Dec 11

Today’s News 11th December 2016

  • THE CIA MOVES TO INVALIDATE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS BY BLAMING RUSSIAN HACKING

    It’s happening. After careful analysis of all the media punditry and the ‘leaks’ coming out from the CIA, I can only conclude that there is a concerted effort taking place to invalidate the U.S. elections, in an effort to unseat Donald Trump. Last night the Washington Post reported a leak from inside the CIA, saying they had a report that showed evidence that Russia hacked the elections in order to elect Donald Trump. They’re being very specific about that point. Pay attention.

    Source: Reuters
    The CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help President-elect Donald Trump win the White House, and not just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

    Citing U.S. officials briefed on the matter, the Post said intelligence agencies had identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to WikiLeaks.

    The officials described the individuals as people known to the intelligence community who were part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and reduce Clinton’s chances of winning the election.

     

    “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” the Post quoted a senior U.S. official as saying. “That’s the consensus view.”

    The Post said the official had been briefed on an intelligence presentation made by the Central Intelligence Agency to key U.S. senators behind closed-doors last week.

    The CIA, in what the Post said was a secret assessment, cited a growing body of evidence from multiple sources. Briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, the Post quoted officials as saying on condition of anonymity.

    In October, the U.S. government formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election.

    President Barack Obama has said he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about consequences for the attacks. But Russian officials have denied all accusations of interference in the U.S. election.

    A CIA spokeswoman said the agency had no comment on the report.

    In response to the Washpo article, the Trump campaign issued the following statement.

    “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” Trump’s representatives said in a statement attributed to the transition team. “The election ended a long time ago … It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.'”

    Bob Baer, former CIA and current ‘Hunting Hitler’ shill, said in an interview today that if the evidence regarding Russia hacking the elections are true, then the only logical thing to do is to hold new elections.

     ‘If the evidence is there, I don’t see any other way than to vote again.’  

     

    Bear in mind, this is all in response to the Wikileaks revelations about the abject corruptness of both the DNC and the Hillary Clinton camp, via the Podesta emails. Instead of offering an explanation for their egregious actions, the elite cadre inside of the Clinton camp have instead gone on the offensive to blame the messenger. The media is running with this story with long strides, not only suggesting that Russia hacked the elections, but also saying Trump was — in fact — a ‘witting asset’ of Moscow. What’s next, an arrest order for Trump and his campaign staff for being covert Russian spies?

     ‘This nation was attacked by a cyber warfare operation. ‘

    Whatever happened to the smug certainty that the elections wouldn’t be rigged? I suppose what Obama meant was they wouldn’t be rigged had Hillary won, yes? Paul Joseph Watson offers some valuable incite, in regards to the naked hypocrisy of America’s ruling elite.

     

    Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com

  • "Hard-Core Clinton Fanatic" Manufactured "Viral Fake News" That MSNBC Used To Discredit Wikileaks

    Authored by Glenn Greenwald via The Intercept,

    The phrase “Fake News” has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

    One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that).

    Now we have an even more compelling example. Back in October, when WikiLeaks was releasing emails from the John Podesta archive, Clinton campaign officials and their media spokespeople adopted a strategy of outright lying to the public, claiming – with no basis whatsoever – that the emails were doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored. That lie – and that is what it was: a claim made with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for its truth – was most aggressively amplified by MSNBC personalities such as Joy Ann Reid and Malcolm Nance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, and Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald.

     

     

    That the emails in the Wikileaks archive were doctored or faked – and thus should be disregarded – was classic Fake News, spread not by Macedonian teenagers or Kremlin operatives but by established news outlets such as MSNBC, the Atlantic and Newsweek. And, by design, this Fake News spread like wildfire all over the internet, hungrily clicked and shared by tens of thousands of people eager to believe it was true. As a result of this deliberate disinformation campaign, anyone reporting on the contents of the emails was instantly met with claims that the documents in the archive had been proven fake.

    The most damaging such claim came from MSNBC’s intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance. As I documented on October 11, he tweeted what he – for some bizarre reason – labeled an “Official Warning.” It decreed: “ are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & not even professionally done.” That tweet was re-tweeted by more than 4,000 people. It was vested with added credibility by Clinton-supporting journalists like Reid and Frum (“expert to take seriously”).

    All of that, in turn, led to an article in something called “The Daily News Bin” with the headline: “MSNBC intelligence expert: WikiLeaks is releasing falsified emails not really from Hillary Clinton.” This classic fake news product – citing Nance and Reid among others – was shared more than 40,000 times on Facebook alone.

     

     

    From the start, it was obvious that it was this accusation from Clinton supporters – not the WikiLeaks documents – that was a complete fraud, perpetrated on the public as deliberate disinformation. With regard to the claim about the Podesta emails, now we know exactly who created it in the first instance: a hard-core Clinton fanatic.

    When Nance – MSNBC’s “intelligence analyst” – issued his “Official Warning,” he linked to a tweet that warned: “Please be skeptical of alleged . Trumpists are dirtying docs.” That tweet, in turn, linked to a tweet from an anonymous account calling itself “The Omnivore,” which had posted an obviously fake transcript purporting to be a Hillary Clinton speech to Goldman Sachs. Even though that fake document was never published by WikiLeaks, that was the entire basis for the MSNBC-inspired claim that some of the WikiLeaks documents were doctored.

    But the person who created that forged Goldman Sachs transcript was not a “Trumpist” at all; he was a devoted supporter of Hillary Clinton. In the Daily Beast, the person behind the anonymous “The Omnivore” account unmasks himself as “Marco Chacon,” a self-professed creator of “viral fake news” whose targets were Sanders and Trump supporters (he specialized in blatantly fake anti-Clinton frauds with the goal of tricking her opponents into citing them, so that they would be discredited). When he wasn’t posting fabricated news accounts designed to make Clintons’ opponents look bad, his account looked like any other standard pro-Clinton account: numerous negative items about Sanders and then Trump, with links to many Clinton-defending articles.

    In his Daily Beast article, published on November 21, Chacon describes how he manufactured the forged Goldman Sachs speech transcript. He says he did it prior to learning that the WikiLeaks releases of Podesta emails contained actual Clinton speech excerpts to Wall Street banks. But once he realized WikiLeaks had published actual Clinton transcripts, Chacon began trying to lure people he disliked – Clinton critics – into believing that his forged speeches were real, so that he could prove they were gullible and dumb.

    Sadly for Chacon, however, the people who ended up getting fooled by his Fake News items were the nation’s most prominent Clinton supporters, including supposed experts and journalists from MSNBC who used his obvious fakes to try to convince the world that the WikiLeaks archive had been compromised and thus should be ignored. That it was pro-Clinton journalists who spread his Fake News as real now horrifies even Chacon:

    The tweet went super-viral. It started an almost trending—but still going today—hashtag #bucketoflosers. A tweet declaring it a bad forgery was picked up by Malcolm Nance, an intelligence analyst for MSNBC among others, who tweeted to be wary of the WikiLeaks release. .

     

    That did not stop Nance, who with a firm intelligence background should have been able to easily spot the fake with “(chaos)” actually written in the side bar and “((makes air quotes))” written before the “bucket of losers” piece in the completely comical so-called transcript, from referencing the document and saying: “Official Warning: #PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done” . . . .

     

    At the end of the day, did this change anything? I don’t know. I think I inadvertently hurt WikiLeaks, which I’m not proud of—but I’m not too sorry about either. I suspect that some people came to realize that they were believing in fake things.

    That last sentence – that as a result of his fraud, “some people came to realize that they were believing in fake things” – is false, at least insofar as it applies to people like Eichenwald, Frum, Nance and Reid. Even though it was clear from the start to any rational and honest person that there was zero evidence that any of the WikiLeaks documents were doctored, and even though (as Chacon himself says) nobody minimally informed (let alone supposed “intelligence experts”) should have been fooled by his blatant Fake News, none of the journalists who lied to the public about these WikiLeaks documents have even once acknowledged what they did.

    Their Fake News tweets – warning people to view the WikiLeaks documents as fake – remain posted, with no subsequent retraction or acknowledgment of the falsehoods that they spread about the WikiLeaks archive. That includes MSNBC segments which spread this accusation.

    Indeed, not only should it have been blatantly obvious that Chacon’s anonymously posted document did not impugn the WikiLeaks archive, but also the slightest research would have revealed that the person who manufactured the forgery was a Clinton supporter, not a “Trumpist” or a Kremlin operative. Indeed, one of the Clinton-criticizing journalists who Chacon tried to trick, Michael Tracey, said exactly this at the time. But because his facts contradicted the MSNBC/Newsweek political agenda, they were ignored in favor of the lie that the WikiLeaks archive had been compromised and doctored:

     

     

    I will be shocked if any of them now acknowledge this even with Chacon’s confession. That’s because MSNBC has repeatedly proven that it tolerates Fake News and outright lies from its personalities as long as those lies are in service of the right candidate (when Democrats were smearing Jill Stein as a Kremlin stooge, Reid’s program aired Nance’s lie to MSNBC viewers that Stein had previously hosted her own show on RT: an utter fabrication that MSNBC, to this day, has never corrected or even acknowledged despite multiple requests from FAIR).

     

     

    Every day, literally, you can turn on MSNBC and hear various people so righteously lamenting the spread of “Fake News.” Yet MSNBC itself not only spreads Fake News but refuses to correct it when it is exposed. How do they have any credibility to denounce Fake News? They do not.

    That journalists and “experts” outright lied to the public this way in order to help their favorite candidate is obviously dangerous. This was most powerfully pointed out – ironically – by Marty Baron, Executive Editor of the Washington Post, who told The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg: “If you have a society where people can’t agree on basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?”

    Exactly: if you have prominent journalists telling the public to trust an anonymous group with a false McCarthyite blacklist, or telling it to ignore informative documents on the grounds that they are fake when there is zero reason to believe that they are fake, that is a direct threat to democracy. In the case of the Podesta emails, these lies were perpetrated by the very factions that have taken to most loudly victimizing themselves over the spread of Fake News.

    But the problem here goes way beyond mere hypocrisy. Complaints about Fake News are typically accompanied by calls for “solutions” that involve censorship and suppression, either by the government or tech giants such as Facebook. But until there is a clear definition of “Fake News,” and until it’s recognized that Fake News is being aggressively spread by the very people most loudly complaining about it, the dangers posed by these solutions will be at least as great as the problem itself.

  • Mapping The Top States For Resettling Refugees In 2016

    The Obama administration admitted nearly 85,000 refugees into the United States in fiscal year 2016, the highest number since 1999.  Moreover, as we noted back in September, Obama’s administration has laid the groundwork to increase that number even further in fiscal year 2017 to 110,000 (see “Hillbama Administration Plans To Admit At Least 110,000 Refugees In 2017“). 

    Of course, not every state is doing their “fair share” to house the massive influx of immigrants with Pew Research Center recently pointing out that the top ten states are taking in 54% of refugees.

    Infographic: The Top U.S. States For Refugee Resettlement In 2016 | Statista

     

    As Pew points notes, California, Texas and New York alone resettled 24% of incoming refugees while Nebraska took in the most on a per capita basis.

    California, Texas and New York resettled the most refugees in fiscal 2016 (which began on Oct. 1, 2015, and ended Sept. 30, 2016), together taking in 20,738 refugees, or about a quarter (24%) of the U.S. total. Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina, Washington, Pennsylvania and Illinois, which each received 3,000 or more refugees, rounded out the top 10 states by number of resettled refugees. Overall, 54% of refugees admitted to the U.S. in 2016 were resettled in one of these 10 states.

     

    At the other end of the spectrum, some states and the District of Columbia took in few or no refugees in fiscal 2016. Arkansas, the District of Columbia and Wyoming resettled fewer than 10 refugees each, while two states – Delaware and Hawaii – took in none.

     

    In fiscal 2016, Nebraska (76), North Dakota (71) and Idaho (69) resettled the most refugees per 100,000 residents. Other states like Vermont (62), Arizona (60) and Kentucky (54) far exceeded the U.S. national average of 26 refugees per 100,000 residents.

    Meanwhile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo was the top country of origin for refugees resettled in the U.S. in 2016 while Syria was a close second.

    The Democratic Republic of the Congo (16,370) was the top origin country among refugees resettled in 2016. Some 10% were resettled in Texas, 7% in Arizona and 6% in both New York and North Carolina.

     

    However, Syrian refugees – the second-largest origin group with 12,587 resettled in fiscal 2016 – have garnered more attention from state leaders, with 31 governors opposing this group’s resettlement in their states. Even so, resettlement patterns of Syrian refugees across the states are similar to the national average. California had the largest number (1,450) of resettled Syrian refugees in fiscal 2016, followed by Michigan (1,374) and Texas (912).

    And while the Obama administration has announced plans to admit even more refugees in 2017, we suspect president-elect Trump may have other ideas.

  • Trump Picks Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson As Secretary Of State

    In a move that is certain to infuriate those who see Trump as nothing more than a puppet of the Kremlin, moments ago NBC reported that Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil and late entrant into the SecState race after his first meeting with the president elect this past Tuesday at the Trump Tower, has been picked by Trump to serve as his next Secretary of State.

    As NBC adds, Tillerson met Saturday with Trump at Trump Tower in New York, the president-elect’s spokesperson confirmed.  The selection of Tillerson comes after Trump and his transition team spent weeks searching for someone to fill the post of the top U.S. diplomat. Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani were reportedly in the running. Giuliani said Friday he had taken his name out of consideration.

    The 64-year-old Texas oilman, whose friends describe as a staunch conservative, emerged as a Secretary of State contender only last week following a meeting with Trump, when it was speculated that he would consider the offer “due to his sense of patriotic duty and because he is set to retire from the company next year.” Tillerson’s appointment would introduce the potential for sticky conflicts of interest because of his financial stake in Exxon: he owns Exxon shares worth $151 million, according to recent securities filings.

    A quick biographical sketch of Tillerson courtesy of the WSJ:

    The son of a local Boy Scouts administrator, Tillerson was born in Wichita Falls, Texas. He attended the University of Texas, where he studied civil engineering, was a drummer in the Longhorn band and participated in a community service-oriented fraternity.

    He joined Exxon in 1975 and has spent his entire career at the company.

    For most of his adult life, he has also been closely involved with the Boy Scouts of America, even occasionally incorporating the Scout Law and Scout Oath into his speeches.  Mr. Tillerson played an instrumental role in leading the organization to change its policy to allow gay youth to participate in 2013, Mr. Hamre said. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates subsequently moved to lift the organization’s ban on gay adult leaders as Boy Scouts president in 2015.  “Most of the reason that organizations fail at change is pretty simple: People don’t understand why,” Mr. Tillerson said in a speech after the 2013 decision, urging leaders to communicate about the policy to help make it successful. “We’re going to serve kids and make the leaders of tomorrow.”

    * * *

    However it is not his Boy Scout exploits that will be the key talking point for pundits in the coming days, but rather his close relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

    According to the WSJ, few U.S. citizens are closer to Mr. Putin than Mr. Tillerson,  a recipient of Russia’s Order of Friendship, bestowed by the president…

    … who has known Putin since he represented Exxon’s interests in Russia during the regime of Boris Yeltsin.

    “He has had more interactive time with Vladimir Putin than probably any other American with the exception of Henry Kissinger,” said John Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary during the Clinton administration and president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank where Mr. Tillerson is a board member.

    Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson with Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, at
    a signing ceremony in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in August 2011.

    In 2011, Mr. Tillerson struck a deal giving Exxon access to prized Arctic resources in Russia as well as allowing Russia’s state oil company, OAO Rosneft, to invest in Exxon concessions all over the world. The following year, the Kremlin bestowed the country’s Order of Friendship decoration on Mr. Tillerson.

    The deal would have been transformative for Exxon. Mr. Putin at the time called it one of the most important involving Russia and the U.S., forecasting that the partnership could eventually spend $500 billion. But it was subsequently blocked by sanctions on Russia that the U.S. and its allies imposed two years ago after the country’s invasion of Crimea and conflicts with Ukraine.

    Tillerson spoke against the sanctions at the company’s annual meeting in 2014. “We always encourage the people who are making those decisions to consider the very broad collateral damage of who are they really harming with sanctions,” he said.

    As such, many have speculated that under his regime, the State Department may quietly drop any existing sactions against Russia.

    * * *

    Then there is the thorny issue of potential conflicts of interest, and his massive holdings of Exxon stock.

    One of the first issues Tillerson would have to resolve as secretary of state would be his holdings of Exxon shares, many of which aren’t scheduled to vest for almost a decade. The value of those shares could go up if the sanctions on Russia were lifted. 

    The shares would likely have to be sold under State Department ethics rules, Chase Untermeyer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Qatar, said in an interview. “He could not erase his strong relationship with a particular country,” Mr. Untermeyer said. “The best protection from a conflict of interest is transparency.”

    Tillerson will sell his $150+ million in XOM shares tax free, courtesy of the same tax break that was introduced in 1989 under the administration of President George H.W. Bush, which allowed Hank Paulson, Colin Powell and plenty of other public servants to dispose of their equity holdings without paying taxes: to get the tax relief, it must be deemed “reasonably necessary” for a public official to divest his shares, or a congressional committee must require the asset sale, according to section 1043 of the tax code, something which is virtually assured in the case of Tillerson.

    * * *

    Finally, the environmentalists will certainly be displeased with Trump’s choice, even thought Tillerson helped shift Exxon’s response to climate change when he took over as CEO in 2006. He embraced a carbon tax as the best potential policy solution and has said climate change is a global problem that warrants action. That was a break from his predecessor, Lee Raymond.

    Still, Mr. Tillerson is a polarizing figure among Democrats and environmental activists. They have accused Exxon of sowing doubt about the impacts of climate change during Mr. Raymond’s tenure and say Mr. Tillerson hasn’t done enough to disclose the future impact of climate-change regulations on the company’s ability to get oil out of the ground.

    “This is certainly a good way to make clear exactly who’ll be running the government in a Trump administration—just cut out the middleman and hand it directly to the fossil-fuel industry,” said Bill McKibben, the environmental activist and founder of 350.org.

     

    Exxon has disputed the criticism and accused activists and Democratic attorneys general of conspiring against the company.

     

    The son of a local Boy Scouts administrator, Mr. Tillerson was born in Wichita Falls, Texas. He attended the University of Texas, where he studied civil engineering, was a drummer in the Longhorn band and participated in a community service-oriented fraternity.

     

    As secretary of state, Tillerson would be fourth in line to the presidency.

    No matter how US diplomacy plays out under Tillerson, however, one thing is certain: at least Mitt Romney will not be setting US foreign policy for the next four years. This particular ritual humiliation has now been duly completed…

    Finally, as NBC also adds, Tillerson’s deputy secretary of state for day-to-day management of the department will be former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

    To summarize: a cabinet run by Wall Street and big oil (with a neocon backstop), and a handful of veteran generals thrown in. The writing should be on the wall as to what comes next.

  • Clinton Aides "Soul Crushed" By Speculation Of Russian Election "Interference"

    As the debacle of the too-secret-to-show-you fantasy CIA report ‘proving’ Russia’s interference with the US election becomes the new news cycle narrative, Hillary Clinton staffers are reportedly “soul crushed” by these new ‘facts’.

    Following her screaming match with Trump campaign manager KellyAnne Conway last week, Clinton campaign manager Jennifer Plamieri tweeted this morning about her devastation at the ‘news’ of Russian interefence…

    “We shouted about this as loud as we could,” added former Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin in another tweet. “Hardly anyone listened.”

    As The Hill reports, other former staffers took aim at Trump, whose transition team blasted the CIA in a statement Friday night following the report, saying, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

    And so it is that ‘they’ lost the election due to Russian interference and the biased electoral college, and not in any way due to running ‘the most flawed candidate ever’ and promising more of the same?

  • Keep The Federal Courts Out Of The Electoral College

    Submitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    The United States was originally constructed in such a way that the states themselves would dominate the electoral process. Historically, states have determined who can vote, when they vote, and how they vote. Through this power states have also been given limited de facto power of determining citizenship.

    Over time, the federal courts have increasingly seized local prerogatives in this matter, but even today, states and counties are the primary government organizations that conduct elections, collect the votes, print the ballots, and determine the winners. 

    This is appropriate, of course, since the United States was intended to function on a confederation model in which it would be up to the states to decide for themselves how they would send representatives to Congress. There is no such thing as a "national election" in the United States because there wasn't supposed to be a single nation. 

    Unfortunately, in the wake of the 2016 election, opponents of the election's outcome have been petitioning the Supreme Court to step in and take even more power away from the states in deciding how presidents are selected through the Electoral College. Specifically, two electors in Colorado are suing in federal court to overturn a state law that requires members of the electoral college to support the winner of the statewide vote: 

    The two electors, Polly Baca and Robert Nemanich, are suing to overturn a Colorado law that requires them to support the winner of their statewide popular vote — Hillary Clinton — during the general election last month.

    In this case, the two electors who are suing are pro-Clinton, and Clinton won the statewide vote in Colorado. So, as electors, they'll be voting for the candidate they supported in the general election anyway. But, they're hoping their lawsuit will lead to the nullification of state laws over the electoral college, which could free up electors in other states. Currently, in addition to Colorado, 28 states and the District of Columbia have adopted laws mandating the electors vote for the winner of the statewide vote. Failure to comply with these mandates, however, generally bring only a fine. 

    This follows a mandate from the current US Constitution which states in Article II, Section 1 that: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress."

    In other words, the text is explicit that the state legislature has nearly untrammeled control over how electors are appointed.

    Thus, by extension, the state legislature could also be entitled to force electors to legally pledge to support the winner of the statewide vote. 

    This method would also be reminiscent of methods used prior to the 17th Amendment when members of the legislature were pledged to appoint to the US Senate the winners of statewide votes. 

    Of course, the method that states use to appoint or bind electors is beside the point. States ought to be free to appoint, manage, remove, or regulate electors totally outside any interference from federal courts, federal regulators, or federal policymakers of any kind. If fifty states employ fifty different methods of assigning electoral votes, this would merely reflect the diversity of the American states. 

    Were the federal courts to step in and begin regulating states on how they manage their electoral college votes, it would be a significant swing in favor of federal centralization and greater federal power. 

    The Current System Favors the Democrats 

    As a final note, we might also look at how the current system of binding electors to the statewide vote in each state actually favors the Democrats. The fact that the state legislatures so often defer to the winner of the statewide vote limits legislative power, and puts electoral votes beyond the reach of the legislature once the votes are counted. This helps the Democrats in a period where the Republicans have an overwhelming advantage at the state-government level. 

    For example, given current party control of state government, were legislatures to reserve to themselves more active control over the electoral college, Republicans would be guaranteed victory in at least  23 states where the GOP has a so-called trifecta — control over all houses of the legislature and the governor's office. This means the GOP would get 248 out of the necessary 270 electoral votes right off the bat. The Democrats by this measure would win 7 states for a total of 86 electoral votes.  Once we add in other states where the GOP controls the legislature but not the governor's office, the GOP easily wins the necessary electoral votes. 

    This advantage will be even greater once the GOP's additional state-level gains in the 2016 election take effect next year. Post-2016, the GOP will have a trifecta in 24 states with 255 electoral votes. The Democrats will have a trifecta in 6 states with 83 electoral votes.

  • Nate Silver "Calculates" Hillary Would Win If Not For Comey, Russia As Democrats Come Swinging

    In the immediate aftermath of last night’s WaPo article revealing a “secret” CIA assessment according to which Russia (without a shred of evidence) helped Trump win the election, we explained – in five points – how this was nothing short of a “soft coup” attempt by leaders of the US Intel community and Obama administration to influence the Electoral College vote. To wit:

    1. Announce “consensus” (not unanimous) “conclusion” based in circumstantial evidence now, before the Electoral College vote, then write a report with actual details due by Jan 20.
    2. Put a proven liar in charge of writing the report on Russian hacking.
    3. Fail to mention that not one of the leaked DNC or Podesta emails has been shown to be inauthentic. So the supposed Russian hacking simply revealed truth about Hillary, DNC, and MSM collusion and corruption.
    4. Fail to mention that if hacking was done by or for US government to stop Hillary, blaming the Russians would be the most likely disinformation used by US agencies.
    5. Expect every pro-Hillary lapdog journalist – which is virtually all of them – in America will hyperventilate about this latest fact-free, anti-Trump political stunt for the next nine days.

    Shortly thereafter, the prominent beacon of liberal thought, Paul Krugman, confirmed that this agenda was quickly taking shape when he tweeted that “we’ll have a president who lost the pop vote by 2.1%, got in thanks to FBI and Putin. And supporters will demand respect. Um, no.”

    He continued: “Also note CIA held findings until after election; FBI splashed its story — which turned out to be LITERALLY nothing — 10 days before”, and concluded furiously that “The big problem, for me at least, it how to keep the rage on a simmer, rather than boiling over. The path to justice will be long 9:24 AM – 10 Dec 2016.”

    That was the initial salvo. It was to be followed promptly by many other liberal voices who have not only concluded that if it not for Russia, Trump would not win, but that without the involvement of FBI director Comey and Vladimir Putin, Hillary would have won the key swing states, and thus the presidency. Case in point, statistician Nate Silver who, together with all other experts, called the election drastically wrong, and is now seeking scapegoats. He appears to have found them.

    And so, with Krugman laying out the ideological strawman, and “statistical genius” Nate Silver validating the fabricated strawman by calculating the odds of Hillary’s victory if it wasn’t for the FBI and evil Russian government hackers, the Democrats have come out swinging, with another liberal commentator, Keith Olberman, laying out the party line that “Priority now is preventing swearing in of Trump (R-Russia). From 9/28: “Is @realDonaldTrump Loyal To This Country?”…

     

    …followed the the punchline: getting the Electoral College to “realize” that Clinton would be the winner, if only the unproven intervention of Putin (and his lapdog, FBI diretor Comey) had not happened.

    From Politico:

    A Democratic congressman is suggesting that members of the Electoral College should be able to consider Russian interference in the presidential election — and whether it influenced the outcome — when deciding how to cast their vote.

     

    Cicilline appears to be the first member of Congress and the highest-ranking elected official in the country to endorse the notion that electors aren’t simply rubber stamps for their states’ popular vote. Earlier Saturday, he retweeted a Rhode Island-based national security expert who argued that the intelligence community “must brief electoral college about Russia before vote.”

     

    “To the extent that foreign interference in the United States presidential elections may have influenced the final result, I believe the electors have the right to consider that,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said in a statement to POLITICO on Saturday.

     

    Cicilline’s comments come amid the explosive determination by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia interfered in the presidential election in support of Donald Trump. Trump’s transition team has forcefully denied the conclusion.

     

    “EC exists to protect republic from candidate under foreign influence,” the expert, Salve Regina University researcher Jim Ludes, wrote.

     

    Cicilline stopped short of endorsing that sentiment in his statement to POLITICO. But in a second tweet on Saturday, he urged the White House to publicize information surrounding the CIA’s assessment that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump. “Before the Electoral College votes,” he added.

    If Trump isn’t profusely nervous at this very moment – when everyone from the Obama administration, to US intel, to every living, breathing liberal, to the “unbiased” press – will be screaming that Trump should not get the Dec. 19 EC vote and effectively engaging in a “soft coup”, then he is not paying attention.

  • Officials Admit Radioactive Fish Off U.S. West Coast Have "Disturbing Fingerprint Of Fukushima"

    Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

    The entire Pacific Coast of the United States, Canada and Mexico has been contaminated with radioactive particles from Fukushima.

    And finally, it is being officially acknowledged. This is really happening…

    It is a stark reminder that the effects from Fukushima radiation continually spilling into the ocean have not been abated. The site continues to leak highly toxic radioactive material to this day. Nothing has stopped.

    via the Associated Press / CBS News:

    “Radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster detected on Oregon shores”

     

    • • • • •

     

    Seaborne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster has been detected on Oregon shores, researchers say.

     

    Seawater samples from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach indicate radiation from the nuclear disaster but at extremely low levels not harmful to humans or the environment.

    Of course, they claim that it is “safe” because the levels are low. USA Today emphasized the ridiculously minuscule dose of radiation that say, a swimmer would get at the beach – while admitted for the first time that those warning about the spreading radiation were, in fact, correct. exposure:

    “Should we be worried about Fukushima radiation?”

     

    • • • • •

     

    The levels are very low and shouldn’t harm people eating fish from the West Coast or swimming in the ocean, according to Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

     

    […]

     

    Cesium-134, the so-called fingerprint of Fukushima, was measured in seawater samples taken from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in Oregon, according to researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

    Of course, the idea that radiation was reaching California and the West Coast, and that fish were being contaminated by Fukushima radiation from thousands of miles across the Pacific was considered – yep – “fake news” at the time. The alarmist cries of conspiracy theorists and hypochondriacs were just non-sense, jibberish, delusions and paranoia. Typical hyperbolic non-sense from people caught up in an echo chamber.

    But now, it is an admitted fact that Fukushima radiation is impacting U.S. shores.

    Sorry to ignore and deride your claims, above group of deplorables. Turns out you were right, or at least on to something.

    The source in this story, as well as most of the other “big” stories on Fukushima over the past several years, is Ken Buesseler, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

    He has been a consistent and authoritative voice on Fukushima, sharply criticizing the government role in ignoring the problem, and shedding light on the vast ripple that the nuclear disaster has caused in the biggest of ponds.

    Regardless, the linear thinking about “low levels” ignore the mounting scientific evidence about cumulative exposure to radioactive isotopes and other toxins and free radicals.

    What’s interesting is how much different the same Ken Buesseler is portrayed in different mainstream media accounts… where sometimes only half of the message gets through.

    While the The New Yorker pointed out the complexity of dealing with long-term health issues that could be connected to radiation, via Ken Beusseler’s comments from 2015:

    “Is Radioactive Water Worth Worrying About?”

     

    …

     

    Whether any of this actually matters depends on whom you ask. “There’s a nuclear-power side that’s very quick to be dismissive and say, ‘Don’t worry your pretty little heads, you’re not in harm’s way,’ “ Ken Buesseler, a marine-chemistry researcher at Woods Hole and the organizer of the sampling initiative, told me. “The flip side are the people screaming, you know, ‘Stay out of the Pacific, don’t swim in Monterey, I’m going to move, tell your friends, this is a catastrophe!’ “ At the levels detected in Ucluelet, Buesseler has calculated, you’d need to swim six hours a day for a thousand years to get the radiation equivalent of a dental X-ray.

     

    The full impact of nuclear fallout, however, depends on more than becquerels, which merely count the number of times per second that an unstable atom somewhere in the sample fires off a particle. These particles, and the differing amounts of energy with which they are ejected, have a wide range of effects on the body. We process cesium like an electrolyte, which means that it is diffused throughout the body and eventually excreted in urine. Half of the amount that is ingested is lost within a few months, which limits exposure.

     

    By contrast, strontium-90, another common component of nuclear waste, is a calcium-like “bone seeker” that becomes concentrated in the skeleton and teeth. Since it stays there for years rather than months, even relatively low doses increase the risk of conditions such as bone cancer and leukemia. From a human health perspective, Buesseler sees a potential strontium leak as far more worrying than a little cesium.

    So, as far as nuclear waste goes, cesium-134 is not as bad as strontium-90, but that doesn’t mean there are no harmful effects, and it doesn’t mean that strontium isotopes aren’t affecting the Pacific and West Coast as well – because it has been detected there, and more can be expected to be found:

    screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-8-17-09-pm

    The biomagnification of the food chain – as low levels of radiation build up in lower life forms and in turn become consumed (and often concentrated) by higher life forms – will increase human exposure in ways that simple measures for exposure time simply do not account for. Its effects will be masked, but not impotent.

    What happens to man and the environment when he is exposed to low levels of radiation over the decades and many years that make up his life? What about its impact on DNA through epigenetics? science now knows that gene expression is changed when it is exposed to dangerous materials in the body.

    When blue fin tuna that migrate from Japan to the West Coast were found to contain radioactive particles, again, via Ken Buesseler, the mainstream media downplayed the risks, while alternative media sources sounded the alarm – something that shouldn’t be happening is:

    screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-7-24-53-pm

    While the facts in the report remain the same, Forbes, among other mainstream outlets, downplayed the perception of the problem, and essentially giving credence to that idea that there isn’t a problem at all:

    screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-7-25-42-pm

    Forbes even published this misleading ‘appeal to conservation’:

    screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-8-34-10-pm

    And don’t forget Ann Coulter’s claim that radiation is good for you, too.

    It wasn’t until 2016 – a full five years after the meltdown – that Japanese officials, and in turn outlets like CBS News, admitted that there was indeed a cover-up, and a concerted effort not to use ‘branding’ and ‘perception’ words like “meltdown”… even though one was underway:

    screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-8-36-04-pm

     

    Latent diseases and disorders have a way of subtly cropping up, creating a silent genocide of worn down people suffering from chronic disease and inflammation that gives way to cancers, heart and brain diseases, autoimmune disorders and the like.

    That is the biggest risk that Fukushima still poses today.

    Ignored since just after it happened in 2011, the authorities have FINALLY officially acknowledged what they dared not admit since the cover-up began in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the nuclear power plant and began the long, slow poisoning of the Pacific Ocean, and all the life that is sustained from it.

    This is a horror, and the mainstream media as it is, with your interests above all others, has assured you that this ongoing disaster is, nonetheless, perfectly safe. Everything is fine, back to your regularly scheduled program….

    screen-shot-2016-12-09-at-8-35-42-pm

     

  • City Of Chicago Working Around Clock To Clear 18 Inches Of Bullet Casings From Streets

    Fact or Fiction?

    With cartridge accumulations reaching two feet or more in some areas, experts say Chicago is on track for the highest annual ammunition-depth total on record.


     

    Promising that every effort would be made to limit the impact on residents’ day-to-day lives, Chicago officials announced Wednesday that a fleet of plows was working around the clock to clear more than 18 inches of fresh bullet casings that had blanketed the metropolitan area overnight.

     

    Sources at the city’s Department of Streets and Sanitation confirmed that over 250 ammunition-removal vehicles had been deployed to deal with the knee-deep layer of spent cartridges, which have been steadily accumulating on Chicago’s streets, alleys, and pedestrian walkways since the previous evening.

     

    “Our crews have been out there all night trying to make our roadways passable, but given how quickly the handgun and semi-automatic shells have piled up, it’s going to take some time,” DSS commissioner Charles L. Williams told reporters, thanking the public for its patience while crews made their way across the stricken municipality. “We’re making good headway, but as you can imagine, it’s not an easy job, especially with casings continuing to fall throughout the city.”

     

    “So unless you have an emergency, we’re urging all citizens to stay put for the time being,” he added. “Right now, it’s just not safe to be out in such treacherous conditions.”

     

    Williams stated that as casing levels surpassed 12 inches, scores of extra workers from outside the city were called in to help keep pace with the buildup. In addition, numerous dump truck crews have reportedly been tasked with carting off entire trailers full of cartridges from the hardest-hit areas and depositing them in nearby landfills before circling back to pick up more.

     

    According to sources, by the morning rush hour, over 300 public and private schools in the Chicago area had been either closed or delayed due to concerns over the large amounts of ammunition covering the city. Citing increased hazards, officials further advised residents to stay off back streets and avoid venturing out at night.

     

    “Man, it’s brutal out there,” said Paul Bergeron, 34, a resident of the Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, showing reporters where plows had piled up over nine feet of empty casings in the parking lot of the grocery store across from his apartment. “I ran out to Walgreens, and on my way back, I nearly took a spill trudging through all the .40-caliber shells—I just wanted to get home as quickly as possible.”

     

    “Growing up in Kansas, I never saw anything nearly like this, but it is what it is,” he continued. “When you’re living here, you learn to deal with the bullets and adjust your life accordingly.”

     

    Some locals, however, have complained that the areas receiving priority attention from the city’s plows were not consistent with those that had been most severely affected. In Chicago’s western and southern neighborhoods, for example, eyewitnesses reported that cartridges had risen as high as some first-floor windows, making it difficult for the occupants to even open their front doors.

     

    “The plows always seem to get to the rich neighborhoods first, that’s for sure,” said Gloria Hawkins, 53, a lifelong resident of the South Side community of Auburn Gresham. “Down here, you have no choice but to go out there into the ammo and shovel your car out yourself. It can be pretty frustrating when things are really bad out, because by the time you finish clearing the walk in front of your house, there’s already an inch or two of fresh bullet casings piling up where you started.”

     

    “But we’ll get through it, just like we always do,” Hawkins continued. “This city is very much used to this sort of thing.”

    Source: The Onion

Digest powered by RSS Digest