades after decades of saying in the words of Trump "we are wasting our time with diplomacy" -- now they want us to believe they are the party of diplomacy? gtfoh
As soon as a democrat is in office again, repubs will be back on the war mongering path in order to justify having the highest defense spending budget of all other countries combined.
Obama's foreign policy was just awful. The exception was ending the Cuban embargo.
It was outdated, ineffective -and alienated Cuban people . Plus we are natural trading partners because of geography.
Iran is a malign state; much more so then Russia. Iran is a regional hegemon and a state sponsor of terrorism.
One of the very few area we still talk to Russia about is intelligence sharing on terrorism
That might be one of the most remarkable things I can recall a president ever saying in recent memory.“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity,” the president said
I never imagined we would ever have a president who would lay all the blame at the feet of America.
I have always maintained that the Cold War was exacerbated by actions taken by both the USSR and the U.S. But, the American system of democracy and representative government always had the moral high ground, on balance. And I literally cannot recall a single liberal or Democrat in my entire life placing all the blame on the United States while absolving our adversaries and competitors.
christiefan915 (07-18-2018)
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