Jan 25

Today’s News 25th January 2017

  • Talk Radio Host, Dr. Michael Savage, Goes on Epic Rant Over DNC Candidate Sally Boynton Brown and Anti-White Democrats

    In response to  poor Sally Boynton Brown’s anti-white rhetoric, who is vying for leadership of the DNC by promising to shut her fellow white people down, Dr. Michael Savage offered poignant commentary — hearkening back to when Amy Biehl was killed by S. African retrogrades —  bridging the two anti-white women together by describing them as being afflicted by an acute mental malady — bordering on self-immolation.

    Listen to the clip. I promise you it’s worth your time.

    As a party trying to govern all Americans, one has to theorize the democrats are merely pandering to demographic trends — hoping to solidify their standing with latinos and black Americans — by casting hideous aspersions and division in white communities — attempting to marginalize them — in an effort to secure long term power over the American economy and military apparatus.

    This is purposeful, deceitful and hateful policies — directed by them, employing identity politics and fomenting discord in people from an early age — using Hollywood and media as channels to direct their propaganda, so that they could profit from it when the scales tip in favor of their voting block.

     

    Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com

  • Has The American Dream Become The American Nightmare?

    Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Most Germans, so far as I could see, did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work were being regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation … On the whole, people did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the contrary, they appeared to support it with genuine enthusiasm.”

     

    -William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years 1930-40

    For too long now, the American people have allowed themselves to be persuaded that the government’s job is to take care of us: to feed us, clothe us, house us, educate us, raise our children, heal our infirmities, manage our finances, protect us from our enemies, guard us against all dangers (real and imaginary), and provide for our every need.

    Where Americans go wrong is in failing to recognize that there’s always a catch to such devil’s bargains purportedly carried out for the good of all society.

    You want free education for your children? The government can take care of it. In exchange for free public schools, however, your children will be molded and indoctrinated into compliant, obedient citizens who reflect the government’s values rather than your own.

    You want free health care? The government can take care of that, too. In exchange, your medical decisions—how you live and die—will ultimately be determined by corporations to whom you are little more than a line item impacting their profit and loss margins.

    You want to be insulated from all things that might cause offense? That’s not a problem for the government. Its thought police will use hate crime laws to criminalize speech, thought and actions that may be politically incorrect.

    You want a guarantee of safety? Sure, but your local police will also have to be militarized and trained in battlefield tactics, your communities and communications will be subjected to round-the-clock surveillance, and you—the citizenry—will be treated as suspects and enemy combatants.

    You want to root out domestic extremism and terrorism? That’s just fine. But in the process of identifying and targeting terrorists, the government will have the power to label anyone who disagrees with its policies as an extremist/terrorist and subject them to indefinite detentions.

    Are you starting to get the picture?

    This is the terrible price—the loss of our freedoms and the enslavement of future generations—that must eventually be paid for the goods and services rendered by a government whose priorities are the acquisition of ever-more power, control and money.

    As the old adage warns: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”

    Unfortunately, we’ve been on the receiving end of the government’s taxpayer-funded handouts—and its deceptively well-intended dictates—for so long that many Americans have forgotten what it is to think for themselves, provide for themselves, and govern themselves.

    Indeed, this age of entitlement is a far cry from the kind of constitutional republic America’s founders envisioned.

    Gone is the proud, independent-minded, pioneering spirit of early Americans like my parents who rejected what they called “hand-outs,” worked hard for whatever they had, protected their homes and families, and believed the government’s job was to govern based on the consent of the governed and not dictate.

    Contrast those fiercely-independent, early Americans who took to heart James Madison’s admonition to distrust all those in power with today’s citizens who not only expect the government to care for their needs but have blindly entrusted the government with vast, growing powers.

    By giving the government the green light to act in loco parentis and treat the citizenry as children in need of caretakers, “we the people” have allowed ourselves to be demoted and infantilized, reduced from knowledgeable, independent-minded, capable masters of a republic to wayward, undisciplined, dependent, vulnerable children incapable of caring for ourselves.

    It’s time to grow up.

    Incredibly, despite the fact that we allowed the government to become all-knowing, all-powerful and all-mighty in the mistaken belief that it would make our lives safer, easier and more affluent, we’re still shocked when that power and might is used against us.

    It’s time to stop being so gullible and so trusting.

    Even when the headlines blare out the news about SWAT team raids gone awry, police shootings of unarmed citizens, roadside cavity searches of young women, children being shackled and tasered, and Americans jailed for profit in private prisons, we still somehow maintain our state of denial until suddenly we’re the ones in the firing line being treated like suspects and criminals, having our skulls cracked, our doors smashed, our pets shot, our children terrorized, and our loved ones jailed for non-offenses.

    It’s time to remove those rose-colored, partisan-tinted glasses and wake up to the fact that our nation of sheep has given rise to a government of wolves.

    Even though, deep down, we have suspected that the system is run by an elite who views the citizenry as little more than cattle destined for the slaughterhouse, we’re still shocked to find ourselves treated like slaves and economic units.

    How could we not have seen it coming?

    How long has the writing been on the wall?

    How could we have been so blind, deaf and dumb to the warnings all around us?

    Unfortunately, it happens this way in every age, in every place where freedom falls and tyranny flourishes.

    As Aldous Huxley recognized in his foreword to Brave New World: “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”

    This is how the seeds of authoritarianism are planted and watered and cultivated into aggressive, invasive growths that can quickly dominate an environment.

    Remember, tyrants don’t always come to power in a show of force. Often, they sweet-talk their way to absolute power, buoyed along by a wave of populist demand for someone to save the country from economic, military and political crises.

    As historian Jim Powell writes for Forbes:

    Hitler didn’t take over a small government with an effective separation of enumerated, delegated and limited powers.  He took over a large welfare state… He dealt with unemployment by introducing forced labor for both men and women.  Government  control of the economy made it virtually impossible for anyone to seriously threaten his regime. Hitler added secret police, death camps and another war machine. The German educational system, which had inspired so many American progressives, played a major role in all this… the government gained complete control of schools and universities, and their top priority was teaching obedience. The professorial elite promoted collectivism.  The highest calling was working for the government.

    It can easily happen here.

    In fact, the early signs of this downshift are all around us if you only know where to look.

    You can smell it in the air: there’s danger coming. A recent New Yorker article reveals the lengths some of the wealthiest in America are going to in order to survive an apocalyptic breakdown of society: isolated refuges, bunkers, gas masks, generators, solar panels, ammunition, etc.

    You can see it in the changes taking place all around you: the government is preparing for something ominous. For example, the Pentagon is using a dystopian training video to prepare special forces to deal with the urban challenges of megacities: criminal networks, illicit economies, decentralized syndicates of crime, substandard infrastructure, religious and ethnic tensions, impoverishment, economic inequality, protesters, slums, open landfills, over-burdened sewers, and a “growing mass of unemployed.”

    You can hear it in the news coming out of the independent media: the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches have already weakened our long-established bulwarks against tyranny by their constant undermining of the Constitution and the president’s amassing of imperial power.

    We are no longer a constitutional republic.

    The American dream is turning into a living nightmare.

    We are fast moving towards full-blown fascism.

    So what’s the answer?

    The powers that be can—and will—continue to distract us with electronic gadgets and entertainment news, they can seduce us with promises they have no intention of keeping, they can drug us with politics packaged to resemble religion, and they can use the schools to breed a populace of compliant slaves.

    In the end, however, the choice of whether to keep drinking the Kool-Aid or reject the false prophets and promises of the police state—a.k.a. fascism or totalitarianism or tyranny—rests with “we the people.”

    After all, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it was “we the people” who struck this devil’s bargain in the first place, trading our liberties for dubious promises of prosperity, security and advancement.

    Through our inaction, our apathy and our unwillingness to do the hard work of holding the government accountable, perhaps “we the people” have been the greatest menace to freedom.

    Perhaps all of this is our fault.

    My parents’ advice was that if you made a mess, you had to clean it up.

    No one else is going to clean this mess up for us, certainly not anyone on the government’s payroll.

    As Jim Powell rightly concludes: “Ultimately, liberty can be protected only if people care enough to fight for it, because everywhere governments push for more power, and they never give it up willingly.”

    So let’s stop buying into the fairytale that politicians are saviors, capable of fixing what’s wrong with our communities and our lives.

    Let’s stop expecting the government to solve all our problems.

    Stop playing the partisan game that paints anyone not of your political persuasion as evil.

    Stop defending the insanity of an immoral system of government that sees nothing wrong with bombing innocent civilians, jailing innocent citizens, and treating human beings as little more than cattle.

    Stop validating a system of laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

    While you’re at it, start taking responsibility for your lives—and your freedoms—again. And maybe, just maybe, there will be some hope for tomorrow.

  • Malls Owners Rush For The Exits As Mall-Backed CMBS Defaults Soar

    Last week we wrote about the epic collapse of the Galleria Mall at Pittsburgh Mills which sold for $100 after once being appraised for $190 million shortly after being opened in 2005 (see “Pittsburgh Mall Once Worth $190 Million Sells For $100“).  Unfortunately for mall owners, while the Pittsburgh Mills Galleria is an extreme example, crashing mall valuations are hardly an anomaly these days.  In fact, just a few weeks ago Commercial Real Estate Direct wrote about the Foothills Mall in Tuscon, Arizona which was valued at $115mm in 2006 and backs a $75mm CMBS loan but recently appraised for just $18mm…or just a slight 75% loss for lenders.

    As pointed out by the Wall Street Journal earlier today, mall CMBS defaults are up all across the country with liquidations up 11% YoY.

    In the period from January to November 2016, 314 loans secured by retail property were liquidated, up 11% from the same period a year earlier, according to data from Morningstar Credit Ratings.

     

    “We’re seeing a boatload of these kinds of properties coming to market,” said James Hull, managing principal of Augusta, Ga.-based Hull Property Group, which purchased five malls from foreclosure sales in 2016. “There have been some draconian losses for the enclosed mall business.”

    Malls

     

    And while we’re frequently reminded of the stunning “Obama recovery” by the mainstream media, retailers seem to represent the one ‘tiny segment’ of the U.S. economy that failed to participate in that recovery as evidenced by the soaring delinquency rates of loans backing retail properties.

    Despite a strengthening economy in 2016, the delinquency rate for loans backing retail property rose by 0.6 percentage point last year to 5.76%, according to Trepp LLC, a real-estate data service. Special servicers, which deal with troubled commercial mortgage securities, managed $3.1 billion worth of mall-backed loans last year, up from $2.9 billion in 2015, according to Trepp.

     

    This year is off to a shaky start. Earlier this month, Sears said it would close 150 stores, and Macy’s gave more details of a plan to close 100 stores.

     

    Limited Stores Co. said it plans to close all 250 stores and filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week.

    Meanwhile, as Barclays’ U.S. REIT team points out, the key question for mall owners in 2017 isn’t whether rent concessions will be granted to tenants, but rather, just how deep the cuts will have to be in order to maintain occupancy.

    A key topic going forward will be the extent of rent concessions provided in order for malls to maintain occupancy.  We think rent concessions could accelerate in 2017 as retailers continue to prune their store bases and at the margin, restaurant openings slow.  Many malls backfilled space in recent years with non-apparel offerings, like restaurants – which increase mall traffic, without cannibalizing sales.

     

    Overall, we expect mall REITs to issue cautious outlooks for 2017, with a wait and see approach to the year.  This will be against the backdrop of many retailers also reporting their holiday results and 2017 guidance, which are likely to be conservative.  We believe both these factors will contribute to negative investor sentiment.

    Alas, while mega malls were once the destination of choice for America’s misunderstood youth, we fear that they’re bound to suffer the same fate as the big hair, hoop earrings and creepy mustaches that once frequented their food courts in the 80s.

    Malls

  • "Frightened" Democrats Propose Bill To Limit Trump's Ability To Launch A Nuclear Strike

    “Frightened” Democrat lawmakers introduced a bill Tuesday that would prevent the president from launching a nuclear first strike without a congressional declaration of war. The bill – proposed by Rep. Ted W. Lieu and Sen. Edward J. Markey – follows through on a policy that was long debated – but never seriously pursued – during the Obama administration.

    As FP reports, this isn’t the first mention of such legislation – the idea of it has been mentioned on and off for years, advocated by groups such as the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. At a January event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said he is “confident we can deter and defend ourselves and our allies against non-nuclear threats through other means,” adding that he “strongly believes” that “deterring and if necessary retaliating against a nuclear attack should be the sole purpose for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”

    But now the idea is anything but academic as the bill overtly questions President Trump’s judgment, with the lawmakers saying in a joint release:

    “the crucial issue of nuclear ‘first use’ is more urgent than ever now that President Donald Trump has the power to launch a nuclear war at a moment’s notice.”

    Congresman Ted Lieu, who has a paper sign reading, “Alternative Fact Free Zone” outside his office, took aim at Trump’s ignorance…

    “It is a frightening reality that the U.S. now has a Commander-in-Chief who has demonstrated ignorance of the nuclear triad, stated his desire to be ‘unpredictable’ with nuclear weapons, and as President-elect was making sweeping statements about U.S. nuclear policy over Twitter. Congress must act to preserve global stability by restricting the circumstances under which the U.S. would be the first nation to use a nuclear weapon.

     

    Our Founders created a system of checks and balances, and it is essential for that standard to be applied to the potentially civilization-ending threat of nuclear war. I am proud to introduce the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017 with Sen. Markey to realign our nation’s nuclear weapons launch policy with the Constitution and work towards a safer world.”

    Senator Edward J. Markey issued the following statement:

    “Nuclear war poses the gravest risk to human survival. Yet, President Trump has suggested that he would consider launching nuclear attacks against terrorists. Unfortunately, by maintaining the option of using nuclear weapons first in a conflict, U.S. policy provides him with that power. In a crisis with another nuclear-armed country, this policy drastically increases the risk of unintended nuclear escalation.

     

    Neither President Trump, nor any other president, should be allowed to use nuclear weapons except in response to a nuclear attack. By restricting the first use of nuclear weapons, this legislation enshrines that simple principle into law. I thank Rep. Lieu for his partnership on this common-sense bill during this critical time in our nation’s history.”

    Markey and Lieu introduced their bill immediately following those September remarks, but brought it up again in the first week of Trump becoming president, receiving more press coverage. The bill has support from former Defense Secretary William Perry as well as five other prominent pro-disarmament groups.:

    William J. Perry, Former Secretary of Defense – “During my period as Secretary of Defense, I never confronted a situation, or could even imagine a situation, in which I would recommend that the President make a first strike with nuclear weapons—understanding that such an action, whatever the provocation, would likely bring about the end of civilization.  I believe that the legislation proposed by Congressman Lieu and Senator Markey recognizes that terrible reality.  Certainly a decision that momentous for all of civilization should have the kind of checks and balances on Executive powers called for by our Constitution.”

     

    Tom Z. Collina, Policy Director of Ploughshares Fund – “President Trump now has the keys to the nuclear arsenal, the most deadly killing machine ever created. Within minutes, President Trump could unleash up to 1,000 nuclear weapons, each one many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Yet Congress has no voice in the most important decision the United States government can make. As it stands now, Congress has a larger role in deciding on the number of military bands than in preventing nuclear catastrophe.”

     

    Derek Johnson, Executive Director of Global Zero – “One modern nuclear weapon is more destructive than all of the bombs detonated in World War II combined. Yet there is no check on a president’s ability to launch the thousands of nuclear weapons at his command. In the wake of the election, the American people are more concerned than ever about the terrible prospect of nuclear war — and what the next commander-in-chief will do with the proverbial ‘red button.’ That such devastating power is concentrated in one person is an affront to our democracy’s founding principles. The proposed legislation is an important first step to reining in this autocratic system and making the world safer from a nuclear catastrophe.”

     

    Megan Amundson, Executive Director of Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND) – “Rep. Lieu and Sen. Markey have rightly called out the dangers of only one person having his or her finger on the nuclear button. The potential misuse of this power in the current global climate has only magnified this concern. It is time to make real progress toward lowering the risk that nuclear weapons are ever used again, and this legislation is a good start.”

     

    Jeff Carter, Executive Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility – “Nuclear weapons pose an unacceptable risk to our national security. Even a “limited” use of nuclear weapons would cause catastrophic climate disruption around the world, including here in the United States. They are simply too profoundly dangerous for one person to be trusted with the power to introduce them into a conflict. Grounded in the fundamental constitutional provision that only Congress has the power to declare war, the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017 is a wise and necessary step to lessen the chance these weapons will ever be used.”

     

    Diane Randall, Executive Secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers) – “Restricting first-use of nuclear weapons is an urgent priority. Congress should support the Markey-Lieu legislation.”

    Well if you weren’t terrified before, you sure are now. But of course, the Congressman and Senator are just doing this to ensure your safety… because to them, with all that is going on, the decision to reintroduce this bill and gain more press coverage is the highest priority.

    Ironically, Trump tweeted this afternoon that tomorrow is a big day for national security…

  • Ted Cruz Trolls Deadspin Editor Ashley Feinberg Over Stupid Basketball Challenge, Deadspin's Response: "Go Eat $hit"

    After spending much of the 2016 campaign known as “Lyin’ Ted” while spitting venom in Donald Trump’s general direction, Senator Ted Cruz traversed a tenuous road to redemption – earning his way back into Trump’s good graces, helping with the cause, and clearly learning much about trolling along the way.

    The target of Cruz’s hijinks is Univision owned Deadspin and Senior Reporter, Ashley Feinberg. Hours after Politico ran an article mentioning that Cruz was was trying to improve relations within the GOP, Feinberg latched onto this tidbit:

    Cruz appears intent on building—and in some cases repairing—personal relationships with Republican senators. He started a weekly basketball game in the Russell Building, for example, and has been urging colleagues to attend. (Cruz is said to be a surprisingly good jump-shooter with miserable form.) Tim Scott has played, and Marco Rubio is said to be joining soon.

     

    The Deadspin editor immediately put out the call for undercover pictures, hoping of course for some shots of Ted lookin’ like an old white guy playing basketball – when Cruz himself, or Barron Trump pretending to be Ted, stopped by with an offering:

    What follows is comedy gold as Deadspin loses their cool and Cruz responds:

    Feinberg then swats Buzzfeed reporter Matthew Zeitlin:

     

    Other reactions were hilarious:

    Conservative review entered stage right with the comic stylings of the guy running their Twitter account:

     This is the best timeline.

    qjr8oyvjxcpx

  • Chinese Bitcoin Trading Volumes Crash 90% Overnight

    As we reported yesterday, there was one reason why bitcoin quickly became the darling of HFT and various high speed algo traders operating out of China – which is home to about 10 significant bitcoin venues, with a majority of trades executed on the top three, and which recently accounted for as much as 98% of global bitcoin trading: domestic transactions were “frictionless”, as there were no fees on buys or sells. However, that changed on Sunday night because as China’s three largest bitcoin exchanges, BTCC, Huobi and OkCoin, all said in separate statements on their websites, starting Tuesday they will charge traders a flat fee of 0.2% per transaction. The move was meant to “further curb market manipulation and extreme volatility.”

    As expected, the impact was immediate and on the day the new fees went into effect, trading volumes crashed by roughly 90% across most Chinese exchanges.

    According to Bloomberg, the same high-speed traders who had dominated bitcoin trading in China for the past year, are pulling out of China’s bitcoin market after the three biggest venues started charging transaction fees on Tuesday. One-hour volume at OkCoin fell 89% to 1,026 bitcoins at 1 p.m. local time, from 10,062 during the same period on Monday, according to the venue’s website. Huobi and BTC China saw declines of 92% and 82% respectively.

    According to data from Bitcoinity there were roughly 4,800 trades on OKCoin between the hours of 11pm and midnight EST. In the following hour, the exchange registered just over 1,000 trades, denominated in CNY: a comparable fall of more than 80%.

    Data pulled from Bitcoinity for BTCChina also demonstrates the apparent effect the new trading fees have had on volume. After registering more than 37,000 trades between the hours of 7 and 8pm EST, that amount had fallen to less than 1,000 between the hours of midnight and 1am EST

    As discussed previously, and as Bloomberg noted, the lack of fees was seen as the main reason why as much as 80 percent of bitcoin trading in China was automated, with professionals using strategies such as “cross-exchange arbitrage” also known as frontrunning of major order blocks. The platforms made money by charging clients to withdraw bitcoin, but Tuesday’s changes may have ended that system for good. The moves came after the Chinese central bank made on-site inspections of the exchanges and reportedly found a number of violations.

    “The exchanges are cutting their arms off to stay alive,” said Zhou Shuoji, whose Fintech Blockchain Group runs a bitcoin hedge fund and venture capital fund. The venues are proactively weeding out speculative trading to appease regulators, said Zhou. The fees, introduced by all three venues at midday on Tuesday, made market-making unprofitable, he said.

    And while HFT traders, frontrunners and other “liquidity providing market makers” are furious that their business model in China was just crushed, the good news is that much of the inherent volatility in bitcoin may now be gone.

    The good news is that bitcoin prices today were little changed, at around 6,300 yuan per bitcoin. Ultimately, any stability in bitcoin prices as a result of the elimination of HFT-driven volatility may be just what the digital currency needs to rise above $1000 and stay there.

  • Trump Orders Media Blackout At Government Agencies: Bans Use Of Social Media, Bars New EPA Contracts

    It wasn’t just the EPA.

    Earlier today, we reported that the Trump administration instituted a media blackout at the Environmental Protection Agency and barred staff from awarding any new contracts or grants.

    Emails sent to EPA staff since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday and reviewed by The Associated Press, detailed the specific prohibitions banning press releases, blog updates or posts to the agency’s social media accounts. On Monday, the Huffington Post reported that EPA grants had been frozen, with agency employees barred from speaking of the matter.  The memo ordering the social media blackout is shown below.

    Cited by The Hill, Myron Ebell, who leads the Trump EPA transition, confirmed the freeze to ProPublica.  “They’re trying to freeze things to make sure nothing happens they don’t want to have happen, so any regulations going forward, contracts, grants, hires, they want to make sure to look at them first,” Ebell told ProPublica. Trump’s pick for EPA director, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has frequently challenged agency policy in court. 

    The Trump administration reportedly told the Department of the Interior to stop tweeting from its accounts over the weekend after the National Park Service’s Twitter account retweeted a post about the crowd sizes at Trump’s inauguration Friday. The agency brought back its accounts on Saturday.

    Asked if the EPA had been gagged, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Tuesday: “I don’t know … we’re looking into it … I don’t think it’s a surprise we’re going to review the policies but I don’t have any info at this time.”

    According to Reuters sources, the move “reinforced concerns that Trump, a climate change doubter, could seek to sideline scientific research showing that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, as well as the career staffers at the agencies that conduct much of this research.”

    The agency also was asked by the White House on Monday to temporarily halt all contracts, grants and interagency agreements pending a review, according to multiple sources. The EPA awards billions of dollars worth of grants and contracts every year to support programs around environmental testing, cleanups and research. According to Reuters,
    the White House sent a letter to the EPA’s Office of Administration and Resources Management ordering the freeze on Monday. “Basically no money moving anywhere until they can take a look,” the staffer said, asking not to be named.

    * * *

    Now, as Reuters adds, other agencies were also impacted, and the Trump’s administration has put staff at a slew of government agencies on notice – “be careful what you say.”

    In addition to the EPA, the Interior Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture also has seen efforts to curb communication. On Monday, staff at the department’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) were asked in an email to suspend the release of “any public-facing documents.”

    “This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content,” the email said.

    The U.S. Department of Agriculture disavowed the email on Tuesday, saying in a statement that it was released without “departmental direction and prior to departmental guidance being issued.”

    “ARS will be providing updated direction to its staff,” according to the statement.

    The ARS focuses on scientific research into the main issues facing agriculture, including long-term climate change.

    Last week, staff at the Interior Department were told to stop posting on Twitter after an employee retweeted posts about the relatively low attendance at Trump’s inauguration, and about how the issues of climate change and civil rights had disappeared from the White House website.

    The department has since resumed tweeting.

  • Trump Threatens To "Send In The Feds" If Chicago "Doesn't Fix This Horrible Carnage"

    President Trump has seen the data and threatens to "send in the Feds"…

    *  *  *

    As we detailed earlier, those Chicagoans hoping that 2017 would bring with it a new era of peace and civility among residents after the city suffered an incredibly violent 2016 in which homicides claimed the lives of over 800 people, it may be time to reset those expectations.  So far in 2017, Chicago is on track to record  the most violent opening month of the past two decades, even exceeding the extremely violent 2016 levels.

    According to the Chicago Tribune, at least 228 people have already been shot in 2017, compared to 216 during the same period last year, with 44 homicides per data from HeyJackAss!.

    Shootings and homicides in Chicago are higher than this time last January, a month that marked the deadliest start to a year in the city in nearly two decades.

     

    As of early Monday, at least 228 people had been shot in Chicago so far this year, a 5.5 percent increase from the 216 shot in the same period time last year. There have been at least 42 homicides, up 23.5 percent from the 34 homicides from the same period in 2016.

     

    Last January closed with 50 homicides, the most for that month in the city in at least 16 years, according to police statistics. The year ended with 783 homicides, the most since 1996, according to data collected by the Tribune.

     

    This January has seen several violent weekends. Over the New Year's weekend, 55 people were shot, five of them fatally. The next weekend saw a sharp drop, two killed and seven wounded. Over the following Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, 39 people were shot, 10 of them fatally.

     

    This past weekend 54 people were shot, six of them fatally. There were seven attacks that wounded three or more people, according to police.

    Aside from a 7-day period in early January, when temperatures plunged to record low levels, the cold weather hasn't seemed to deter Chicago's violent criminals. 

    Chicago Murders

     

    With 44 homicides already recorded, Chicago is on pace for 60 murders in the opening month of January which would exceed the two-decade record high set last year.

    Chicago Murders

     

    Just like 2016, Chicago's 2017 violence is concentrated in a handful of west and south side neighborhoods where gangs are prevalent. 

    Chicago Murders

     

    Of course, Trump has vowed numerous times to empower police forces around the country to crack down on drug and gang-related violence.  In a tweet from earlier this year, Trump even invited Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to seek federal help to address his city's epidemic of violence.

     

    And while only time will tell how/if Trump will follow through on his campaign promises to crack down on rising violence in America's inner-cities, we suspect any approach taken by the new administration will be a welcome change from the Obama administration's parting efforts to delegitimize Chicago's police force by effectively labeling it as a racist organization that the habitually resorts to the use of "deadly force" in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.

  • The Democratic Party Is Out Of Ideas And About To Quadruple-Down On Failed Identity Politics

    Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    Yes, of course, Trump winning the GOP nomination marks the end of the party as we know it. After all, some neocons are already publicly and actively throwing their support behind Hillary. While this undoubtably represents a major turning point in U.S. political history, many pundits have yet to appreciate that the exact same thing is happening within the Democratic Party. It’s just not completely obvious yet.

     

    While it might sound strange, a coronation of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary will mark the end of the party as we know it. There’s been a lot written about the “Sanders surge,” with much of it revolving around Hillary Clinton’s extreme personal weakness as a candidate. While this is indisputable, it’s also a convenient way for the status quo to exempt itself from fault and discount genuine grassroots anger. I’m of the view that Sanders’ support is more about people liking him than them disliking Hillary, particularly when it comes to registered Democrats. He’s not merely seen as the “least bad choice.” People really do like him.

     

    – From the February 2016 post:  It’s Not Just the GOP – The Democratic Party is Also Imploding

    By now, most of you have heard about the DNC candidate forum hosted by certifiably insane MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid, as well as the racially charged comments which vomited from the mouth of Sally Boynton Brown. We’ll get to that later, but first I want to prove to you that the Democratic Party has learned absolutely zero lessons from the 2016 contest, and will continue to focus on winning elections based on demographics alone, as opposed to confronting the actual issues. It is a carcass of a political party.

    Let’s start with an article written by Steve Phillips a few days ago in The Nation, to explain what I mean. First, who is Steve Phillips?

    Steve Phillips is a national political leader, civil-rights lawyer, author, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the founder and editor in chief of Democracy in Color, a multimedia platform on race and politics. He is the author of the New York Times best seller, Brown Is the New White: How a Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority (New Press). He is a regular contributor to The Nation.

    He’s also one of the people who helped organize the DNC candidate forum mentioned above. What follows are a few excerpts from his article, The Next DNC Chair Must Abandon Color-Blind Politics:

     The single greatest force shaping American politics today is the demographic revolution that is transforming the racial composition of the US population. Since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights and Immigration and Nationality Acts, tens of millions of people of color have joined the electorate, rapidly swelling the ranks of people of color from 12 percent of the population in 1965 to 38.4 percent today. The force of that revolution propelled a black man into the White House, and then Donald Trump rode the backlash to that revolution to his apparent narrow Electoral College win. If the Democratic Party is going to effectively rebuild from the ashes of this defeat and reclaim control of the federal government, it must put in place new leadership that has the lived experience, cultural competence, and electoral sophistication to build power and win elections in a highly racially charged environment.

     

    That is the context for the contest for new DNC chair, and it is the framework for the Democracy in Color Chair Candidates Forum that will be held on Monday in Washington, DC, at George Washington University. I am helping to organize the forum, along with the teams at Democracy in Color, mitú, and Inclusv. We will explore three areas that demand immediate attention and complete rethinking if we are going to win in the years ahead.

    Notice how this man’s entire focus is on demographics, assuming that people of color have nowhere to turn but to the Democrats. There’s no emphasis on any of the issues that allowed a reality tv star to win the Presidency against one of the most well-funded and media supported candidates in American history. The entirety of the above is obsessed with winning elections based on identity politics as opposed to making lives better for tens of millions of suffering Americans. In today’s environment, this is a recipe for political oblivion.

    Let’s take a look at some more of Mr. Phillips’ insights.

    Cultural competence within the Democratic Party must extend to all areas of the operation, not just the rhetoric of the chair. It must manifest itself in the composition of the staff and top leadership she or he hires, the expertise and experience of the consultants retained, and the strategic priority and focus of the party’s financial expenditures. How much of the resources and money will go towards chasing the shrinking sector of the electorate made up of the conservative white working class, and how much will go to maximizing the power and potential of the most rapidly growing sectors of the population—the country’s communities of color, who make up 46 percent of all Democratic voters?

    Again, he’s explicitly saying, let’s pretty much ignore the conservative white working class and just focus on people within the demographics of those who we think owe us their vote. This is not simply cynical calculating, and gross, it’s a recipe for continued disaster not just for the Democratic Party, but the nation as a whole.

    Meanwhile, the following paragraph proves he learned absolutely nothing from Trump’s victory, which should be obvious by now anyway.

    The first step the next chair should take to fix this problem is to conduct a transparent and brutally honest assessment of exactly what happened in 2016. There are a lot of misunderstandings, incorrect conclusions, and false and facile assumptions floating around and influencing preliminary plans for progressives in the future. One such myth, for example, is that millions of voters abandoned Democrats and flocked to the Trump campaign, when in fact Clinton got just about the same number of votes that Obama did in 2012 (Trump exceeded Romney’s 2012 numbers by 2 million votes, and third-party candidates received 5 million more votes than they did in 2016). Understanding exactly what happened and why is an essential first step to winning back the White House.

    In other words, no fundamental change is needed here. We just failed to make sure certain people within the demographics who owe us their vote get off their asses next time and vote blue. He also once again makes it perfectly clear that the key is to win, as opposed to win on the actual issues.

    Now here’s his final paragraph, and it’s the most important one in the entire piece. He accidentally exposes the key flaw in his strategy and why it is doomed to failure.

    These are dark days in American politics, but Democrats and progressives must never forget that we are in fact the majority of people in this country. Each of the last three presidential elections have proved that there is a new American majority consisting of the overwhelming majority of people of color and a meaningful minority of whites who vote progressive. The mission of the DNC and its next chair is to start now to put in place the infrastructure to translate that population majority into an electoral majority in enough states to win back the White House and Congress so that we can continue to build a vibrant, just, inclusive multiracial society. That journey begins with making sure the next DNC chair has the skills, experience, strategy and sophistication to lead us on that journey. We’ll ask them these questions and more on Monday. 

    He claims “Democrats and progressives must never forget that we are in fact the majority of people in this country.” Note, the key part of this statement is “Democrats and progressives.” If Democrats aren’t progressives, what are they? Neoliberals of course, but he doesn’t want to say that for obvious reasons. Ultimately, this betrays the core flaw in his logic. You can’t say “Democrats and progressives are the majority” if those two groups ideologically clash on everything. At the end of the day, this majority coalition he expects to win elections based on demographics isn’t really a coalition at all.

    To summarize, nowhere in this article is there any sort of discussion about economic decay, corporate power, militarism, etc. Why is that? The reason is that the Democrats (ie, neoliberals) don’t want to focus on issues their donors won’t like. Identity politics is perfect for a corporate-Wall Street based Democratic Party. The truly rich and powerful in this country love identity politics and fund it like mad, because identity politics diverts attention away from economic populism, and poses no real threat to them.

    Finally, let’s end with the comments of Sally Boynton Brown, a white woman running for chair of the Democratic National Committee.

    Makes you wonder, is she trying to become DNC chair, or auditioning for a job at MTV?

    Perhaps this is her strategy for getting invited to the cool kids identity politics table, but it’s certainly not going to be a winning strategy for Democrats.

    Good luck donkeys, you’re going to need it.

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