90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Ex-CIA Officer: Obama Intel Chief’s Attacks on Trump Putting National Security at Risk

For supporters of President Donald Trump, it’s the Deep State at its most dangerous.

When former President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan took to MSNBC in March to insinuate that the White House is vulnerable to specific, personal blackmail by Russian President Vladimir Putin, liberals hailed it as the kind of “truth to power moment” they needed to tarnish the Trump presidency as fundamentally flawed.

But a veteran of the Cold War’s shadowy front lines is fighting back.

In an interview with The Washington Times published Monday, Daniel Hoffman, the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow, said Brennan’s deliberate smearing of the president — without a shred of evidence to back it up — was the kind of partisan tactic that could directly damage the work of intelligence agencies in the field.

related: Confirmed: John Brennan Colluded With Foreign Spies to Defeat Trump

If Brennan really was alarmed at a potential security threat involving Trump being vulnerable to Russian pressure, Hoffman said, he could have brought it up to special counsel Robert Mueller, who has now spent almost a year investigating the possibility of “Russian collusion” by the Trump campaign.

“That way, he could avoid collateral damage to those with whom we are working, whether it’s a spy who’s risking his life to be the source of secrets for us, who’s now going to wonder whether he should be doing that because his boss Vladimir Putin has dirt on our president, or a partner liaison service, which might want to work with us against the Russia target,” Hoffman told the Times.

But that isn’t what Brennan chose to do at all. Instead, he sat on the set of the rabidly anti-Trump “Morning Joe” program and said something about the president of the United States that had to chill any American.

“I think he is afraid of the president of Russia,” Brennan said. “…I think one can speculate as to why. That the Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult. Clearly, I think it’s important for us to be able to improve relations with Russia, but the fact that he has had this fawning attitude toward Mr. Putin, has not said anything negative about him, I think continues to say to me that he does have something to fear and something very serious to fear.”

(Check out the video on RealClear Politics here. Brennan’s sneering attititude make the words even worse than they appear in print. And he doesn’t look like he’s guessing.)

Brennan later tried to walk back that damning statement, telling The New York Times in an interview after the appearance that his words had been entirely speculative.

“I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they...

Comey’s tortured Trump collusion logic can’t be real. Here’s a little taste of the crazy cake.

President Donald Trump’s denials about collusion with Russia are evidence he may actually have colluded.

That’s at least according to the logic of numerous Trump opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey.

“It’s always struck me as strange whenever someone continually denies something; it makes me interested. So his continual denial of something that’s being investigated by some of the best people in the country is strange,” Comey said at a Washington Post Live event on Tuesday.

Comey has made similar comments about Trump during a tour to promote his new book, “A Higher Loyalty.”

Trump’s repeated pushback on the Steele dossier raises the possibility that the salacious document is accurate, the former FBI chief has said.

The Kremlin is blackmailing Trump with video footage of him engaged with prostitutes during a 2013 stay at a Moscow hotel, the dossier claims. Comey says in his book Trump denied the allegation during several meetings they had in 2017. Comey found it peculiar Trump seemed so fixated on the dossier, which Democrats funded and former British spy Christopher Steele wrote, he said.

But Trump had reason to be “obsessed” with the dossier’s allegations, Washington Examiner columnist Eddie Scarry wrote.

“Yes, Trump was ‘obsessed’ because he was preoccupied with thoughts about prostitutes in his conversations with Comey, a man who on their first encounter — immediately brought up prostitutes!“ Scarry wrote in an April 21 column.

The backstory is it was Comey who broached the topic of Russian prostitutes with Trump. During a Jan. 6, 2017, briefing at Trump Tower, Comey told the then-president-elect about the existence of the dossier and its salacious allegations.

It is “unlikely” the Kremlin has compromising material on Trump, Comey has said in interviews for his book tour. But at the same time, he has harped on Trump’s denials about the dossier and collusion, suggesting they could be indicators of deception.

Comey is not the only Trump critic to use the same line of reasoning.

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Why Pope Francis's Call to Ban Weapons Would Destroy the West

What would happen if the world took Pope Francis's advice (via a tweet)?

"Do we really want peace? Then let's ban all weapons so we don't have to live in fear of war," said the pontiff.

While on the surface, the disappearance of all weapons might suggest the inability to do violence, in reality, it would mean the certain annihilation of the West as a civilization.

For starters, the pope seems to forget that violence and the things that motivate it – hate, envy, rapacity, and plain old evil – do not need weapons. Had he turned to the book he claims to represent, the Bible, he would have seen that the first act of violence, of murder – that of Cain against his brother, Abel – did not require weapons, just a violent and envious will. The brothers "were in the field [when] Cain rose against Abel his brother and killed him." Genesis 4 does not shed light on how this first fratricide occurred, but it was most assuredly done without a formal weapon – maybe a large rock, a branch, or simply Cain's bare hands.

And it is from here that one understands why the West would be swept away without weapons and walls – another defense mechanism Pope Francis wishes to see eliminated. The same hate, envy, and rapacity that some non-Western peoples have for the West – understood in the context of a "clash of civilizations" – would remain, but there would be little to stop it, deter it, or keep it at bay.

Contrary to first appearances, were all weapons around the world instantly to disappear, that would not lead to an even playing field, where, if it comes to it, men limited to fighting with their fists would more or less maintain the status quo. For starters, in a world still largely defined by civilizations, the people of the West are much fewer in number than those of the rest of the – mostly third and desperate – world.

Already small Western numbers shrink even more on the realization that a great many men are not up to the task. Decades of enforced cultural emasculation have done their job, leaving many men in the West helpless and paralyzed against any would-be aggressor.

This is especially on display in the West's interaction with Islam. One need only look to Western European nations, where the interplay of emasculated Western males and aggressive Muslim migrants is on constant display. Thanks to the latter, Sweden has become the rape capital of the world. That is not because Muslims use weapons, or are stronger, or are more numerous – they are still a tiny minority – but because many Swedish men have been so indoctrinated in passivity that they are not even able to protect their...

CLEVELAND (Reuters) - In Cleveland, a new road meant to cut commute times between the suburbs and a downtown medical hub has been redesigned as an “Opportunity Corridor” to bring businesses and jobs to poor neighborhoods along its way.

In St. Louis, development officials are repurposing a century-old hat factory into a space for small manufacturers to bring jobs back downtown, while Baltimore has committed $500 million to a private-led overhaul of an old industrial zone.

The efforts reflect a growing consensus among economists and policymakers that keeping the overall economy on track will not be enough to help areas left behind by a decade-long recovery.

The current expansion is among the longest ever and brought national unemployment to an 18-year low. Yet over 6.3 million are still out of work, many of them clustered in cities with chronic, high unemployment. A Reuters review of federal data shows that out of those unemployed about a quarter live in 50 urban counties with above-average unemployment, and a third in just 100.

Often with large minority populations, those areas include cities like St. Louis, Cleveland and Baltimore - 20th century industrial powerhouses hit hard by globalization, demographic changes, and the shift to a service-based economy.

Amid the tightest labor markets in two decades and labor force growth the slowest in half a century, local and national officials are turning to targeted training schemes, new investment incentives, and other strategies to bring jobs closer to the unemployed.

“We definitely need to be thinking in terms of place as an important component...Increasing the number of people who are connected to the economy is fundamental to the maximum employment goal,” Atlanta Federal Reserve bank president Raphael Bostic told Reuters in an interview. “What counts as success? Is it two million people? Five million people?” Bostic said, referring to the number of jobless. “We can get to maximum employment and still have a lot of distress.”

PILE OF CASH

While monetary policy works on the national level, the Fed under former chair Janet Yellen and now under chairman Jerome Powell has been only gently raising interest rates in part to see if it can help lagging areas join the recovery.

However, a consensus is building among economists and politicians that the persistence of unemployment and poverty in certain areas needs to be addressed with direct, “place-based” policies.

The tax code approved by the Republican congress in December included a bipartisan-backed measure to support such locally-directed efforts, granting a capital gains waiver for those who invest in locations included on a list of distressed census tracts being chosen by state governors.

Advocates, who include Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers Chair Kevin Hassett and Jared Bernstein, a former Obama administration adviser, hope it shifts capital from buoyant stock markets and high-value real estate to blighted rural pockets, struggling suburbs, or ailing inner city neighborhoods.

“Investors are sitting on a large pile of (unrealized) capital gains,” said John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank that sponsored a 2015 paper by Hassett and Bernstein outlining the idea.

“We think the scale is likely to be measured certainly in the tens of billions of dollars,” Lettieri said about how much of an estimated $1 trillion in unrealized capital gains could make its way to neglected areas. Such amounts...

Just two weeks ago, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was coming off a legal victory against the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda for fuel efficiency standards.

“As we’ve proven again and again, when the Trump administration puts special interests before public health and our environment, we’ll take them to court—and we will win,” Schneiderman said April 23.

And Saturday, Schneiderman boasted about taking on the Trump administration in a tweet with comic book art presenting him as a superhero.

But Monday evening, the Democrat resigned as New York attorney general amid allegations that he had beaten and physically abused four women.

The sudden fall came just hours after he announced plans to lead eight state attorneys general in a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.

First elected to his post in 2010 after eight years in the state Senate and seen as a contender for governor, Schneiderman made himself a leading figure among states challenging some of Trump’s biggest initiatives.

Touting his lawsuits against the Trump administration on the travel ban, environmental issues, immigration, and other matters, Schneiderman embraced his stature as a “resistance” figure. In a February video made for the leftist MoveOn.org to encourage voting in local elections, he said: “If you really, truly want to be part of the resistance, this is where the fight lives.”

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, chairwoman of the Republican Attorneys General Association, called Schneiderman the “ringleader” of anti-Trump activists fighting the president in the courts.

“As Schneiderman leaves office in disgrace, his impact and influence with activist Democrat state attorneys general and candidates cannot be overstated,” Rutledge told...