A Compendium of Various Official Lies, Business Scandals, Small Murders, Frauds, and Other Gross Defects of Our Current Political, Business and Religious Moral Lepers.

“When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes… Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”- Napoleon Bonaparte, 1815

 

“Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen”. – Huey Long

 

“I fired [General MacArthur] because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail “- Harry S Truman

 

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” -Thomas Jefferson.

 

“Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage”

– H.L. Mencken

 

 “For a quarter of a century the CIA has been repeatedly wrong about every major political and economic question entrusted to its analysis.” 

-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 

The New York Times, 1991.

 

Don’t tell a lie! Some men I’ve known
Commit the most appalling acts,
Because they happen to be prone
To an economy of facts;
And if to lie is bad, no doubt
’Tis even worse to get found out!

 

My children, never, never steal!
To know their offspring is a thief
Will often make a father feel
Annoyed and cause a mother grief;
So never steal, but, when you do,
Be sure there’s no one watching you.

 

The Wicked flourish like the bay,
At Cards or Love they always win,
Good Fortune dogs their steps all day,
They fatten while the Good grow thin.
The Righteous Man has much to bear;

       The Bad becomes a Bullionaire!

 The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C.  October 28, 2016:””As the election day draws closer, both sides are becoming frantic. The Clinton camp, feeling secure in establishment and almost total media support, is now feeling frightened by more and more negativity appearing in the media. They ought to know that the media are staffed almost entirely by whores who shift with the wind and live in a dream-world of self-importance. The same media yaps at Putin’s Russia, blaming them for leaking radiators, lost pets, fallen arches and chronic constipation. American cannot abide any potential rival to her belief that she rules the world, ergo the yapping.If Hillary wins, and she might, there will be serious social problems erupting both domestically and internationally. We always get what we pay for.”

Voter Suppression Is the Real Election Scandal

October 27 2016

by Alice Speri

The Intercept

The integrity of this year’s election is under attack — but not in the way Donald Trump claims it is. Ahead of last week’s final debate, the Republican nominee called the election “rigged” dozens of times — in at least 20 tweets sent in the course of a single weekend as well as at rallies across the country in which he called on supporters to show up in “certain areas” and watch the polls.

“And when I say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about, right?” he told supporters in Ohio. “Go to your place and vote. And go pick some other place and go sit there with your friends and make sure it’s on the up and up,” he encouraged supporters in Michigan. “The only way we can lose, in my opinion — and I really mean this, Pennsylvania — is if cheating goes on.”

Trump’s comments, as well as those made by some of his supporters who more explicitly voiced the racism behind his call to watch the polls, sent chills down the spines of many Americans, conjuring up visions of civil rights-era violence and voter harassment that’s not unheard of even in more recent elections.

But the real problems with this year’s vote will be largely invisible on Election Day. Three years ago, the Supreme Court struck down a major section of the Voting Rights Act, opening the doors to new efforts to restrict voting. The impact of that decision will be felt at the polls for the first time this year. Measures passed in the aftermath of that decision — restrictive voter ID laws, new requirements for voter registration, cuts to early voting options and polling sites, and other schemes — are the real threat to the November 8 vote, civil rights advocates say. And these procedural obstacles to the polls pose more insidious, large-scale challenges to suffrage than the more egregious and illegal harassment of the sort Trump has repeatedly advocated.

“This is an unfortunate part of our history,” Leah Aden, a senior counsel with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, told The Intercept. “People are acutely aware of the changing demographics in this country and while we should all be working towards more people participating, there’s always been this segment of our country that has wanted to limit who is part of the political process.”

Voter intimidation, Aden noted, has traditionally gone hand in hand with the growing political participation of minorities. This election is slated to be the most racially diverse in U.S. history, a reality that’s already beginning to tip the scales in some swing states. One in three eligible voters is a member of a minority group, and minorities also make up 43 percent of new voters.

The growing diversity of the electorate, coupled with the uniquely racist and incendiary rhetoric of the Trump campaign, has fueled fears of widespread intimidation. Responding to Trump’s call to watch the polls, a supporter at a recent Ohio rally told the Boston Globe that he planned to look for “Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American.”

“I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally,” he said, describing a practice that’s unequivocally illegal under federal law. “I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”

The specter of voter intimidation and growing fears of violence at the polls have led some local officials to add “active shooter training” to Election Day preparation, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented growing threats of “civil war” from white supremacists should Hillary Clinton win.

“It’ll be bloody but I think if enough heads are busted the will become loud and clear” a commenter wrote on the alt-right website the Daily Stormer. “They want violence? Just let the try declaring Hillary winner,” another user wrote. “Enough of being tough in the blogs, be tough in real life,” wrote a commenter in one of 240 militia group Facebook pages that are open to the public.

The Trump campaign has called on volunteers to sign up as election observers. To lead the effort, the campaign reportedly recruited Mike Roman, a Republican who in 2008 helped promote a video showing two members of the New Black Panthers, one with a billy club, outside a Philadelphia polling site. That isolated incident fueled months of media frenzy over voter intimidation and prompted two DOJ investigations. Trump adviser Roger Stone told The Guardian that 1,300 volunteers from the grassroots Citizens for Trump group planned to conduct exit polls in nine swing-state cities with large minority populations — a plan resembling voter intimidation more than traditional exit polling. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on these reports.

But despite the incessant rhetoric of election fraud coming from Trump’s camp, some remain skeptical that significant Election Day intimidation will actually take place. A Republican election official in Philadelphia — one of the cities that Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Newt Gingrich all singled out as being rife with fraud — told the New York Times that his office hadn’t received “a single call from somebody outside Philadelphia looking to be a poll watcher.”

Trump himself seems to be hazy on the details. In Pennsylvania, for instance, poll monitors have to be registered to vote in the county they are monitoring. “So when Trump goes to rural Pennsylvania and says I want you to go to certain parts of Philadelphia and watch the polls, he is telling them to do something illegal,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s voting rights project. “Everyone agrees that the parties are entitled to and should have people watch the polls. We want certified poll monitors. We don’t want these broad, blanket calls for random people to show up at the polls in places they’re not familiar with and look for anything that they think is suspicious.”

But even alarmism is a form of voter intimidation — and it cuts both ways. Researchers have suggested that Trump’s insistence that the election is rigged might be discouraging his own supporters more than his opponents. And civil rights advocates are taking the threats of intimidation seriously while warning against the inhibiting impact of hyped-up speculation about Election Day disturbances.

“It’s tough, because I don’t want voters to be afraid, I don’t want them to think that this is something that’s very common,” said Ho. “But at the same time, people need to know that this is something that happens from time to time, and when it does, they need to know their rights and they need to report what they see.”

In fact, while voter intimidation and harassment have become far more rare than subtler and more insidious assaults on voting rights, there are plenty of precedents, and one does not need to travel too far back in history to find them.

In 1964, Republican Party lawyers, including future Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist, demanded that black and Latino voters in Arizona read out sections of the U.S. Constitution to prove their citizenship. In 1966, a year after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, white teenagers in Georgia harassed black voters in line at the polls as police watched; white election officials inspected black voters’ ballots in Alabama; and Mississippi plantation workers were forced to cast their ballots in plantation stores as their bosses watched. The list goes on and on.

Fast forward to 2004, when University of Pittsburgh students were held up for hours at the polls as Republican Party lawyers challenged the credentials of “pretty much every young voter who showed up.” That same year, in Harris County, Texas, local police officers showed up at an early voting site and demanded to see IDs, saying anyone with an outstanding warrant would go to jail. In 2012, an organizer with the right-wing poll-watching group “True the Vote” told volunteer monitors that the voters they targeted should be made to feel “like driving and seeing the police following you.”

Civil rights advocates fear that Trump’s call for his supporters to watch the polls might lead to more incidents of that nature this year. Fliers circulating on social media have been reminding voters of their rights, calling on anyone experiencing intimidation or obstruction to take photos and report the incident to authorities. And in addition to the parties’ and campaigns’ official poll monitors — which must be pre-registered with local election officials — independent observers will also be watching the polls and fielding calls from voters about any irregularities.

One such initiative is the National Lawyers’ Committee’s “election protection” program, a nonpartisan effort that will dispatch trained monitors to 27 states. The group has also worked to remove barriers to the polls ahead of the vote: It recently filed suit in Virginia after the state’s online registration tool crashed, causing eligible voters to miss the deadline, and it successfully fought to extend the registration deadline in North Carolina areas affected by Hurricane Matthew.

Kristen Clarke, president of the committee, told The Intercept she fears the impact of both those procedural obstacles and the prospect of more blatant harassment. “We want a democracy where people feel they are free and able to participate,” she said. “My hope is that people will not be discouraged and stay at home, that’s just not a healthy outcome for our democracy.”

“Legal” Obstacles to Voting

But even with the potential for intimidation at the polls, by far the greatest challenge to this year’s election will come from state and local governments themselves. The widespread, unfounded talk of election fraud pushed by Trump has been “a distraction from the real problems that voters face in communities around the country,” Clarke said. “There are voters in certain communities that are particularly vulnerable this election cycle in the wake of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.”

This election marks the first presidential race since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required nine states and several jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to secure federal approval before changing election laws and procedures.

That decision was followed by a rash of measures across the country — some proposed within hours of the court’s ruling — restricting voting access for the minority voters the Voting Rights Act was originally intended to protect. Many of those measures have been challenged in court, some successfully, but uncertainty over the new election rules has left voters confused and voting rights advocates scrambling to litigate every new attempt at restrictions.

At least 14 states have new restrictions in place this year, including voter ID laws, changes in registration requirements, and cuts to early voting options. In Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona, officials closed 70 percent of the polling sites, causing long delays during the primaries and prompting a DOJ investigation. In Florida and Ohio, officials tried to purge thousands of mostly black voters from their rolls. As The Intercept has reported, Missouri legislators even proposed changing the state’s constitution — which unlike the federal one includes an affirmative right to vote — in an effort to pass stricter voter ID laws. The proposed amendment will be on the ballot on November 8. The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund maintains a regularly updated tally of voter suppression efforts that is more than 100 pages long.

Not incidentally, the states that in recent years have been most adamant about restricting access to the polls are those that were previously covered by the Voting Rights Act’s federal oversight, as well as those seeing the growing political participation of minorities. According to research compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice, of the 11 states with the highest African-American turnout in 2008, six have new restrictions in place, and of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth between 2000 and 2010, seven passed laws making it harder to vote.

In light of the Shelby County decision, the DOJ has significantly scaled back its election monitoring. In 2012, the agency’s observers monitored elections in 13 states. This year, they will be inside polls in only four states, only one of which, Louisiana, is in the South, where historically the federal government exercised broad oversight over voting rights.

The Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, one of the world’s largest human rights and security groups and a monitor of elections across the world, plans to dispatch nearly 500 observers to the U.S. The organization has been sending observers to monitor U.S. elections since 2004, but this year is different.

“I have often heard claims of fraud by electoral contestants,” wrote Christine Muttonen, the mission’s coordinator, in an op-ed for CNN. “But these tend to be in countries emerging from authoritarianism and in post-conflict scenarios; they are somewhat surprising to hear in the world’s oldest constitutional republic.”

Election fraud, the ostensible motivation between both Trump’s “rigged vote” rhetoric and voter restriction measures across the country, has repeatedly been debunked as a myth. What can’t be debunked is this country’s history of discrimination and repression of communities of color, and that shameful legacy remains the most enduring threat to the integrity of the November 8 vote.

Russia warships: Kuznetsov battle group ‘refuels off North Africa’

October 27, 2016

BBC

A group of warships including Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is reportedly refuelling at sea off North Africa en route to Syria.

Plans for some of the ships to dock at a Spanish port were cancelled after Nato allies voiced concern.

Nato is concerned planes from the carrier could be used to attack civilians in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

President Vladimir Putin also hinted that an aerial bombardment of rebel-held east Aleppo could resume.

Russia and its ally, the Syrian government, had said earlier that they would continue a moratorium on the bombing.

At an international conference in the Russian city of Sochi on Thursday, Mr Putin said other parties to the conflict had not been keeping their promises.

“Where is the disengagement of terrorists from the healthy part of the opposition?” Mr Putin asked.

“So far we have been restrained, and we have not been rude to our partners, but everything has its limits. We could respond.”

The Admiral Kuznetsov can carry dozens of fighter bombers and helicopters. It has been sailing for the past week from Russia to the Mediterranean.

The BBC’s Jonathan Marcus reports from Brussels that the battle group is currently at anchor off the North African coast and taking on fuel.

The group has two “oilers” (tankers) with it and it is not clear which of the vessels is actually refuelling, he adds.

The Russian embassy in Madrid formally withdrew a request to Spain for refuelling after being approached by the Spanish foreign ministry.

“Given the information which appeared on the possibility that these ships would participate in supporting military action in the Syrian city of Aleppo, the ministry of foreign affairs requested clarification from the embassy of the Russian Federation in Madrid,” the Spanish foreign ministry had said on Wednesday in a statement to the BBC.

It added that permission had been granted in September for three Russian ships to dock in the port of Ceuta between 28 October and 2 November. It said such stops for Russian naval vessels had taken place for years in Spanish ports.

Nato had said the final decision on resupply rested with Spain.

“We are concerned and I have expressed that very clearly about the potential use of this battle group to increase Russia’s ability and to be a platform for air strikes against Syria,” Nato’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told journalists on Tuesday.

The naval group also includes a nuclear-powered battle cruiser, two anti-submarine warships and four support vessels, probably escorted by submarines.

The battle group is expected to join about 10 other Russian vessels already off the Syrian coast.

Some 2,700 people have been killed or injured since the Russian-backed Syrian offensive started last month, according to activists.

Western leaders have said Russian and Syrian air strikes on Aleppo could amount to war crimes, an accusation rejected by Russia.

About 250,000 civilians who live in Aleppo have been trapped by the fighting. Moscow announced last week a “humanitarian pause” in attacks as part of a plan to allow civilians and fighters to leave the area.

Iraqi villagers celebrate freedom from Islamic State, but still haunted by terror

October 27, 2016

by Michael Georgy

Reuters

FADILIYA, Iraq- When Kurdish fighters cleared Islamic State from the northern Iraqi village of Fadiliya, some residents celebrated by passing around cigarettes – an act that would have earned them a public whipping under the group’s reign of terror.

Peshmerga forces took the village on Thursday as they advanced towards Mosul, Islamic State’s last main stronghold in Iraq which lies about four km (2.5 miles) away.

As the fighters moved through the streets and greeted villagers, there was no longer any sign of the jihadists, alive or dead. Their fear easing, local people began speaking openly for the first time about their two years under Islamic State occupation.

“If you are caught smoking you get whipped with a water hose 50 times in public,” said Othman Mahmoud, as his friend handed around a pack of cigarettes with a smile.

A teenager joined the gathering, describing a code imposed with ferocity on every aspect of personal life, right down to facial hair.

“If you are caught growing sideburns you get whipped 25 times,” he said. “There were so many things we could not do.”

Young men in their 20s all had beards of similar length to meet the demands of the group which captured Fadiliya during a lightning sweep of northern Iraq in 2014.

One of them had complied with the beard rules, but was still punished after getting into a harmless argument with a friend while playing soccer. He was publicly whipped on the dirt pitch.

The short distance away in Mosul, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi walked into a mosque two years ago to declare a caliphate and himself as the leader of the world’s Muslims.

Now Iraqi and Kurdish forces are recapturing territory as part of the offensive to recapture Mosul from Islamic State, which is known by its opponents in Arabic as Daesh. The battle for Iraq’s second city is expected to be the biggest since a U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003.

Several residents and a peshmerga commander said it took only about 50 militants to control Fadiliya, whose population once numbered 5,000 before many villagers fled, so pervasive was fear of the group.

HIDDEN CELLPHONE

After 10 days of pressing the jihadists, Kurdish forces took full control after firing mortar rounds at their positions on Thursday. Residents had hung up white flags on their homes, hoping to avoid being targeted by airstrikes.

Children joyfully ran through the streets singing songs and chanting “peshmerga”, “peshmerga”, “peshmerga”.

One peshmerga fighter named Ahmed arrived at his home to see his loved ones for the first time in two years.

His sister stood in the doorway and wept and screamed while looking up to the sky. “Daesh ruined our lives. Look what they have done to us,” she said.

Ahmed’s brother-in-law described how the family had taken risks to make contact with him every 25 days. Possession of a cellphone was punishable by torture, or worse, he said.

“We kept the cellphone hidden and only used it to call him. But we hid in a room and whispered,” said the brother-in-law, Wasim Abdullah. “Islamic State had a habit of climbing over people’s walls at night for surprise inspections of homes.”

The jihadists appeared to have melted away. “Some of them escaped through tunnels,” said a peshmerga commander.

But there were plenty of reminders of what they had done – cars that had been blown up, demolished buildings, bullet holes. “They kill. They kill,” said a 12-year-old girl named Nour.

Villagers said they had not seen any public executions or beheadings – Islamic State’s favorite method of spreading fear.

They noted, however, that people were often taken to Mosul for the maximum punishment, and word always got back to Fadiliya so that threatening notes that Islamic State distributed would keep everyone on edge.

As more and more people came out of their homes to taste freedom that had been unthinkable for so long, Khalid Abdel Hafiz tried to hold back tears as he recalled a knock on his door one week ago. The militants took away his 19-year-old son Ihsan along with 14 other young men.

“They just showed up and said ‘we have security orders from high up’,” he said. “I have no information about Ihsan. I am resigned to the fact I will never see him again.”

(editing by David Stamp)

Justice Department charges dozens in massive Indian call center scheme

October 27, 2016

by Matt Zapotosky

The Washington Post

The callers in India, claiming to be officials with the Internal Revenue Service or immigration services, would present those who answered the phone with an ultimatum. Pay us, or we’ll fine you, deport you or arrest you.

Their network was expansive, and their work lucrative. Justice Department officials announced charges against 61 people and entities Thursday and said the call center scheme had scammed at least 15,000 victims out of more than $250 million.

Phone scams are not new, but the breadth and sophistication of this one is notable. Justice Department officials said the defendants — 24 of them based in the United States — ran at least five call center groups overseas. Leslie Caldwell, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said she hoped the efforts of U.S. and Indian authorities would put a dent in the robust industry of phone scammers.

“We have seen a drop-off in the success rate of these scams,” Caldwell said.

U.S. authorities said they arrested 20 people in this country and carried out nine search warrants Thursday. A few others involved were already in custody. Earlier this month, in a separate case, police in Mumbai raided a call center and detained 770 employees for questioning. The Justice Department said that it was focused on a network of call centers in Ahmedabad and that some of the centers’ owners have been charged.

A grand jury in federal court in the Southern District of Texas returned an indictment in the case on Oct. 19. Officials announced the unsealing of it on Thursday. The charges against those involved include conspiracy to commit identity theft, impersonation of an officer of the United States, wire fraud and money laundering.

Bruce Foucart, assistant director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s homeland security investigations, said the scammers conducted online research on potential targets using Facebook and other online sources and bilked “savvy, successful and law-abiding people.” He said they went to “frightening lengths” to ensure the success of their scheme.

In one instance, Foucart said, scammers convinced a Southern California woman with cancer that police would show up at her workplace for purported unpaid tax bills stemming from her medical treatment. She paid the scammers $7,000, Foucart said.

In another instance, he said, when a man did not respond to phone demands for four years of purported back taxes, the scammers called 911 posing as the man and told the dispatcher he was armed and wanted to kill police. Armed officers showed up at the man’s house, where his daughter was home alone, Foucart said.

“They convey authority and a sense of urgency that leaves their victims terrified,” he said.

Those involved had a network of U.S.-based co-conspirators who would liquidate and launder the ill-gotten gains by buying prepaid debit cards, which they often registered using the personal information of identity-theft victims. They also would send wire transfers using fake names and use money transferring methods known as “hawalas,” in which money is effectively moved internationally outside the U.S. banking system.

Caldwell said the scammers were able to display their numbers on caller ID systems as being from the U.S. government, though she said no government agency would call demanding money as they did.

“If you get one of these calls,” she said, “it is not the U.S. government calling you.”

Authorities said callers also sometimes would defraud victims by offering small, short-term loans or telling them they were eligible for grants, then requesting a processing fee or a good-faith deposit to demonstrate the victims’ ability to pay it back. The callers would pocket that money and never provide the grant or loan, authorities said.

Caldwell said that authorities would seek to recover the money that was stolen, but that doing so might be difficult, and that it is possible that victims would not be repaid.

Florida man pleads guilty to hacking, spamming scheme

October 27, 2016

by Nate Raymond

Reuters

A Florida man pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges stemming from his role in wide-ranging hacking scheme that generated $1.3 million through the hijacking of customer email accounts to send unsolicited “spam” messages, prosecutors said.

Timothy Livingston, 31, entered his plea in federal court in Newark, New Jersey to three counts including conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers and access devices, prosecutors said.

His plea came ahead of a trial scheduled for Nov. 14, and followed guilty pleas in June by two other men in the case, Tomasz Chmielarz of Rutherford, New Jersey and Devin McArthur of Ellicott City, Maryland.

As part of a plea agreement, Livingston agreed to forfeit nearly $1.35 million as well as property he obtained using proceeds from the scheme, including a Ferrari and Cadillac, prosecutors said. He is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 27.

A lawyer for Livingston did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors said Livingston, who owned a spam company called A Whole Lot of Nothing LLC, solicited Chmielarz to write computer programs that send spam in a manner that conceals their origin and bypasses spam filters.

In pleading guilty, Livingston admitted that he also hacked into individual email accounts and used corporate mail servers to further his spam campaigns, prosecutors said.

He also admitted he and Chmielarz created custom software that appropriated a corporate website belonging to a New York-based technology company in order to use its servers to send spam that appeared to be from the company, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors had previously said the scheme that targeted personal information of 60 million people, including customers of Comcast Corp, where McArthur worked during the period in question.

The case is U.S. v. Livingston et al, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey, No. 15-cr-00626.

(Editing by Alistair Bell)

FBI to review more emails related to Clinton’s private email use

October 28, 2016

by Susan Heavey and Jonathan Allen |

Reuters

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK-The FBI said on Friday it will investigate additional emails that have surfaced relating to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system, in a new twist to the U.S. presidential campaign with 11 days to go before Election Day.

In a letter to several U.S. congressional committee chairmen, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said the agency will determine whether the emails contain classified information, adding that it is unclear how significant the new materials may be.

Comey said he “cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work.”

The announcement shook up the campaign for the Nov. 8 election, where Clinton is the Democratic Party’s candidate and the front-runner in opinion polls.

The FBI spent about a year investigating Clinton’s use of an unauthorized private email server for her work as U.S. secretary of state between 2009 and 2013 after it emerged that there were classified government secrets in some of her emails.

In July, the FBI characterized Clinton’s handling of classified information via email as “extremely careless” but, after a months-long investigation, it recommended that no criminal charges be brought.

Comey provided no further details on Friday about the nature of the additional emails now being looked into.

“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote in the letter released on Friday.

He said that the FBI “cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant.”

Spokespeople for Clinton did not immediately respond to a request for comment. She has previously apologized for her server, which was set up in her home in Chappaqua, New York. She said the arrangement was a mistake, and that she did not knowingly send or receive classified information.

Friday’s news was seized upon by Donald Trump, Clinton’s Republican rival for the presidency, who has repeatedly sought to cite her email practices as disqualifying her for office.

“I need to open with a very critical breaking news announcement,” Trump said at the start of a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, before describing Comey’s letter.

He was drowned out by a chant from the crowd: “Lock her up!”

“We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office,” Trump continued. “I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made.”

Paul Ryan, the House of Representative Speaker and the most senior elected Republican in Congress, said Clinton should not get classified briefings until the investigation was over.

“Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame,” he said in a statement. “She was entrusted with some of our nation’s most important secrets, and she betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information.”

U.S. stock prices fell along with U.S. Treasury yields at midsession on Friday after the FBI news.

The U.S. dollar slipped against major currencies such as the euro and the yen, while the Mexican peso fell to an 11-day low.

A victory for Trump has been viewed as a risk for the Mexican currency given his promises to clamp down on illegal immigration and rethink trade relations.

(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball and Julia Harte in Washington, Steve Holland in Manchester and Sam Forgione in New York; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Alistair Bell)

Three in Florida, Virginia charged with criminal voter fraud

October 28, 2016

by Scott Malone

Reuters

Officials in Florida and Virginia filed voter fraud charges against three people in apparently unrelated cases on Friday, just 11 days before American voters cast ballots in the hotly contested presidential race.

The charges targeted a Florida woman and a Virginia man accused of filing bogus voter registration forms and a Florida woman alleged to have tampered with absentee ballots she was opening at the Miami-Dade Elections Department.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has charged in recent weeks that the election will be rigged in favor of Democrat Hillary Clinton, though he has shown no proof for these claims and many Republicans have called them unfounded.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle in Florida said that 74-year-old Gladys Coego, had been working as an absentee ballot opener when a supervisor allegedly saw her changing ballots that had been left blank to support a mayoral candidate. Prosecutors said that Coego admitted to marking the ballots, and was charged with two felony counts of marking or designating the ballot of another.

“The integrity of the electoral process is intact because our procedures work,” said Christina White, the county’s election supervisor, in a statement.

Separately, 33-year-old Tomika Curgil was charged with five felony counts of submitting false voter registration information for allegedly handing in forms filled out by fictitious voters while working on a voter-registration drive for a medical marijuana advocacy group.

A Virginia man was also charged with submitting falsified forms while working for a voter-registration campaign, state prosecutors said.

Vafalay Massaquoi, 30, was arraigned on two felony counts of forging a public record and two counts of voter registration fraud.

“There is no allegation that any illegal vote was actually cast in this case,” said Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney Bryan Porter. “Furthermore, since the fraudulent applications involved fictitious people, had the fraud not been uncovered, the risk of actual fraudulent votes being cast was low.”

Neither Coego, Curgil nor Massaquoi could be reached for immediate comment.

A man in Texas, where early voting started on Monday, was arrested on Monday on charges of electioneering and loitering near a polling place, public records show.

The man, Brett Mauthe, had been charged for showing up to vote in a Trump hat and T-shirt with the phrase “basket of deplorables,” a reference to a comment Clinton made disparaging her rivals’ supporters, election officials told local media.

(This version of the story was refiled to fix a typographical error in last paragraph to make it “hat” instead of “had”)

(Additional reporting by Jonathan Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, and Letitia Stein in Tampa, Florida; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

 

Italian earthquakes were retribution for anti-Jewish UNESCO vote – Israeli deputy minister

October 28, 2016

RT

Two earthquakes, which struck Italy this week, were “retribution” for the country’s support of the UNESCO resolution disregarding the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, Israeli Deputy Minister for Regional Cooperation Ayoob Kara said.

“I’m sure that the earthquake happened because of the UNESCO decision,” Kara, a member of the ruling Likud Party, wrote in a memo, Ynetnews website reported.

Ironically, the Israeli politician was on a state visit to the Vatican when the quakes hit central Italy on Wednesday, killing one and injuring 10 people.

Earlier the same day, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), passed a resolution criticizing Israel for its handling of the holy site in Jerusalem – called Temple Mount by Jews, and Haram al-Sharif by Muslims.

The document was adopted after heated debate over its wording, and particularly the Arabic names used in the document. Italy was among the nations voting in favor of the resolution.

Israel blasted UNESCO and its Arab members for trying to undermine Jewish connections to the holy site.

Kara arrived in the Vatican in a fruitless effort to avert the resolution, but still managed to have a small chat with the leader of the Catholic Church.

According to Kara, Pope Francis “strongly disagreed” with the resolution.

“He (the Pope) even said publicly that the holy land is connected to the Nation of Israel,” the deputy minister stressed.

As for surviving the natural disaster, the Israeli politician said that “going through the earthquake was not the most comfortable of experiences, but we trusted that the Holy See would keep us safe.”

Northern Ireland High Court dismisses Brexit challenge

The High Court in Belfast has ruled that the UK can legislate for Northern Ireland without any special procedure. Two parallel claims had argued that the impact of Brexit challenges Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accords.

DW

Northern Ireland’s High Court rejected on Friday a legal challenge to the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.

The case marks the first legal judgment regarding the Brexit referendum, with politicians and markets keeping a keen eye on proceedings.

The court in Belfast threw out two parallel claims, both of which rested on Northern Ireland’s 1998 Good Friday peace accords, which ended three decades of bloodshed and sectarian fighting . The first claim, brought by a cross-party group of politicians, argued that under the peace agreement Northern Ireland’s constitutional arrangements can only be altered with the consent of its residents.

The second claim, brought by veteran victims’ rights campaigner Raymond McCord, challenged the impact of Brexit on the Northern Ireland peace process. There are fears that Britain’s withdrawal from the EU could lead to the reintroduction of border controls with the Republic of Ireland, which is an EU member and not a part of the UK.

However, Judge Paul Maguire dismissed the application, ruling that neither Northern Ireland’s parliament nor its laws could override the British government. It was “difficult to see how the court can overlook the importance of the terms in which the 1998 Act are cast or to deviate from what to date has been plain, namely that the United Kingdom parliament has retained to itself the ability to legislate for Northern Ireland,” Maguire said. “While the wind of change may be about to blow, the precise direction in which it will blow cannot yet be determined so there is a level of uncertainty.”

UK Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed the ruling; a spokesman said it would allow the British government “to proceed to trigger Article 50 [the formal process of rescinding EU membership] as planned” by the end of March.

However, the Belfast court said it would defer to the English courts whether the British government has a “Royal Prerogative” to invoke Article 50 without the explicit backing of the UK parliament.

Appeal process

McCord said immediately after the ruling that he would appeal the High Court’s decision, bringing the challenge to the Supreme Court in London, the UK’s highest judicial body.

“We didn’t expect to win today because this was always going to an appeal,” McCord’s lawyer, Ciaran O’Hare said. “We are disappointed but today was a skirmish, the main battle is yet to come.”

Representatives for the cross-party group said they would mull whether to appeal over the coming days. “We are disappointed but it remains our duty to protect the people of Northern Ireland,” he said.

In June 23 Brexit referendum, 52 percent of the UK population voted for Britain to leave the EU. However, within Northern Ireland, 56 percent voted to remain.

As England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate legal systems within the UK, other legal challenges to the Brexit vote are under way elsewhere in the UK. The case in Belfast serves as a crucial first judgment on the legal disputes surrounding the issue. The case before the Supreme Court will rule on whether May can trigger Article 50 without consulting parliament.

The ruling might also have crucial implications for Scotland. Its devolved government has argued that it too should have a say on Brexit, as its population also voted to remain in the EU. The ruling Scottish National Party, led by Nicola Sturgeon has drafted a legislation for a second independence referendum from the UK, which it says gives the country an option to protect its position within the EU.

US militia members acquitted over armed occupation

Seven members of a militia that occupied a wildlife refuge in the US state of Orgegon have been cleared of all charges. A 41-day standoff with police, which began in January, ended with one death.

October 28, 2016

DW

Group leader Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan and five others were cleared on Thursday of conspiring to prevent federal workers from their jobs when they staged an armed occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Even attorneys for the defendants were surprised by the jury acquittals, which dealt a stinging defeat to federal prosecutors and conservation groups, one of which said the outcome would likely embolden extremist movements.

Seven members of a militia that occupied a wildlife refuge in the US state of Orgegon have been cleared of all charges. A 41-day standoff with police, which began in January, ended with one death.

Group leader Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan and five others were cleared on Thursday of conspiring to prevent federal workers from their jobs when they staged an armed occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Even attorneys for the defendants were surprised by the jury acquittals, which dealt a stinging defeat to federal prosecutors and conservation groups, one of which said the outcome would likely embolden extremist movements.

Defense attorney Lisa Ludwig called the verdict “stunning” as the group’s supporters erupted in cheers, local news media reported.

Bundy and his followers took over the bird sanctuary, located 480 kilometers (300 miles) southeast of Portland on January 2.

Initially they said their occupation was carried out against prison sentences given to two local ranchers convicted of setting fires on public land. But their confrontation with authorities quickly turned into a wider campaign to force authorities to transfer federal land to state or local government control.

The takeover followed a similar confrontation by the Bundy brothers’ father Cliven Bundy, who had clashed with federal officials in 2014 over cattle grazing on public land in Nevada. The brothers still face assault and others charges from that standoff.

Threat of jail

The six men and one woman each faced up to six years in prison on the conspiracy charge. Several also faced gun charges during the five-week trial.

The 12-member jury found all seven defendants not guilty of the most serious charge, conspiracy to impede federal officers through intimidation, threats or force.

The defendants also were acquitted of illegal possession of firearms in a federal facility and theft of government property, except in the case of Ryan Bundy, for whom jurors were deadlocked on the charge of theft.

Several weeks into the occupation, the Bundys and several others were arrested when they left the refuge and headed to a community meeting to plead their case. The group’s spokesman Robert “LaVoy” Finicum was shot dead by police. A few days later, the four remaining holdouts surrendered.

The case has reignited the debate over government control over millions of acres of public land in western US states, which has been a thorny issue for decades.

Several other people are due to stand trial over charges relating to the occupation in February.

 

If Clinton Campaign Believes WikiLeaks Emails Are Forged, Why Don’t They Prove It?

October 28 2016

by Zaid Jilani

The Intercept

Top Democrats have repeatedly waved off substantial questions arising from their hacked emails by falsely implying that some of them are forgeries created by Russian hackers.

The problem with that is that no one has found a single case of anything forged among the information released from hacks of either Clinton campaign or Democratic Party officials.

The strategy dates all the way back to a conference call with Democratic lawmakers in August. Politico reported that a number of Democratic strategists suggested that Russian hackers — who have been blamed by U.S. intelligence agencies for supplying the emails to Wikileaks and other web sites — could sprinkle false data among the real information.

Since then, despite the complete lack of evidence to support such a claim, it’s become a common dodge among leading Democrats and the Clinton campaign when asked questions about the substance of the emails.

Clinton strategist Joel Benenson, asked about an email in which Clinton campaign staffers decide to accept foreign lobbyist money, used that line on MSNBC on Sunday.

“These emails, we have no idea whether they’re authentic or not,” he said. “Or whether they’ve been tampered with. I know I’ve seen things that aren’t authentic, that we know aren’t authentic, and it’s not surprising.”

Clinton’s running mate, Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, also suggested that the emails may have been doctored during an appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday.

“The one [email] that has referred to me was flat-out completely incorrect,” he said. “So I don’t know whether it was doctored or whether the person sending it didn’t know what they were talking about. Clearly, I think there’s a capacity for much of the information in them to be wrong.”

Kaine appeared to be referring to a July 2015 email to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta from political consultant Erick Mullen. In the email, Mullen claimed a man named Bob Glennon has informed two Democratic senators that Clinton “has personally told Tim Kaine he’s the veep.”

Clinton may or may not have selected Kaine as her running mate a year before announcing it publicly. However, that doesn’t mean the email is a forgery. It was simply Mullen’s view of things. Podesta’s response to the email is itself jovial: “And here I thought it was going to be me.” No one has alleged the email as it was published on Wikileaks is a forgery.

The Intercept contacted Benenson to point to any emails he believes are inauthentic. He did not respond.

Jennifer Granholm, a senior adviser to the pro-Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record, was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether the Clinton campaign should be responding to revelations revealed by Wikileaks.

“There are reports that these have been doctored,” she told Tapper on October 19. “And Newsweek had found that, in fact, that was happening.”

Granholm was referring, inaccurately, to a blog post by Kurt Eichenwald where the Newsweek writer pointed out that the English-language, Russian-owned news website Sputnik had misreported the contents of one of the emails. But there was no evidence that the email itself as it existed on the Wikileaks website was false or doctored. Eichenwald himself added to the misunderstanding by posting a series of tweets imputing that the email had been forged — by Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on October 18, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, was asked if the Russian government would impact the election by hacking voting systems.

“What worries me the most … is between now and the election the Russians dump information that is fabricated,” Schiff warned. “To get a last minute dump of emails that contain fabricated emails that are widely reported in the press, and there isn’t enough time to fact check and demonstrate the forgery, that is what really concerns me.”

CNN host Wolf Blitzer pushed back, “But have you confirmed that any of these emails released over the past two weeks, if you will, by Wikileaks are fabricated or doctored?”

“You know I’m not in a position to be able to do that,” Schiff demurred.

The Democrats’ muddy-the-waters strategy has had some success. For example, the popular fact-checking website Politifact wrote an article on Sunday titled: “Are the Clinton WikiLeaks emails doctored, or are they authentic?”

The article cited numerous claims by Democrats that they cannot verify the authenticity of the emails and a number of experts who claimed that it is in fact possible that false information is in the emails. But the writer also noted that the Clinton campaign has not offered any evidence that any of the emails have been doctored.

Ordinarily, if there is no supporting evidence for a claim, PolitiFact has no problem declaring it false. But in this case PolitiFact reached no conclusion — and actually went so far as to raise the possibility that the Clinton campaign does have proof that the emails have been doctored, but isn’t sharing it for political reasons.

(Ironically, the website has no problem citing the emails to fact-check other statements).

The strategy has not been entirely effective. There has still been discussion about the contents of Clinton’s private speeches to megabanks like Goldman Sachs, her campaign team’s coordination with Super PACs, and the candidate’s affinity for Wal-Mart, among other topics.

The Washington Post published a lengthy article on Tuesday delving into the internal squabbling among Clinton aides and allies over the candidates use of a private email server. And the Wikileaks disclosure of a 13-page memo by former Bill Clinton aide Doug Band formed the basis of a Post article Thursday that showed how Band co-mingled the clients of his for-profit consulting firm Teneo with the former president’s speaking clients and financial backers of the Clinton Foundation.

Invisible punishment’ hits ex-felons for life; DOJ, HUD fight blanket rental bias

October 27, 2016

by Joe Davidson

The Washington Post

There’s been a lot of bipartisan talk lately about criminal justice reform. But action is slow.

Too slow for Pedro Collazo, dangling in a web of collateral consequences.

He did 12 years in New York’s Sing Sing prison on manslaughter charges after a beef went bad at a bar where he was a bouncer. He was 22. He has been home nine months and has a good job that allows him to care for his 16-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter.

But “home” is an elusive concept for Collazo, who sleeps on a relative’s couch.

Although he completed his incarceration while earning an associate’s and bachelor’s degree, Collazo is serving a life sentence. Like millions of others, he is bound by a multitude of laws and regulations prohibiting ex-felons from a broad range of activities, notably many employment and housing opportunities.

“The most recent attempt to secure an apartment was the most overt form of discrimination I have experienced thus far,” he said, recalling his attempt to get a place in Queens. The landlord told Collazo that “he does not rent to anyone with a criminal history. I asked if there were any types of acts or if it was all, and he replied that if there was any form of criminal history he would not rent. I … did not return.”

There are more than 48,000 prohibitions, mostly among the states, but almost 1,200 at the federal level, according to an American Bar Association database. They form what Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, calls “invisible punishment.”

This everlasting retribution is particularly hard on African Americans. Studies show black people are treated more harshly than white people at every stage of the criminal justice process. To its shame, the United States has less than 5 percent of the planet’s population and but almost 25 percent of the incarcerated. More than a third of the prisoners are black, more than a fifth Hispanic. Every year, more than 600,000 inmates are released, according to the Justice Department, many not realizing that their punishment continues.

These bans “harm the life prospects of individuals with a criminal conviction long after they’ve completed serving their sentences,” said Mauer, co-author of “Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment.”

“The limitations posed through barriers to employment, housing, public benefits, and the right to vote in effect mark these people as second-class citizens,” he added. “Not only does that harm their life prospects, but it’s counterproductive for our overall public safety goals.”

These proscriptions can be very difficult for individuals to challenge. But last week, the Justice Department took action against this form of rental discrimination when it joined the Department of Housing and Urban Development in a case alleging housing bias against the convicted.

Justice officials argue that blanket bans on renting to people with criminal records “that do not consider when the conviction occurred, what the underlying conduct entailed, or what the convicted person has done since then run a substantial risk of having a disparate impact based on race or national origin.”

The agencies are supporting the Fortune Society in New York, which works with the formerly incarcerated. It employs Collazo, but he is not involved with the organization’s case against Sandcastle Towers Housing Development Fund Corp.

Sandcastle rebuts the government, saying its 917-unit apartment building, mostly studios, has 20 tenants with convictions and 70 percent of the residents are black or Latino.  “The safety of existing tenants takes precedence over the purported rights of applicants with criminal records that raise legitimate safety concerns,” said Tom Shanahan, Sandcastle’s lawyer.

Among the efforts to prevent wholesale discrimination against the convicted is President Obama’s 2015 instruction to agencies imposing a delay in asking about a candidate’s criminal record until later in the hiring process, a plan known as “ban the box.” Similar legislation was introduced in Congress.

Legislation introduced in 2014 by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) would lift the federal ban on welfare and food stamps for low-level drug offenders, a ban that does not apply to murderers and kidnappers.

In 2012, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission told employers to distinguish between arrests and convictions to ensure that the use of criminal histories in employment is “job related and consistent with business necessity.”

At an event hosted by BuzzFeed last month, Booker lamented a system in which a nonviolent drug offense means “you can’t get a job, you can’t get a Pell grant, you can’t get food stamps, you can’t get public housing, you can’t get loans from banks.” There is an urgent need to correct this, he added, because “we are bereft in this country of the talent, the skills, the entrepreneurialism of so many people.”

As Darkness Falls, A Silver Lining

Short term pessimism – long term optimism

October 28, 2016

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

The future, in many respects, looks dark for opponents of interventionism and the National Security State. US troops are currently involved in civil wars and “policing” across a wide swath of the Middle East, Europe, and Eastasia. Our political class is firmly committed to a globalist ideology that disdains the very concept of national sovereignty, most especially our own. And what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial-congressional complex” is more firmly entrenched than ever, extracting billions from the “public” purse and filling their coffers at our expense.

Furthermore, the presidential election is hardly encouraging. The prospect of Hillary Clinton in the White House must surely cause even the most optimistic among us to consider building one of those backyard bomb shelters so popular during the cold war era and stocking it with a couple of years supply of emergency rations. She has all but threatened to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia, intervene massively in Syria, and ratchet up NATO’s encirclement of the Russian bear.

Yet these are all short-term concerns: in the long term, we anti-interventionists have every reason to be optimistic.

To begin with, the American people are with us. Every poll shows that, while support for a strong defense is rising, the reluctance to engage in foreign wars is strong and getting stronger. The most recent measuring of anti-interventionist sentiment came out just as I started writing this column: a mere 25 percent want the US to expand the role of the US military overseas, reports the Financial Times. Fourteen percent say the fifteen years of constant warfare have made us more safe, 51 percent disagree. A majority says no to “safe zones” or any sort of intervention in Syria: and a whopping 80 percent say Congress must approve any military action abroad.

Secondly, the victory of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary has broken the iron grip of the neoconservatives on GOP foreign policy orthodoxy and given opposition to globalism new legitimacy in the pubic square. No matter what one may think of Trump as a candidate, and in spite of his many inconsistencies, one indisputable fact remains: the Republican party, which cheered as George W. Bush launched two wars and declared a multi-generational interventionist project, very shortly afterward nominated someone who not only opposed the Iraq war but said “They lied. There were no weapons of mass destruction and they knew there were none.” That, all by itself, represents a sea change. But it didn’t end there.

Trump has questioned the utility of NATO, and even threatened to pull out if member states didn’t pay their fair share – a pronouncement that, just a short time ago, would have been inconceivable coming from any major part presidential nominee. He wondered aloud why we’re defending South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, all rich nations that are perfectly capable of defending themselves. And he provoked the undying ire of the War Party when he asked: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get along with Russia?”

Underscoring that he understands the broader implications of these positions, Trump adopted a campaign theme that evokes the historical legacy of the anti-interventionist movement in this country: “America First.” This provoked paroxysms of hatred from the foreign policy mandarins in Washington, who loathe “isolationism” — and their squeals of outrage were music to my ears.

Thirdly, the Trump campaign has generated the healthiest trend to be seen in this country in a long time: widespread skepticism, and even hatred, of the “mainstream” media. Trump has campaigned against the media almost more than he has against Hillary Clinton, making them a special target of his disdain. “See those people out there,” he says at his rallies, pointing to the media in attendance. “They’re the worst! They’re corrupt!” And as a chorus of jeers rises up from the crowd, we can count another victory for our side.

For the very same media that served as a conduit for the war propaganda of the Bush administration is now going after Trump, hammer and tongs, in an unabashed campaign to deny him the presidency. The result is that nearly half the country is now not only skeptical of anything they hear coming from the media, they positively loathe them – and that, from our perspective, is a Good Thing.

Remember, it was the American media that assured us Saddam Hussein was plotting to nuke Washington, D.C., and reported the Bush administration’s talking points as if they were fact. The same newspaper that put Judy Miller’s manufactured “revelations” about Iraq’s alleged nuclear program on the front page is now in the vanguard of the anti-Trump jihad. The Washington Post, which has editorially supported every single military intervention in the past 35 years, today reads like a publication of the Democratic National Committee.

The revelation that the media, rather than being a watchdog of Power, is itself an integral part of the power structure, is one of the great contributions of the Trump campaign. In the past, journalists, hiding behind the pretense of “objectivity,” have effectively channeled the War Party’s propaganda, reporting it as fact: now that this pretense has been dropped, and their brazen partisanship has been exposed, much of their power to persuade has been lost.

The media and the Establishment they serve are telling us that all this will go away after the election. Having already declared Mrs. Clinton the winner, they’re gloating that Trumpism – and the Trump Effect – is dead or dying.

This is wishful thinking on their part. The reality is that there’s an undercurrent coursing through Flyover America that threatens the ideological and political hegemony of the War Party, and, indeed, poses a rising challenge to our arrogant and self-isolated political class. Trump has tapped into this, and he will not be the last to do so. The movement to put “America First,” to reject the blandishments of Empire and restore our Old Republic, far from being dead, is just being born.

Yes, dark clouds are gathering on the horizon: but if you step back, the silver lining shines through.