Real men don't fear the US military, they loathe it

 

Meanwhile Joe Biden and the Democrats who cut and ran from Afghanistan fell far short of military recruitment even after cutting goals

 The US Army was 25% short, while all the other branches had to dip into delayed-entry recruits to make their goals for this cycle. 

Active duty military fell to 1.347m in 2020 from 1.388m in 2019.

In 2021 we're down to 1.195m, a year over year decline of 11.3% and 13.9% from 2019.

Look at this fearsome lot. These supposedly still meet US Army standards.

I'm sure our enemies tremble with fear.

 

Joe Biden's nuclear war comments are completely irresponsible, but so is just about everything that comes out of his pie hole

 He's making matters worse, not better.

He's attributing statements to Putin which Putin did not make, which is the default practice for Democrats when speaking of their opponents.

A lot more is at stake than losing control of the US House and Senate in a few weeks.

Joe's irresponsible remarks risk real catastrophe from a deadly opponent.

Think what you will about Putin, Biden is a fool. 

Nobody fucks around with a Biden, he says, the day after Saudi Arabia does just that, telling him to go pound sand.

The whole world knows he's a fool, which is perilous for the rest of us.

Biden: Nuclear ‘Armageddon’ risk highest since ’62 crisis

 

BIDEN WARNS OF NUCLEAR 'ARMAGEDDON'
 

The brazen military industrial complex is asserting today that the Judicial Branch is civilian Commander in Chief, not the Executive

 These people are a threat to the constitution:

Signatories:

Former Secretaries of Defense

Dr. Ashton Baldwin Carter
William Sebastian Cohen
Dr. Mark Thomas Esper
Dr. Robert Michael Gates
Charles Timothy Hagel
James Norman Mattis
Leon Edward Panetta
Dr. William James Perry

Former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Gen. (ret.) Martin Edward Dempsey
Gen. (ret.) Joseph Francis Dunford Jr.
Adm. (ret.) Michael Glenn Mullen
Gen. (ret.) Richard Bowman Myers
Gen. (ret.) Peter Pace 

6. In certain cases or controversies, civilian control is exercised within the judicial branch through judicial review of policies, orders, and actions involving the military. In practice, the power to declare a policy/order/action illegal or unconstitutional is decisive because the military is obligated (by law and by professional ethics) to refuse to carry out an illegal or unconstitutional policy/order/action. 

 

An extraordinary open letter signed by eight former defense secretaries and five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

 The letter also says that civilian control of the military can be exercised by the judicial branch when an administration’s decisions are challenged, and that a court ruling is decisive because military leaders are obligated by law and professional ethics to refuse to carry out illegal or unconstitutional orders.

WAPo calls Chicom propaganda that coronavirus came from Fort Detrick, Maryland, "baseless"

 I don't think so.

This is the same WAPo which highlighted an unexplained outbreak of a respiratory virus in Virginia, just across the border from the Fort Detrick biodefense facility, in June-July 2019, which killed 3 and hospitalized and sickened dozens more. The CDC concluded in late July 2019 that a "common cold" virus was to blame in the outbreak.

Hm, imagine that. But don't think about it too long. The investigative reporting on the right wants us to concentrate on a possible outbreak at the Wuhan lab, which, by the way, wasn't a Wall Street Journal scoop. An Australian journalist had the story already in March.

Meanwhile the CDC temporarily shut down the US Army part of the Fort Detrick operation in August 2019, just a month after the Virginia outbreak, for numerous safety and other violations, not the least of which was an incomplete inventory of agents. The latter problem seems to be chronic at Fort Detrick. The place was similarly cited way back in 2009.

And Congress was deliberately kept out of the loop.

What else is Fort Detrick famous for, besides bioweapons research long ago supposedly abandoned by the US government? 

In 2001 a bunch of people were killed by anthrax mailed in letters shortly after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The anthrax was traced to Fort Detrick.

Robert Mueller and James Comey infamously fingered the wrong guy for those anthrax attacks, who was later compensated millions and exonerated. The true culprit was a senior scientist at United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008 before our incompetent FBI could arrest him, seven years after the crimes.

What other nutjobs are still working in sensitive positions in our government? 

In light of recent testimony by Anthony Fauci to Congress that he couldn't guarantee that NIH funds awarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third party were not used for gain of function research to weaponize viruses, you have to open your eyes to the fact of long-standing and intimate cooperation of US researchers with their Chinese counterparts. Chinese "scientists" are all over the place at American universities and research institutions, including at Fort Detrick, where their American counterparts seem all too often unruffled by the security implications. They are all also all dependent on US government, including military, funding for their livelihoods, as well as on funding from what President Eisenhower once warned us about, the military-industrial complex.

I don't believe any of these people as far as I can throw them.

We know the Chicoms were working on coronavirus. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that one of the inventory lacunae at Fort Detrick was the coronavirus, too. Was it just a coincidence that there was an outbreak of coronavirus-like disease in Virginia in the summer of 2019? CDC should be forced to reveal more.

The American elites who work on this stuff have all the same incentives to keep it all secret as the Chinese do. American scientists are thick as thieves with the Chinese. The fact is they are in this together, and we are the helpless bystanders on the outside. My estimation is they have too much to lose to tell the truth to the American people. Money trumps patriotism. 

As U.S. calls for focus on covid origins, China repeats speculation about U.S. military base:

Zhao, one of the country’s most notoriously hawkish diplomats, referenced a U.S. military location that has been baselessly linked to the coronavirus outbreak by Chinese media.

Trump used immigration to get elected the first time, is using neo-cons to get elected the second time

It's all about election for Trump, not about policy.

Dead servants of the Iranian mullahs is a good thing. Dead mullahs would be better. You pays your money and you takes your chance.

Trump already betrayed his supporters and went soft on immigration. Killing this cancer cell from the tumor on the world isn't going to cost Trump any more votes from the alt-right than he's already lost.

Neo-con/military industrial complex votes matter more than alt-right votes in the up-coming election.

Lizard brain is way ahead of you.

 

After passing NDAA whopper funding The Military Industrial Complex and The Swamp, US House passes another $1.4 trillion in spending in two bills to let Trump say he didn't sign another Omnibus spending bill

TRUMP IS WORKING WITH THEM AGAINST US YOU IDIOTS.

The House passed a $1.4 trillion federal spending package that averts a government shutdown and maintains some funding for a southern border wall. The measure passed Tuesday despite the objections of liberal Democrats and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who said they opposed the $1.375 billion allocated for the construction of a southern border wall as well as other border security provisions. The spending bill would provide funding through the rest of fiscal 2020. It passed in two different measures in order to avoid sending President Trump one “omnibus” package, which he had vowed to reject. 

More here.

Trump and Congress are spending us blind

There is no Great Financial Crisis as in 2008, but Trump & Co. are in the process of racking up trillion dollar deficits same as then as we speak.

Tax cuts for corporations, military-industrial complex spending and goodies for The Swamp are just some of the main reasons.

Trump has a veto pen, but refuses to use it.

Debt to the Penny is currently $23.091 trillion.

Revenues in col 1, spending in col 2, deficits in col 3

Biden in the cat bird seat: Just as Bernie tanked after promising criminals will get to vote, Warren has tanked after hedging on Medicare for all

Ezra Klein, here:

One lesson of the past few weeks is that the Medicare-for-all debate has become a minefield for Democrats — and it’s not clear that any candidate has a safe path through it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has dropped 14 points since October 8, when she briefly led the Democratic field in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Most attribute her decline to her handling of Medicare-for-all — the financing plan she released made her the target of attacks from the moderates, and then the transition plan she released, which envisions a robust public option in the first year of her presidency and only moving to Medicare-for-all in year three, left single-payer advocates unnerved about her commitment to the cause.

The Democrat left has been its own worst enemy.

In addition to alienating working people by going soft on crime, the people who bear the brunt of it,  Bernie has notably lost ground with the working class by flipping on immigration restriction. Every new immigrant drives down their wages when immigrants are not taking their jobs outright.

For her part, on top of hedging on Medicare for all, Warren has rolled out a veritable cornucopia of crazy in this campaign, including a ban on all fracking in the US and ending the Electoral College. Combined with the recent lying about the little details of her life, voters justifiably doubt her sincerity on these larger issues and suspect that she cares about little except getting the power into her hands.

Hence the default candidate still on top, Joe Biden.

America's political institutions are still so structured that even when radicals like Obama do win, those institutions frustrate their aims. The upside of this is that harmful radicalism is usually stopped in its tracks. The downside is that mediocrities and grotesques are produced.

Just as Obama was content to let his Clinton retreads handle the Great Financial Crisis resulting in the still poor full time employment, moribund GDP, unaffordable housing and low interest rates catastrophic to income portfolios of the present time, Obama provided zero leadership on healthcare reform. This resulted in the competing Democrat House and Senate versions which consumed his first year in office, and eventually produced the Affordable Care Act camel, a horse designed by a committee. He sure did enjoy watching basketball in the private residence, though, and went on to make the Bush tax cuts permanent after winning re-election in 2012. Some radical, huh?

The same thing has happened with Trump. Although promising us the moon about immigration, healthcare reform and foreign wars, he instead delivered tax reform mostly for the corporations and huge spending increases for the military industrial complex, which is the basic consensus of the Republican caucus in Congress, foolishly hoping that they would give him a little somethin' somethin' in return.

Nothing doing. Even trade realignment will disappear when Trump does.

Trump's problem is that he never had a political faction holding any seats in Congress to drive his agenda. He just assumed the existing members would adopt his positions, which is pretty damn naive considering how he attacked and alienated them all throughout 2015-2016. Instead, Trump has steadily moved away from his own positions and adopted theirs, for his own political survival.

Trump's porous bollard fencing instead of the real wall he promised is simply the most public symbol of this, going back as it does to the George W. Bush administration.

The only radical realignment we have seen is the realignment of the radicals with their respective parties, and Election 2020 will be the same old, same old fight between them.

Those who won't realign get discarded.

This is the tyranny of the legislative. And the only way to remedy this is to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, the great mistake of 1951. Only the threat of a Trump or an Obama perpetually in the White House will restore the balance of power between the three branches of government and advance the interests of the people who vote for the president.

As things stand, the best we can hope for is a president desperately stacking the courts to increase his power in a tyranny of the judiciary, which is hardly the remedy intended by the founders and is unacceptable to Americans loyal to the constitution and the nation as founded. The three stooges of the law schools on display at the impeachment hearing yesterday are proof enough of that. 

Eisenhower would have called this a coup attempt against Trump by the military-industrial complex

Trump calls war on terrorism a battle between good and evil

Full transcript of remarks in Saudi Arabia here.

Gee, sounds just like Bush (and ISIS) and conservative talk radio is thrilled.

Typically, this rhetoric is used to justify treating the evil as less than human, which is what ISIS does, or sending American troops abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But we're 16 years into Afghanistan now, with no end in sight, and the monsters just keep reproducing themselves.

This is not to suggest moral equivalence, but only that the West continues to delegitimize the "Islamic" in Islamic State in order to keep the military-industrial complex busy.

The goal of war, rather, is supposed to be to end the enemy's ability to wage it. We haven't been serious about that, and I don't think Trump will be either.

Either end it, or quit it, but carrying on like this is bankrupting the country.

Enough. 

The Deep State: Eisenhower knew it as the military-industrial complex

The military leadership is shot through with liberal neocons bent on perpetual war to keep the warriors busy.

What interest does its intelligence network have in telling the truth to a civilian commander in chief about who did what with which to whom in Syria?

They all lied about WMD in Iraq, as surely as Obama & Co. lied to us about Obamacare.

Trump's just their latest patsy to keep the money flowing to the underlying businesses.

With "You Didn't Build That" Obama Revealed We're No Free Market Economy

Barack The Builder-Thief

Consider Sheldon Richman, here, emphasis added:

"What we have—and have had for a long time—is corporatism, an interventionist system shot through with government-granted privileges mostly for the well-connected–who tend to be rich businesspeople. This system is maintained in a variety of ways: through taxes, subsidies, cartelizing regulations, intellectual “property” protections, trade restrictions, government-bank collusion, the military-industrial complex, land close-offs, zoning, building codes, restrictions on workers, and more. As a result, people can get rich at the expense of the government’s victims. Even some who have prospered apparently by market means have actually done so through government intervention, such as transportation subsidies and eminent domain. Wealth can be transferred in many ways besides welfare and Medicaid, some of them quite subtle. Most transfers are upward."

Obama's flub in "you didn't build that" wasn't some supposed expression of disdain for free-market capitalism, but rather a too-open affirmation of the collusion which exists in America between government and business, a collusion redolent of the fascism of an earlier era.

The line was supposed to be, before it blew up in his face, a gentle reminder to his peeps that they owe their continued success to his stewardship of this system of corporatist largesse. 

In stating the obvious Obama has let the cat out of the bag and proven himself an unreliable leader for the game of charades we call the free market economy. He let his guard down and opened a window on this uncomfortable truth about America, that in economics we consider our advocates of free market capitalism analogous to the preachers of fundamentalist Christianity. It's a free country and that's all well and good, as long as you're not really serious.

Obama's mistake is that he said all that out loud. He can be replaced.

(image source)

Is SITE Monitoring Service Credible in Report of Al Qaeda Confirming Death of Osama?

There's at least one person who doesn't think so:

SITE is a US military-industrial complex front and has been caught red-handed releasing fake Al-Qaeda tapes on numerous occasions.

The SITE organization is nothing more than a contractor for the US government, receiving some $500,000 a year annually from Uncle Sam, the majority of which is paid for by US taxpayers. The group was founded by Rita Katz, the daughter of an executed Israeli spy. Katz has worked closely with the Department of Justice, Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Homeland Security.