TBR News January 31, 2019
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8
Washington, D.C. January 30, 2019:” We will be out of the office until February 2.” Ed
Table of Contents
- Pelosi: No wall money in U.S. border deal talks
- Death of the private self: how fifteen years of Facebook changed the human condition
- Apple bans Facebook’s data-collecting app, reportedly kicks it off developer program
- The National Security Agency and the FBI teamed up in October 2010 to develop techniques for turning Facebook into a surveillance tool
- How the religious right gained unprecedented access to Trump
- The New Christian Manifesto
- S. lawmakers move to curtail president’s power to levy tariffs
- INSTEX: Europe sets up transactions channel with Iran
- Police Make More Than 10 Million Arrests a Year, but That Doesn’t Mean They’re Solving Crimes
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
Pelosi: No wall money in U.S. border deal talks
January 31, 2019
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democratic U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday said there would not be any money for President Donald Trump’s border wall in the deal being worked out by a bipartisan negotiation team.
“There’s not going to be any wall money in the legislation,” she told reporters. The top Democrat in Congress said if Republicans have suggestions about adding more ports of entry or technologies, those kinds of things would be negotiable.
“It is not a negotiation for the president to say … ‘it doesn’t matter what Congress says’,” she said at a news conference.
“The president wants to have Congress be completely irrelevant in how we meet the needs of the American people? No, c’mon. Let them work their will. I’m an appropriator.”
The negotiating committee is trying to reach a compromise on the $5.7 billion down-payment Trump has sought for his promised wall along the border. The committee will likely have to wrap up its work around Feb. 10 to meet the Feb. 15 deadline set when Trump and lawmakers agreed last week to end a 35-day partial government shutdown.
Pelosi also rejected as a “non-starter” the Republican president’s offer of a temporary three-year protection for young “Dreamers” in exchange for a permanent wall.
She said it was tantamount to saying: “These are protections that exist, I’ll take them away. I’ll give them to you temporarily, you give me a wall permanently.”
“A non-starter,” Pelosi said.
She said she does not believe a bill to permanently end shutdowns should be part of current border security negotiations.
Reporting by Amanda Becker and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Susan Heavey and James Dalgleish
Death of the private self: how fifteen years of Facebook changed the human condition
In 2004, the social network site was set up to connect people. But now, with lives increasingly played out online, have we forgotten how to be alone?
January 31, 2019
by John Harris
The Guardian
‘Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University. You can use Thefacebook to: search for people at your school; find out who are [sic] in your classes; look up your friends’ friends; see a visualization of your social network.”
On 4 February 2004, this rather clunky announcement launched an invention conceived in the dorm room of a Harvard student called Mark Zuckerberg, and intended to be an improvement on the so-called face books that US universities traditionally used to collect photos and basic information about their students. From the vantage point of 2019, Thefacebook – as it was then known – looks familiar, but also strange. Pages were coloured that now familiar shade of blue, and “friends” were obviously a central element of what was displayed. However, there was little on show from the wider world: the only photos were people’s profile pictures, and there was no ever-changing news feed.
Everything on offer was centred on the lives of students: first at Harvard, then at Columbia, Stanford and Yale. On the face of it, the focus was campus dating and a feature whereby users could send each other “pokes”, whose meaning was open to interpretation, thus increasing the fun.
Very quickly, though, something else happened. By the autumn of 2005, 85% of US college students were using the site with 60% of students visiting it daily. As they immersed themselves, Thefacebook tapped into the fierce social competitiveness that the US education system seems to be built on. As David Kirkpatrick’s definitive history The Facebook Effect explains, users of the new site began to fixate on perfecting the details of their profile, not just to date, but to make themselves more attractive as potential friends. This came down to a handful of imperatives: “Find exactly the right profile picture. Change it regularly. Consider carefully how you describe your interests.”
In fact, says Kirkpatrick, being a successful Facebooker soon became such a necessity that it began to affect choices people made in the real world: “Since everyone’s classes were listed, some students even began selecting what they studied in order to project a certain image of themselves. And many definitely selected classes based on who Thefacebook indicated would be joining them there.”
Everyone, it seemed, was performing, and the basic idea was to do as much performing as possible. At the end of 2004, Thefacebook reached a million users; in September 2006, having renamed itself Facebook, it moved beyond campuses and high schools, and opened itself up to anyone over 13 with an email address. But a core tenet of its Harvard beginnings remained: the imperative for users to present the world with the most flattering impression of themselves.
Fifteen years after Facebook’s birth, it has 2.2 billion users, Zuckerberg sits on a fortune of about $55bn (£42bn), and this week the company posted a record profit of $6.88bn for the final three months of 2018. And we know one other thing for sure: tangled up in its success is the fact that people lie about themselves on Facebook, as they do on other social media platforms. In 2016, when the market research firm Custard surveyed 2,000 people in the UK, it found that only 18% of them said their Facebook profile accurately represented them, 31% said the face they presented on Facebook boiled down to “pretty much my life but without the boring bits”, and 14% said Facebook made them look “much more” socially active than they were. Men, it seemed, were more likely than women to knowingly depart from the truth: 43% admitted to fabricating some aspect of their online selves.
That said, there is plenty of evidence of the same everyday deceit on the other side of the gender divide. Six years ago, the market research company OnePoll found that a third of women it surveyed admitted to “dishonesty” on social media. Almost one in four admitted to lying or exaggerating about key aspects of their life online between one and three times a month, and almost one in 10 said they lied more than once a week. Nearly 30% of women lied about doing something when they were really home alone, and 20% were not truthful about their holiday activities or their jobs.
On the face of it, this may not seem that revelatory. It is, perhaps, in the nature of our relationships with other human beings that we work desperately hard on our outward presentation, and sometimes fall into a kind of performance that leads inexorably towards fibs.
However, the Facebook age marks a break from traditional human behaviour in key aspect. In the past, we could regularly take a break from acting, and revert to some sense of our private, authentic selves. Now, as we constantly prod at our smartphones and feel the pull of their addictive apps, when does the performing ever stop?
Along with Russian interference in elections, fake news, Facebook’s approach to hate speech and its insatiable appetite for personal data, this is surely one of the most malign ways in which its presence in our lives is playing out.
What its innovations have done to the divide between our social and private lives highlights a mess of stuff to do with the true meanings of intimacy and privacy, and something that goes even closer to the heart of what it is to be human: who we really are beyond the attention and judgments of others, and whether we even know any more.
This demise of the barrier between our public and private selves is particularly relevant to people going through that stage of life when the very idea of “self” is still in flux: the often difficult period from the stirrings of adolescence to the mid-20s (and, if you’re unlucky, even older). At that point, sensitivity to your peer group is at its height and an obsession with what some people call “social comparison” tends to run deep. We all know the basics: you desperately want to meet all the requirements of whichever code of cool is holding sway, and avoid mockery at all costs. Looks are at their peak of importance. So are clothes.
In her new doorstop-sized treatise on the dominance of Facebook and Google, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the American academic Shoshana Zuboff gets to the heart of why social media collides with this stage of life in a particularly toxic way. “Social media marks a new era in the intensity, density and pervasiveness of social comparison processes especially for the youngest among us, who are ‘almost constantly online’ at a time of life when one’s own identity, voice and moral agency are a work in progress,” she writes. “In fact, the psychological tsunami of social comparison triggered by the social media experience is considered unprecedented.” She calls this experience “life in the hive”, and rather chillingly characterises it as “being alive in the gaze of others because it’s the only life one has, even when it hurts”.
I remember what it was like being 16, and the minefield of peer pressure, ridicule and keeping up with the cool kids I had to navigate. Coming home each afternoon and having long spells to unwind was essential – in fact, it was in these daily quiet periods that I began to get some vague sense of who I was. If you had told me that in the near future, the noise of school would emanate from an addictive device that compelled me to carry on performing for my peers until I fell asleep, I would probably have screamed. Yet this is now the everyday reality for millions of teenagers, and we all know the likely consequences.
According to a report published this week by the media regulator Ofcom, 70% of those aged 12 to 15 have at least one social media profile. Among those aged eight to 11, the figure is 18%. Ofcom says that children’s most visible accounts tend to “be more highly curated, showing a ‘picture-perfect’ self”. A substantial body of opinion links depression and anxiety to social media use, something routinely traced to online bullying and negative self-perception caused by reading other people’s online posts. According to the Millennium Cohort Study led by the Institute of Education, London (which follows the life experiences of 19,000 people born at the start of the 21st century), almost 40% of girls who spend more than five hours a day on social media show symptoms of depression; research in 2017 by the Royal Society for Public Health recorded young people themselves suggesting that all the big social platforms had a negative effect on their mental wellbeing, something that health professionals said was bound up with increased feelings of inadequacy and anxiety.
In response, defenders of Facebook might argue that its popularity is declining among younger users, who now prefer Snapchat and Instagram. However, Facebook is still used by millions of young people and Zuckerberg’s company owns Instagram. There is also a sense in which Facebook has led the way in breaking down some of the behavioural distinctions between children, youths and adults, to the point that all social media users are acting like teenagers, and experiencing the same downsides of excessive use, whichever platform they favour.
Put another way, endless performance, the craven pursuit of approval and worrying about what other people think of us might be quintessentially adolescent behaviour, but millions of people of a much more advanced age are doing exactly those things on a minute-by-minute basis, usually via Facebook. And in that context, the 15th anniversary of Mark Zuckerberg’s invention might be a good time to take a step back, and consider whether we are suffering from a huge outbreak of collective arrested development, with all the pain and dysfunction that entails.
I don’t often use Facebook, but I am a habitual tweeter, and I know that I post too much, and that it gets in the way of far too many experiences. By the same token, I am not sure that repeatedly changing one’s Facebook profile picture in pursuit of two-word comments from your friends (such as “Gorgeous, babe”) is behaviour that does anyone any good, but it definitely doesn’t suit people much over 25. There is no need to write posts about what you just had for dinner, or the funny thing the dog did. Most of all, it seems incontestable that, whatever age we are, we need moments of quiet and introspection to reaffirm what it is to be alive, and that Facebook is something that too often spoils things.
This is particularly true of the way we enjoy other people’s creativity. A recent article on the music website the Quietus by the writer Jazz Monroe nails the essential point. “When we submit to a profound experience of art, it’s a rare reprieve from the everyday torrent of triviality and distraction,” he wrote. “Likewise, when you finish a great book, there’s supposed to be a moment when you reflect on it. But it’s so easy to just check your phone, or tweet some earnest statement about it.”
Even in the company of other people, there are times when we need to withdraw into ourselves and savour an essentially private moment of transcendence. Gigs are a good example, which makes me think of a line from Radiohead’s 1997 song Karma Police, which I heard Thom Yorke sing a cappella to an entranced crowd at Glastonbury: “For a minute there, I lost myself.” But in such settings, Monroe says, smartphones and their apps are basically “alien interlopers carrying a ton of baggage”. He goes on: “Small concerts are not designed to outperform a £600 device containing the entire internet. That makes the radioactive slab of social energy in your pocket a cultural hazard. When you shoot a casual glance at its screen – perhaps unconsciously, out of undiagnosed boredom – the megawatt glare that screams into the gently lit room is not discreet. Not everybody else was bored at that moment.”
I often wonder, in fact, whether social media platforms and smartphones are the root cause of one very irksome aspect of life in the 21st century: the way people now endlessly chat during musical performances, seemingly unaware that if they concentrated silently on what was happening onstage, they might have a much better time.
And what is it people are being distracted by, whether they are alone, or in company? Social media comes down to an endless series of competitions, with prizes in the form of attention: likes, friends, comments. On top of that, Facebook has become humanity’s main means of reminding individuals of the exciting, fulfilling stuff that other people claim to be doing, and giving them the feeling they ought to join in. For all that Silicon Valley styles itself as being about liberating us from earthly concerns and creating a new kind of networked human, these things tap into aspects of our psychology that are primitive and animalistic.
In his brilliant polemic, 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, the virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier pithily describes what silently happens as we endlessly scroll: “Deep mechanisms in the social parts of our brains monitor our social standing, making us terrified to be left behind, like a runt sacrificed to predators on the savannah.”
I know when I last felt like that. It was when I was at school, and then university. I had a recurrently good time at both places, but I also vividly recall the sense of always either being in the crowd, or wondering why I wasn’t. In that sense, in the same way that the personal development of celebrities is sometimes said to be frozen at the point they first become famous, so Facebook and its effects were always going to be defined by its beginnings at Harvard. It has turned the world into one big college dorm, where there is rarely any silence, and anyone of a sensitive disposition longs for a bit of me time, to no avail. Among the many arguments against Zuckerberg’s goal of “bringing the world closer together”, perhaps, is the fact that the human condition demands that we also need to regularly be apart, and alone. Has that been forgotten in only 15 years?
Apple bans Facebook’s data-collecting app, reportedly kicks it off developer program
January 31, 2019
RT
Apple has reportedly shut down Facebook’s access to internal apps on its employees’ phones. The company earlier banned the social network’s ‘research’ app from its Enterprise Developer Program for monitoring users as young as 13.
Internal apps stopped launching on Facebook employees’ phones after Apple revoked the company’s certificate for the Enterprise Developer Program, the Verge reported on Wednesday. The publication was told that Facebook treats what’s happened as “a critical problem internally.”
Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program is designed for distributing apps within organizations. The Silicon Valley-based tech giant earlier banned Facebook’s Research VPN app from the program, saying the social network was in “clear breach” of its agreement with Apple.
A spokesperson for the iPhone manufacturer stated that Mark Zuckerberg’s company used the program’s certificate to distribute the data-collecting app to consumers, and the certificate was revoked in order “to protect our users and their data.”
Facebook had been distributing the Research VPN app since 2016. Users, aged between 13 and 35, were paid $20 a month to download and install it on their mobile phones. The app would then give Facebook access to a variety of personal data. It is not clear what type of data Facebook was monitoring but, once installed, the app would give the tech giant “nearly limitless access” to a user’s smartphone, TechCrunch wrote.
Facebook denied that it has ever ‘spied’ on users. All users who downloaded the app went through a “clear on-boarding process asking for their permission and were paid to participate,” a Facebook spokesperson said, adding that “less than five percent” of them were teenagers.
Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told CNBC that the app was intended for market research. “The important thing is that the people involved in that research project knew they were involved and consented,” she stressed.
The social network later stated that it decided to pull the iOS version of the app – after it was blocked by Apple. It is still available on Android.
The National Security Agency and the FBI teamed up in October 2010 to develop techniques for turning Facebook into a surveillance tool.
by Harrison Weber
Documents released alongside security journalist Glenn Greenwald’s book, “No Place To Hide,” reveal the NSA and FBI partnership, in which the two agencies developed techniques for exploiting Facebook chats, capturing private photos, collecting IP addresses, and gathering private profile data.
NSA documents make painfully clear how the agencies collected information “by exploiting inherent weaknesses in Facebook’s security model” through its use of the popular Akamai content delivery network. The NSA describes its methods as “assumed authentication,” and “security through obscurity.”
Two months ago, following a series of Facebook-related NSA spying leaks, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg stated in a blog post that he’s “confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the U.S. government.”
According to a report by The Intercept, the above slides do not reveal the NSA’s Facebook surveillance program in full. The report states that the NSA also “disguises itself as a fake Facebook server” to perform “man-in-the-middle” and “man-on-the-side” attacks and spread malware
The “NSA’s Facebook targeting is reportedly a response to the declining success of other malware injection techniques. Previous techniques included the use of “spam emails that trick targets into clicking a malicious link.”
Following the report, released in March, Zuckerberg said, “When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.”
Zuckerberg claimed he disapproved of the NSA’s actions and said that he’s spoken to president Barack Obama by phone to “express [his] frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future.”
How the religious right gained unprecedented access to Trump
As the president offers a sympathetic ear – and policies to match – critics see a de facto advisory committee, violating federal law
January 31, 2019
by Jessica Glenza in New York
The Guardian
The US health secretary sat for an interview with a man experts say is the leader of a hate group known for “defaming gays and lesbians”, just two days after Karen Pence, the US second lady, was criticized for teaching at a Christian school that bans homosexuality.
Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, was interviewed by the Family Research Council President, Tony Perkins, at an anti-abortion event called ProLifeCon in mid-January.
“We are the department of life,” Azar told Perkins, “from conception until natural death, through all of our programs.” He then rattled off victories – new policies that make it difficult to obtain an abortion, including allowing healthcare workers to refuse to treat patients based on moral objections. “The right of conscience is as foundational as the right to life.”
Perkins has falsely claimed homosexuality is linked with pedophilia, advocated for parents’ rights to send children to harmful conversion therapy, and said about transgender people: “I mean, what’s to keep you from saying that you’re an animal?”
The interview is the latest example of how a narrow slice of the American right has gained unprecedented access to the White House, as defining Trump statements have emboldened the antisemitic far right and Trump administration policies put the brakes on Muslim immigration.
The access “has been remarkable, and candidly it has gone back to the campaign”, said Ralph Reed, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. While Reed and other evangelicals have celebrated the Trump administration’s hunger for their views and policies in line with them, critics argue it is running a de facto advisory committee in violation of federal law.
“This is part of a story about the emboldened religious right that has a partnership at the highest level of government with the Trump and Pence administration,” said Rachel Laser, CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Together, they’re co-opting the term ‘religious freedom’ to advance their political agenda.”
Paula White, a televangelist from Florida cited as the president’s chief spiritual adviser, told Charisma News she was able to make calls to the White House following Hurricane Maria. “You can do that because you have a seat there,” she said.
Johnnie Moore, a Southern Baptist minister and former co-chair of the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisory board, estimated he’d visited the White House 20 times by early last year. Roughly 100 evangelical leaders were invited to the White House for a meal with all the trappings of an official state dinner.
At the same time, Reed said many of the top priorities of evangelicals had been supported by the administration. He included “repeal of the Johnson amendment”, which prohibited nonprofits and houses of worship from endorsing political candidates, “Christian persecution around the world, the Obamacare conscience mandate … the pro-life issue, judicial nominations and judicial appointments, especially to the supreme court.”
This summer, Trump successfully appointed the conservative Catholic Brett Kavanaugh to the US supreme court. The former attorney general Jeff Sessions announced a religious liberty taskforce, but the names of its members are not public. In the summer of 2017, Trump unexpectedly announced a ban on transgender people serving in the military.
Last week, Azar’s health department exempted South Carolina from anti-discrimination statutes that protect same-sex couples from discrimination while adopting from faith-based agencies. Trump tweeted support for Bible study classes in state schools.
In each instance, the Trump policy was widely supported by evangelical leaders, even as some were barely on the radar for traditional conservatives. At the same time, some evangelical leaders have provided cover for the Trump administration during moments of crisis.
When Trump shut the government down over a border wall, the Faith and Freedom Coalition wrote a letter calling on Democrats to fund the wall. “We think that’s a Biblical principle,” said Reed. “There’s nothing in scripture anywhere about a barrier or a wall being immoral.”
When the Trump administration separated children from their families at the border, White rejected arguments that Jesus was a refugee, Christian Today reported. White said: “Yes, he did live in Egypt for three and a half years. But it was not illegal. If he had broken the law then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah.”
Members of the Trump family have also donated to leading evangelicals. Ivanka Trump gave $50,000 to the Texas megachurch leader Jack Graham to help reunite migrant families after her father’s administration separated them from their parents at the border. Ivanka remains a senier advisor to the president. In 2013, Graham’s church described nontraditional gender identity as “sexual identity confusion”.
“It’s an ugly story of the politicization about one of America’s most sacred symbols: religious freedom,” said Laser. “It’s also a story about one narrow slice of America, the religious right, trying to hold on to their power in a country that is quickly becoming less white and less Christian. It is a threat to true religious freedom in America.”
For evangelical leaders, however, the president’s interest in their views has been thrilling.
“If you talk to enough of these leaders, they’re not only thrilled by the unprecedented access, and he’s so solicitous of their views as is the rest of the team at the White House, but also the decisions he makes,” said Reed. Trump, he said, “dances with the one he brought”.
The New Christian Manifesto
To Our Brothers and Sisters in Christ, Greetings!
It is with glowing pride that we contemplate the growing control and spiritual influence of True Christians in the regaining control of the American political and educational realms. America was founded in 1620 by Religious Dissenters, True Christians, who fled from secular persecutions in England. They set up a religious community in Plymouth Bay and flourished greatly. But in subsequent years, America drifted away from her True Christian origins and became a nest of Secularism. Americans have turned away from the One True God to worship Mammon and materialism! Self-indulgence has replaced self-discipline and the cell phone has replaced Our Lord Jesus Christ in daily importance! But rejoice in your hearts because the True Disciples of Christ have organized to save America from Secular Humanism and hedonism and we are now at the very gates of the True Kingdom of Heaven on earth! The True Disciples have begun their Sacred Mission by gaining virtual control over the Republican Party in almost every state in the Union, have elected a President of our One True Faith, have filled the halls of Congress with Representatives of both the people and Christ the Lord! We are well on our way to reestablish the True Christian nation, under God Almighty, that was founded in 1620.
The Politics of God
Now, with the advent of a True Christian as President of the United States, we Christians stand closer now to establishing a truly Christian-based government in this country since 1620!
By faith and determination, we have placed many of our people into the ranks of the Republican Party; have organized local elections to put our members on vital school boards where they can, and have, successfully supplanted the false Darwinism with the Divinely Inspired Biblical Creationism. We have elected members to serve in Congress who are sensitive to our needs and wishes but we need far more in order to establish a firm majority.
Since 2001 dozens of True Christians, by Presidential order have been placed in key positions within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Drug Administration and on commissions and advisory committees where they have made serious progress. Three years later God-sent Bush Administration has established one of the most righteous sexual health agendas in the Western world.
As one example of the growing power of the Lord in American politics, the Texas Republican Party Platform for 2002, called for rescinding United States membership in the United Nations and removing the United Nations from US soil. Pat Robertson, in his book, “The Millennium”, depicts the United Nations as a Satanic plot to take control of the world. And in the LaHaye “Left Behind” books, we can see that the United Nations is firmly in the hands of the anti-Christ!
Herewith we present our Watchwords and our Credo to you for your guide and inspiration.
1.Rule the world for God!
2.Give the impression that you are there to work for the Republican party, not push an ideology.
3.Hide your strength.
4.Don’t flaunt your Christianity.
Our Credo is:
Jesus Christ is Lord in all aspects of life, including civil government.
Jesus Christ is, therefore, the Ruler of Nations, and should be explicitly confessed as such in any constitutional documents. The civil ruler is to be a servant of God, he derives his authority from God and he is duty-bound to govern according to the expressed will of God.
The civil government of our nation, its laws, institutions, and practices must therefore be conformed to the principles of Biblical law as revealed in the Old and New Testaments.
In confronting Secular Humanists and Satanists, we must realize that it is vital to stress the following Proclaimed Truths:
- The unique divine inspiration of all the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments as originally given, so that they are infallible and uniquely authoritative and free from error of any sort, in all matters with which they deal, scientific and historical as well as moral and theological.
- Special creation of the existing space-time universe and all its basic systems and kinds of organisms in the six literal days of the creation week.
- The full historicity and perspicuity of the biblical record of primeval history, including the literal existence of Adam and Eve as the progenitors of all people, the literal fall and resultant divine curse of the creation, and worldwide cataclysmic deluge and the origin of nations and languages at the Tower of Babel.
Brother Pat Robertson said in 1992,
“We want…as soon as possible to see a majority of the Republican Party in the hands of pro-family Christians…”
Ralph Reed said in 2001,
“You’re no longer throwing rocks at the building; you’re in the building.”
Once dismissed as a small regional movement, Christian conservatives have become a staple of politics nearly everywhere. Christian conservatives now hold a majority of seats in 36% of all Republican Party state committees (or 18 of 50 states), plus large minorities in 81% of the rest, double their strength from a decade before.
Active Christian Conservatives who are obedient to Almighty God and his Commandments in the United States Senate are:
Bill Frist, TN, Mitch McConnell, KY, Rick Santorum, PA, Bob Bennet, UT, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, TX, Jon Kyle, AZ, George Allen, VA, Richard Shelby, AL, Zell Miller, GA, Sam Brownback, KS, Sen. Lindsey Graham, SC
These True Christians deserve our heartfelt thanks and our continued support, both fiscal and personal.
The twin surges of Christians into GOP ranks in the early 1980s and early 1990s have begun to bear fruit, as naïve, idealistic recruits have transformed into highly proficient operatives and leaders, building organizations, winning leadership positions, fighting onto platform committees, and electing many of our own to public offices at all levels of American governance.
Christians need to take leadership positions. Since Republican Party officers control the membership and our legislative bodies, it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God willing.
One of our brilliantly successful tactics in gaining control of Republican organizations is to tie up the meetings for hours until people left. Then we appointed ourselves leaders and make key decisions. Once we took over the local leadership throughout our target State, we can then control the state party apparatus. Once we have a target state under Christian control, we can then use the same tactics in other states until we build a solid Christian foundation that can control any election, state or national.
The strategy of the coming Christian Based Republican Party is simple.
First, enact a permanent tax cut which will eliminate $6 trillion in revenue over the next 20 years. This will in effect starve the federal government so it will be unable to fund many liberal and essentially anti-Christian governmental functions instituted since the Communist-inspired New Deal.
Second, fill the liberal and secular federal judiciary with Christian advocates whose judicial philosophy will reverse the disastrous trends on civil rights, environmental protections, religious liberty, reproductive rights and privacy and so much more.
Third, mandate the teaching of Divine Creationism in all public and private schools and remove from all school curriculums the Secular Humanist false theories of Darwin and others.
Fourth, revise the Federal Constitution so that it better reflects Divine Will and strips away false secularism entirely.
A Constitution that conforms to Biblical Law will rely on the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament as its guiding source. Therefore, the Ten Commandments hold a special meaning. The New Christian lawmakers are going to pass legislation in various state legislatures that will mandate government posting of the Ten Commandments in all public buildings.
Rev. Joseph Morecraft is pastor of the Reconstructionist Chalcedon Presbyterian Church in Marietta, Georgia and he states his belief in the persecution of nonbelievers and those who are insufficiently orthodox is crystal clear. Reverend Morecraft describes democracy as “mob rule,” and states that the purpose of “civil government” is to “terrorize evil doers. . . to be an avenger!” and “To bring down the wrath of God to bear on all those who practice evil!”
“And how do you terrorize an evil doer?” he asks. “You enforce Biblical law!” The purpose of government is “to protect the church of Jesus Christ,” and, “Nobody has the right to worship on this planet any other God than Jehovah. And therefore the state does not have the responsibility to defend anybody’s pseudo-right to worship an idol!” “There is no such thing” as religious pluralism, he declared. Further, “There has never been such a condition in the history of mankind. There is no such place now. There never will be.”
“When God brings Noah through the flood to a new earth, He re-establishes the Dominion Mandate but now delegates to man the responsibility for governing other men in order to protect human life. He does this by instituting capital punishment – the backbone of civil government.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
Now let us begin with some realistic soul-searching. Let us define the purposes and directions of our ranks for, although we may see the same Enlightenment in different ways, in the end, we are all True Christians.
A definition of the True Christian membership:
Fundamentalists are a subgroup of evangelicals who believe that the Scriptures — both the Old and New Testaments –are the verbally inspired Word of God, written by men in God’s control. Therefore, the Bible is inerrant and infallible. Christian Fundamentalists argue that the Bible must be accepted as the literal word of God, correct not only in its religious or moral teachings, but also in its scientific and historical claims. They believe that the theory of evolution is false, since it contradicts their reading of the Bible.
Pentecostals believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, but differ from fundamentalists and other Christian denominations by practicing exorcism, speaking in tongues, faith healing, and, in general, seeking supernatural experiences. Some of the better known Pentecostal denominations are Assemblies of God and the United Pentecostal Church. Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religion in the United States and the world today.
The implementation of Biblical Law is central to the mission of building the Kingdom of God on earth. The way to get to Biblical Law is through politics. Therefore, God’s law as manifested in the Bible should govern. References to the Ten Commandments are more than symbolic. It reflects a belief that the Bible, not the Constitution, represents the final legal authority.
1) The federal government should recede into the background through massive tax cuts. This concept, heartily embraced by President Bush, has more than one benefit. As money available for corrupting so-called “entitlements” dries up, there will not be funding for welfare leeches, birth control programs, support for the army of illegal aliens now flooding out country and the notorious Social Security give-aways.
2) Churches should be mandated to take over responsibility for welfare and education by Faith-based initiatives and school vouchers. By these means, True Christians can establish a firm control over the education of American youth. We can, and will, instill Christian Values in our youth and by this means insure a growing body of young Christians, ready, willing and able to assume leadership positions in a Christian United States.
3) Capitalism is the sole reason that America is now the greatest nation on earth and the Christian Community firmly believes that this engine of national success and power should be freed of current regulations that harmfully restrict America’s major corporations in achieving their maximum growth potential. We are therefore opposed to so-called “environmental” rules and regulations, restrictive and repressive work safety regulations, involvement by the Federal government in civil rights matters. We must first and foremost introduce and secure legislation to halt devastating personal injury lawsuits against Corporate America.
4) The U.S. Constitution should conform to Biblical Law.
The Constitution Restoration Act of 2004, introduced into both houses of Congress on February 11, 2004, includes the acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law by an official in his capacity of executing his office. This is another firm and ascending step in the establishment of a true Christian society in America.
U.S. lawmakers move to curtail president’s power to levy tariffs
January 30, 2019
by Chris Prentice
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday introduced legislation to limit the president’s power to levy import tariffs for national security reasons
The bills face an uncertain future but underscore bipartisan concerns on Capitol Hill over the rising costs of the Trump administration’s trade policies. The United States in 2018 slapped duties on aluminum and steel from other countries, drawing criticism from lawmakers who support free trade and complaints of rising supply chain costs across business sectors.
Two bipartisan groups of lawmakers on Wednesday introduced legislation known as the Bicameral Congressional Trade Authority Act in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
The bills would require Trump to have congressional approval before taking trade actions like tariffs and quotas under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. The law currently allows the president to impose such tariffs without approval from Capitol Hill.
“The imposition of these taxes, under the false pretense of national security (Section 232), is weakening our economy, threatening American jobs, and eroding our credibility with other nations,” said Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, co-sponsor of the Senate bill.
Toomey led a similar push last year that did not go to vote. It is unclear that Congress would consider taking up such legislation now. Still, the bills underscore mounting pressure from lawmakers to address concerns over tariffs, especially those on Canada and Mexico as lawmakers ready to vote on a new North American trade deal agreed late last year.
Republican Chuck Grassley from Iowa, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, earlier pressed the Trump administration to lift tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and Mexico before Congress begins considering legislation to implement the new pact.
Numerous business and agricultural groups have come out in support of the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement, but have said its benefits will be limited so long as the U.S. tariffs and retaliatory tariffs from Canada and Mexico remain in place.
Companies are able to request to exemptions from the steel and aluminum tariffs, but the process has been plagued by delays and uncertainty.
“Virginia consumers and industries like craft beer and agriculture are hurting because of the President’s steel and aluminum tariffs,” said Democratic Senator Mark Warner, co-sponsor of the Senate legislation. “This bill would roll them back.”
Republicans Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Darin LaHood of Illinois and Democrats Ron Kind of Wisconsin and Jimmy Panetta of California introduced the House legislation.
Reporting by Chris Prentice; Editing by James Dalgleish
INSTEX: Europe sets up transactions channel with Iran
Germany, France and the UK have set up a payment channel with Iran called INSTEX, to help continue trade and circumvent US sanctions. The question is, how will Washington react?
January 31, 2019
DW
Several European countries have registered a transaction channel with Iran in order to facilitate trade despite US sanctions, the German foreign ministry confirmed to DW on Thursday.
The channel, set up by Germany, France and the UK, is called INSTEX — short for “Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges.”
The payment channel allows for European countries to continue trade with Iran but could put them on a collision course with Washington.
What is INSTEX:
A “Special Purpose Vehicle” that will allow European businesses to trade with Iran, despite strict US sanctions.
According to media reports, INSTEX will be based in Paris and be managed by German banking expert Per Fischer, a former manager at Commerzbank. The UK will head the supervisory board.
The European side intends to use the channel initially only to sell food, medicine and medical devices in Iran. However, it will be possible to expand it in the future.
‘Shared concerns’
Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said that Europe did share US concerns about Iran but “at the end of the day it will be companies that decide whether or not they want to work in Iran, bearing in mind the risk of American sanctions.”
The US Embassy in Berlin said that Washington did not expect the payment system to reduce economic pressure on Iran. An embassy spokesperson repeated US President Donald Trump’s threat that all who continue to do business with Iran will be subject to US sanctions. The embassy spokesperson warned that this could mean losing access to the US financial system and the ability to do business with US companies.
Attempt to save Iran nuclear deal: The Trump administration has warned the European Union against trying to sidestep sanctions on Iran. Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions last year. Along with fellow signatories Russia and China, the EU maintains that Iran has not broken its side of the deal and should be allowed to trad
EU-Iran relations tested: Although Europe has been willing to show good faith since the US left the nuclear deal, relations with Tehran have worsened recently. The EU imposed sanctions this month over Oran’s missile tests and assassination plots on European soil.
Annoucement scheduled at EU meeting: Further details about INSTEX are due to be revealed later on Thursday at a meeting of EU defense and foreign ministers in Bucharest.
Comment: For daring to defy him, Trump is rumored to be planning to hit a number of European leaders with his purse at their next meeting.
Police Make More Than 10 Million Arrests a Year, but That Doesn’t Mean They’re Solving Crimes
January 31, 2019
by Alice Speri
The Intercept
Someone is arrested in the United States every three seconds. While arrests are the first entryway into a criminal justice system most acknowledge is in dire need of reform, we know remarkably little about who is arrested, where, and why. Advocates and legislators have pushed in recent years for policy changes at various points of the justice process, from pretrial to sentencing, but arrests remain one of the largest and least scrutinized contributors to the country’s mass incarceration and policing crises.
The FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics collect arrest data from the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies — but those agencies self-report on a voluntary basis, and there are significant disparities in the information they share. The data, for the most part, remains inaccessible to the broader public, and statistics on crime are isolated from data about the effectiveness of enforcement.
In an effort to better inform conversations about criminal justice, a team of researchers from the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy organization, took more than two years to combine eight different federal databases into a tool that allows users to analyze arrest trends at the national, state, and county levels against a series of variables, including offense types, demographic factors, and solved crimes.
The project was born “out of this moment of frustration over the past number of years that there isn’t very much information on policing, people feeling like it’s a black box,” said Rebecca Neusteter, co-author of a report Vera released Thursday alongside the new data tool. “We wanted to be able to demonstrate that there is some information. There are gaps in knowledge, for sure, but there are lots of pieces of information that the government is spending a lot of money to collect. It just hasn’t been released for people to look at previously.”
That data shows that of more than 10.5 million arrests made every year, the bulk are for noncriminal behavior, drug violations, and low-level offenses. Since 1980, arrests for drug violations have increased by 170 percent, and racial disparities in enforcement have grown even more stark. Still, a majority of victims don’t report their experiences to police, and police solve only a fraction of the crimes that are reported.
In recent years, after a series of police killings sparked nationwide protests, a growing movement for police accountability also exposed systemic problems with everyday policing practices. Most arrests are ultimately dismissed, but aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses, especially in communities of color, causes long-term damage to those communities and their relationship with police.The Persistent Harms of “Broken Windows”
The Vera tool analyzes arrest trends between 1980 and 2016. The data shows that overall arrests have declined by nearly 25 percent over the last decade. But it also shows that, while arrests for serious crimes have dropped consistent with declining crime rates nationwide, they are increasingly being substituted with arrests for minor misconduct.
Among the most common causes for arrest are low-level offenses like “disorderly conduct” and a broad, largely unexplained category the FBI refers to as “all other offenses,” which can include a variety of non-traffic offenses, violations of local ordinances, and civil violations like failure to pay fines or child support. Together with drug violations, these offenses account for more than 80 percent of arrests, while serious, violent offenses make up less than 5 percent of arrests.
“We really want to see a national conversation about whether or not this is a good use of resources,” said Neusteter. “Are we potentially creating more harm than good by arresting people for what are essentially really low-level, trivial offenses?”
While there is little integration between court data and police data, and it’s hard to track a case from arrest through prosecution, a majority of arrests are dismissed. Still, police continue to use them as an enforcement tool of their own, rather than a way to funnel criminal behavior into the justice system.
“That’s the broken windows theory,” said Vitale, referring to the largely discredited but still widely applied criminological view that low-level misconduct fuels more serious crime. “The arrest itself is the tool we are using to try to fix the problem.”
“There’s still profound political imperatives to use policing to solve every social problem, especially in poor communities and communities of color,” he added. “They’re getting complaints about kids on a street corner, so they are looking for any excuse to arrest these kids, and they don’t care if it’s prosecuted.”
“There’s a growing understanding that the problems of policing are not limited to a few high-profile deaths but are the result of a broader problem of over-policing,” said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of a book that argues for alternatives to policing rather than police reform. “The solution to this is not making police arrests friendlier or more professional: It’s to quit relying on arrests to solve any problem under the sun.”
What the FBI refers to as “drug abuse violations” lead to 1.5 million arrests annually, the Vera report found. And while the FBI doesn’t differentiate in how it categorizes drug violations, federal statistics have consistently shown that a vast majority of them are over simple possession, most often of marijuana.
The report also highlights the vast racial disparities in arrest rates, particularly when it comes to drug enforcement — and even in places where drug enforcement policies have been loosened. “In just about every state that’s made changes to how laws around marijuana are enforced, we see major racial disparities in enforcement,” Neusteter said.
Black people nationwide are an estimated 2.39 times more likely to be arrested for “drug abuse violations” than white people — even though drug use rates are similar across the two groups. The estimated number of arrests of black people across the country has risen by 23 percent in the last four decades. African-Americans now make up 12 percent of the U.S. population and an estimated 28 percent of all arrests.
Amid a push for more progressive polices in prosecutors’ offices, a growing number of district attorneys have announced that they will no longer prosecute marijuana possession. But that hasn’t necessarily translated into a drop in arrests yet.
“There’s some type of disconnect between what’s going on in the prosecutors’ offices and what’s going on with the police,” said Vitale, noting that police maintain significant discretion to make arrests over pretextual reasons. “Failure to prosecute doesn’t mean that the police can’t still arrest you, put you through the system, bring you to arraignment.”
“There’s this discourse out there that with the opioid crisis, there’s more openness to talking about treatment and how this is a medical problem, but this is not what we see in the arrests numbers,” he added. “There’s been some change in the discourse, but not in the actual underlying police practices.”Arresting Everyone Doesn’t Make Anyone Safer
Perhaps the report’s most revealing finding, however, is that such aggressive enforcement doesn’t seem to do much to improve public safety or solve crime. Only 40 percent of crime victims report their experiences to police, Vera found, and fewer than 25 percent of reported crimes are cleared by arrests.
“This television-inspired myth-making that police are out there all day solving serious crimes is just completely erroneous,” said Vitale. “We have this myth that if we didn’t have the police, crime would be out of control, when the reality is very little crime is reported to the police, and even less is solved by the police. There’s just no reason to equate police with public safety in this way.”
Arrests have an enormous impact on individuals: They can exacerbate economic disparities, harm an individual’s capacity to retain housing and jobs, and lead to devastating consequences like the loss of child custody or deportation. The mental health cost, too, is significant. But the huge number of arrests also comes at a cost to the safety of the community at large: both at the moment of the arrest itself, which can put those arrested, bystanders, and officers at risk of harm, and in the long run, as relationships between over-policed communities and law enforcement deteriorate, sometimes irreparably.
While that seems far too high a price, police continue to focus their attention on the enforcement of low-level offenses and noncriminal behavior, reinforcing a cycle of mistrust. That’s in part in response to arrest quotas and other incentives police get for productivity, as well as financial gains for agencies and municipalities that rely on punitive enforcement for funding. Vitale pointed to the controversial “collars for dollars” practice, by which officers will sometimes make arrests toward the end of their shifts in order to earn overtime pay, as they are required to remain with the person they arrested through the booking process. “A marijuana possession arrest at the end of the shift can be worth several hundred dollars for the officer,” he noted.
But part of the problem is also that police are the go-to solution for all kinds of complaints in communities with no meaningful alternatives. “The vast majority of police work is in response to 911 calls for service,” said Neusteter. “I think that the major component of the large number of arrests for low-level offenses has to do with the fact that police are being called as the default responders for these quality-of-life issues.”
There are some bright sides to the Vera report, which the authors hope will inspire further analysis and reform. Arrests of minors, for instance, decreased by more than 50 percent between 1980 and 2014, as juvenile-specific offenses like running away or curfew violations were decriminalized, and non-punitive programs were instituted in lieu of arrest. The solution, the report makes clear, is to find alternatives to enforcement for much of the behavior police currently address with arrest.
“People do not go to jail, they do not go to prison, without being arrested first,” said Neusteter. “But we haven’t seen enforcement and arrests tied very clearly to those conversations and ultimately to the strategies that are attached to improving them. That’s our ultimate goal here.”
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
January 31, 2019
by Dr. Peter Janney
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.
Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.
The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.
Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.
Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.
Conversation No. 98
Date: Friday, August 22, 1997
Commenced: 3:17 PM CST
Concluded: 3:35 PM CST
GD: Robert, we have talked about Clinton and I have been reading about his alleged tie ins with your people and the smuggling of drugs. Anything to it?
RTC: Oh yes, much true there. Drugs are brought up from South America, for cocaine and heroin and Mexico for marijuana. They just fly it in over the border and land at a safe small airfield, unload and go back from whence them came. Arizona is popular and some ranchers there are very rich from taking in landing fees.
GD: Clinton’s involvement?
RTC: His brother is hophead and Bill does like under the counter money. So does his wife. It’s a wink and a nod type of thing.
GD: Money corrupts and big money corrupts big people.
GD: Yes, anyone is for sale.
GD: I recall the story of the man in the bar who saw a beautiful woman come in. She sat next to him and he asked her if she would spend the night with him for a thousand dollars. She said she certainly would. Then he asked her if she would drop the price to fifty dollars. When she said, in some anger, ‘what do you think I am? He replied, ‘we already know that. I’m just trying to establish the price.’
RTC:(Laughter) I haven’t heard that one but it does fit. And don’t be fooled by Clinton. He is a large man, very smooth, a great talker and very jovial. Have you offed in a second and think nothing about it. Well, he’s done his duty and will retire, a rich man.. And he will write a book and the New York Times will rave about it.
GD: Yes, they praised Posner’s totally idiotic book on the Kennedy killing.
RTC: Oh that piece of shit. I mean both the book and the author. What an odious ass kisser that one is. Bought and paid for. And so is the Times. They print just what we tell them to print, where our operations are concerned, and kill whatever we tell them to. I have had to deal with them in the past. We toss them a few nice bones from time to time but they do as they are told, believe me.
GD: So much for freedom of the press.
RTC: (Laughter) What a joker you are, Gregory. The Jews own all the major papers in this country, and we work with them. They won’t print a negative word about Israel and on the domestic scene, they do as we ask them. In point of fact, the Jews here think they are going to own everything but in fact, they are here on sufferance. They’ve been kicked out of every country they have lived in throughout history. Mostly a bunch of swindlers, con men and the like. On sufferance. If things get bad here, the men in power, and they are not Jews, will use them as scapegoats and force them out. We don’t need concentration camps here as long as El Al can take them back to their Mediterranean paradise. Personally, the sooner the better before they ruin the stock market with their backdoor scheming and we have another depression.
GD: They had little to do with the ’29 one, however.
RTC: Just you wait, Gregory, they’ll do it again, mark my words. Yes, Hitler was right about them. Parasites. Never create anything and attach themselves to the system like leeches.
GD: As far as Clinton is concerned, he doesn’t have to worry about the Jews because of his wife but the born again morons hate him. Old Ken Staar is from Chicago and is as crazy as they come. As a matter of fact, all of these raging twits should be shoved into the El Al baggage compartments and shipped off with the Jews. By the way, did you know that the precious wailing wall in Jerusalem is not the foundation of Soloman’s temple but was built by the Arabs about 600 AD? How ironic it is to see devout Jews licking the stones that some Arab mason pissed on hundreds of years before. And there enough pieces of the true cross floating around to build a six room house.
RTC: The relic business was booming once.
GD: Well, now they sell other things, don’t they? I rarely read the main stream press because I don’t trust Israel and the press knocks themselves out to kiss their ass. I predict that if the US doesn’t disengage over there, the frustrated Arabs will start attacking us next. Washington said it best: No entangling alliances. Of course no one will follow such a course but the time will come when they wish they had.
RTC: I’m afraid so. This is beginning to sound like a Nazi party meeting but the truth will out, won’t it?
GD: Not in the New York Times, it won’t.
RTC: Isn’t the truth what people want to believe?
GD: Or are told to believe. If you lie to people long enough, they will either come to believe the lies or will recognize them for what they are and turn on the liars. I predict both of these concepts because one always follows the other.
(Concluded at 3:35 PM CST)