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LA. and MIS. take the most money from the Federal government. WE, in California .. PAY the MOST to
the FEDs in the US. You're are a deadbeat state! You haven't even learned how to pay your own way!
just lazing around waiting on Mardi Gras to lift a wallet or two ........
LOSERS ! .. all of you!
'So many emotions': Thousands attend L.A. naturalization ceremony
A newly sworn-in U.S. citizen poses for a picture at the conclusion of a naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Esmeralda Bermudez February 15 2017
More than 6,700 people were sworn in today as U.S. citizens at the Los Angeles Convention Center in the first naturalization ceremony since the presidential inauguration.
Among them was Maria Fernandez of Boyle Heights. The 54-year-old homemaker has lived in the United States more than 30 years.
Her husband, Ignacio Tobar, had constantly pushed her to become naturalized.
"I never thought I was smart enough to get through all those questions," she said as she waited in line for a seat Wednesday afternoon.
Her husband wasn’t in attendance however. He died in an assault a year ago. It was then that Fernandez found out he had secretly submitted her citizenship application.
"It's like he knew how necessary my vote would be," Fernandez said.
Like many of the immigrants who filled the convention center Wednesday, Fernandez said the day was joyful but uncertain given the country's political climate.
"I'm feeling so many emotions," she said.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-naturalization-ceremony-20170215-story.html
Democrats have kept them working since President Bill Clinton
as usual .. every site you read gets NO RESPECT from the Real WORLD
Judicial Watch is an American conservative, non-partisan [dubious – discuss] watchdog group[1] that files Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits to expose alleged misconduct by government officials.
[2] Founded in 1994, it has sued the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
Most of its lawsuits have been dismissed.[2] As of October 2016 it was the plaintiff in more than 20
ongoing lawsuits involving Hillary Clinton.[2]
in other words another lying con site where people like you and fox news viewers cling to .. losers!
.. LOSERS! man! you can't even come up with new republican smut sites?
omg ...walked into another room and heard the orange menace whining while sitting next to Benjamin..
oh well.... one of them is on way to jail and the Other? . .who knows? ..
You're so so sloppy ... It was about Fellatio by Fruit Bats
NOT "Fruit Bats"
It's not going to cost as much as your tax cuts will cost our country!
yeppers ,, you're right! ..they are both COOO COOOOOS! ..........now, the rooster? .... he's been a bonafide chump ever since I met him and he can't stop.. maybe he's seeing that '''' coo coo Ablow that Lur thinks so much of running on fox news ... that would explain why he has not been helped! .. ;).. and then they wonder why they are always always behind & wrong on everything .. ..
COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO COOO! COOOOOOOOOOO COO! COOOOOO COOO!
Like attracts Like .. the uniting of the COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOO's !
right here on Tornado Alley .. LIVE!..........;)
yeah and you just might check out the definition of
queer before your next breath! and Yes, you are !
Is he or you an 'EX QUEER'? ____In a rant where he compared being transgender to pretending to be 65 to get Medicare, Ablow proposed injecting transgender children with hormones corresponding to their gender assigned at birth to “go with nature” and make them “feel more comfortable.” Ablow’s proposed “treatment” is his own extreme variation of discredited ex-gay “conversion therapy” which falsely claims to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Ablow’s suggestion is reminiscent of 1940’s era “treatments” where lesbians were forced to submit to estrogen injections and men were given testosterone to “cure” them of being gay. These type of “reparative therapy” practices have been rejected for decades by all mainstream medical associations.
========================
The American Psychological Association has stated that it is "not helpful to force [a transgender child] to act in a more gender-conforming way." Family rejection of transgender youth has been linked to a series of negative health consequences.
Family acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth protects against depression, substance abuse, suicide, study suggests
Researchers have established a clear link between accepting family attitudes and behaviors towards their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) children and significantly decreased risk and better overall health in adulthood. The study shows that specific parental and caregiver behaviors -- such as advocating for their children when they are mistreated because of their LGBT identity or supporting their gender expression -- protect against depression, substance abuse and suicidal behavior in early adulthood. much more here - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101206093701.htm
whatever, he's a coo coo supreme . .wish he would go have fun in jail. I feel much compassion for you if you are an X queer,
I'll protect you and so will all my family and friends who just so happen to be LOTS of democrats!!!! ...
you never need to worry..come on and be X queer by us! .. ;)
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/04/25/fox-news-doctor-proposes-harmful-new-treatment-transgender-children/210068
you all are so mean .... mean and hurtful to total strangers ...
Medical Experts Condemn Fox's Keith Ablow: "Shameful" And "Unfortunate That He Is Given A Platform"
November 6, 2014 5:05 PM EST ››› OLIVER WILLIS
Medical experts contacted by the Associated Press condemned Fox News contributor Dr. Keith Ablow for his ongoing cable news psychoanalysis of President Obama, his wife, and other figures.
Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, the chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and past president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), told the AP that "it is shameful and unfortunate that he is given a platform by Fox News or any other media organization," adding that "he is a narcissistic self-promoter of limited and dubious expertise."
Ford Vox, a staff psychiatrist at the Shepherd Brain Injury Rehabilitation Center in Atlanta, said that Ablow's medical analysis "is really just irresponsible and it's embarrassing for physicians in general."
The AP notes that Ablow is not a member of the APA, which "discourages members from speculating on psychiatric characteristics of non-patients," "having resigned in 2011 in a dispute over transgenderism." Ablow had been criticized by the president of the APA after writing in a FoxNews.com column that Chaz Bono suffered from a "psychotic delusion" and added it was dangerous for him to appear on the reality TV show Dancing With The Stars.
For years Ablow has often used his position at Fox News and as a member of that network's "Medical A-Team" to purportedly analyze the psychological motivations of figures like President Obama.
In recent appearances on Fox News and radio, Ablow claimed that President Obama had the desire to make America "suffer" and would allow an outbreak of Ebola, said Obama won't "fully defend" America because "he has it in" for America, and said President Obama welcomes the presence of Ebola in the United States because his "affinities" are with Africa.
He also claimed that "something is deeply wrong with the psyche" of Ferguson, Missouri residents protesting over the shooting death of 18-year old Michael Brown, and described First Lady Michelle Obama as too fat to be credible while offering advice to children on nutrition.
yeah.. there's all kinds of embedded links which you won't read stupid.. However, it would mean something to MOST people to KNOW THAT HE DOESN;T HAVE A LICENSE TO PRACTICE. HE IS NOT A MEMBER OF THE APA!
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/11/06/medical-experts-condemn-foxs-keith-ablow-shamef/201486
CHUMP...
Then Sally and others___ White House staff in "survival mode ... scared to death"
Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
Here's a twist that has top GOP sources buzzing:
o.k.. I'll post it .. I've never liked the 'observer' since his son in law took it over .. It used to
be an excellent little rag ... now, I don't know. .it hasn't been long enough ...
The Spy Revolt Against Trump Begins
Intelligence Community pushes back against a White House
it considers leaky, untruthful and penetrated by the Kremlin
By John R. Schindler • 02/12/17 10:00am
In a recent column, [ http://observer.com/2017/01/donald-trump-intelligence-community-kremlin-spy-alliance/ ] I explained how the still-forming Trump administration is already doing serious harm to America’s longstanding global intelligence partnerships. In particular, fears that the White House is too friendly to Moscow are causing close allies to curtail some of their espionage relationships with Washington—a development with grave implications for international security, particularly in the all-important realm of counterterrorism.
Now those concerns are causing problems much closer to home—in fact, inside the Beltway itself. Our Intelligence Community is so worried by the unprecedented problems of the Trump administration—not only do senior officials possess troubling ties to the Kremlin, there are nagging questions about basic competence regarding Team Trump—that it is beginning to withhold intelligence from a White House which our spies do not trust.
That the IC has ample grounds for concern is demonstrated by almost daily revelations of major problems inside the White House, a mere three weeks after the inauguration. The president has repeatedly gone out of his way [ http://observer.com/2016/12/trump-declares-war-on-the-intelligence-community/ ] to antagonize our spies, mocking them and demeaning their work, and Trump’s personal national security guru can’t seem to keep his story straight on vital issues.
That’s Mike Flynn, the retired Army three-star general who now heads the National Security Council. Widely disliked in Washington for his brash personality and preference for conspiracy-theorizing over intelligence facts, Flynn was fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for managerial incompetence and poor judgment [ http://observer.com/2016/07/military-guys-make-bad-running-mates/ ] —flaws he has brought to the far more powerful and political NSC.
Flynn’s problems with the truth have been laid bare by the growing scandal about his dealings with Moscow. Strange ties to the Kremlin, [ http://observer.com/2016/08/yes-american-spies-really-think-trump-is-putins-guy/ ] including Vladimir Putin himself, have dogged Flynn since he left DIA, and concerns about his judgment have risen considerably since it was revealed that after the November 8 election, Flynn repeatedly called the Russian embassy in Washington to discuss the transition. The White House has denied that anything substantive came up in conversations between Flynn and Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.
That was a lie, as confirmed by an extensively sourced bombshell report in The Washington Post, [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/national-security-adviser-flynn-discussed-sanctions-with-russian-ambassador-despite-denials-officials-say/2017/02/09/f85b29d6-ee11-11e6-b4ff-ac2cf509efe5_story.html?utm_term=.b74549d0b297 ] which makes clear that Flynn grossly misrepresented his numerous conversations with Kislyak—which turn out to have happened before the election too, part of a regular dialogue with the Russian embassy. To call such an arrangement highly unusual in American politics would be very charitable.
In particular, Flynn and Kislyak discussed the possible lifting of the sanctions President Obama placed on Russia and its intelligence services late last year in retaliation for the Kremlin’s meddling in our 2016 election. In public, Flynn repeatedly denied that any talk of sanctions occurred during his conversations with Russia’s ambassador. Worse, he apparently lied in private too, including to Vice President Mike Pence, who when this scandal broke last month publicly denied that Flynn conducted any sanctions talk with Kislyak. Pence and his staff are reported to be very upset with the national security adviser, who played the vice president for a fool.
It’s debatable whether Flynn broke any laws by conducting unofficial diplomacy with Moscow, then lying about it, and he has now adopted the customary Beltway dodge about the affair, ditching his previous denials in favor of professing he has “no recollection of discussing sanctions,” adding that he “couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.” That’s not good enough anymore, since the IC knows exactly what Flynn and Kislyak discussed.
In pretty much every capital worldwide, embassies that provide sanctuary to hostile intelligence services are subject to counterintelligence surveillance, including monitoring phone calls. Our spy services conduct signals intelligence—SIGINT for short—against the Russian embassy in Washington, just as the Russians do against our embassy in Moscow. Ambassadors’ calls are always monitored: that’s how the SpyWar works, everywhere.
Ambassador Kislyak surely knew his conversations with Flynn were being intercepted, and it’s incomprehensible that a career military intelligence officer who once headed a major intelligence agency didn’t realize the same. Whether Flynn is monumentally stupid or monumentally arrogant is the big question that hangs over this increasingly strange affair.
Prominent Democrats in Congress are already calling for Flynn to be relieved over this scandal, which at best shows him to be dishonest about important issues. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has bluntly asked for the national security adviser’s ouster. Republicans on the Hill who would prefer that the White House stop lying to the public about its Kremlin links ought to get behind Schiff’s initiative before the scandal gets worse.
In truth, it may already be too late. A new report by CNN indicates that important parts of the infamous spy dossier that professed to shed light on President Trump’s shady Moscow ties have been corroborated by communications intercepts. In other words, SIGINT strikes again, providing key evidence that backs up some of the claims made in that 35-page report compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official with extensive Russia experience.
As I’ve previously explained, that salacious dossier is raw intelligence, an explosive amalgam of fact and fantasy, including some disinformation planted by the Kremlin to obscure this already murky case. Now SIGINT confirms that some of the non-salacious parts of what Steele reported, in particular how senior Russian officials conspired to assist Trump in last year’s election, are substantially based in fact. This is bad news for the White House, which has already lashed out in angry panic, with Press Secretary Sean Spicer stating, “We continue to be disgusted by CNN’s fake news reporting.”
That is hardly a denial, of course, and I can confirm from my friends still serving in the IC that the SIGINT, which corroborates some of the Steele dossier, is damning for the administration. Our spies have had enough of these shady Russian connections—and they are starting to push back.
There are pervasive concerns that the president simply isn’t paying attention to intelligence.
How things are heating up between the White House and the spooks is evidenced by a new report [ http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/mike-flynn-nsa-aide-trump-234923 ] that the CIA has denied a security clearance to one of Flynn’s acolytes. Rob Townley, a former Marine intelligence officer selected to head up the NSC’s Africa desk, was denied a clearance to see Sensitive Compartmented Information (which is required to have access to SIGINT in particular). Why Townley’s SCI was turned down isn’t clear—it could be over personal problems or foreign ties—but the CIA’s stand has been privately denounced by the White House, which views this as a vendetta against Flynn. That the Townley SCI denial was reportedly endorsed by Mike Pompeo, the new CIA director selected by Trump himself, only adds to the pain.
There is more consequential IC pushback happening, too. Our spies have never liked Trump’s lackadaisical attitude toward the President’s Daily Brief, the most sensitive of all IC documents, which the new commander-in-chief has received haphazardly. The president has frequently blown off the PDB altogether, tasking Flynn with condensing it into a one-page summary with no more than nine bullet-points. Some in the IC are relieved by this, but there are pervasive concerns that the president simply isn’t paying attention to intelligence.
In light of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.
Since NSA provides something like 80 percent [ http://observer.com/2016/09/were-losing-the-war-against-terrorism/ ] of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.
What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.
None of this has happened in Washington before. A White House with unsettling links to Moscow wasn’t something anybody in the Pentagon or the Intelligence Community even considered a possibility until a few months ago. Until Team Trump clarifies its strange relationship with the Kremlin, and starts working on its professional honesty, the IC will approach the administration with caution and concern.
I previously warned [ http://observer.com/2016/12/trump-declares-war-on-the-intelligence-community/ ] the Trump administration not to go to war with the nation’s spies, and here’s why. This is a risky situation, particularly since President Trump is prone to creating crises foreign and domestic with his incautious tweets. In the event of a serious international crisis of the sort which eventually befalls almost every administration, the White House will need the best intelligence possible to prevent war, possibly even nuclear war. It may not get the information it needs in that hour of crisis, and for that it has nobody to blame but itself.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.
http://observer.com/2017/02/donald-trump-administration-mike-flynn-russian-embassy/
I don't have much respect for outlets owned by the son - in - law .. then only references that same publication .. but, it does match with some facts .. so .....................
Spy Agencies Are Now Reportedly Withholding Intelligence From the White House
By Jack Moore
2 days ago
“Since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM.”
.........................................................
When I was a teenager, all of my friends—along with the totality of America's dads—were obsessed with Tom Clancy novels. I was never a fan of the conspiracy-driven military and spy-novel genre, mostly because it all seemed a little farfetched. The plots seemed more like fantasies rather than anything resembling the actual geopolitical landscape.
But BOY WAS I WRONG. We've now dealt with more than three weeks of harrowing headlines thanks to the Trump regime, the worst being this one from the Observer [ http://observer.com/2017/02/donald-trump-administration-mike-flynn-russian-embassy/ ] this weekend. This is really bad. Bad, as in "the time Gary Busey gave a long and incoherent speech at the Omaha Steaks presentation on Celebrity Apprentice" bad.
According to former NSA analyst and counterintelligence officer John R. Schindler's piece in the Observer, the U.S.'s intelligence community is so convinced that Donald Trump and his administration have been compromised by Russia that it are no longer briefing the White House on all of its most sensitive information, lest the information end up in Putin's cold, tiger-blood-soaked hands.
Philip Lewis ?@Phil_Lewis_ Feb 13
Get you someone that looks at you the way
Ivanka Trump looks at Justin Trudeau
https://twitter.com/markos?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
notice Justin's hands, reminds me of Obama .. long elegant well, beautiful.. ;)
Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, MARK MAZZETTI and MATT APUZZO FEB. 14, 2017
President Trump spoke with Vladimir V. Putin on Jan. 28. His national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, right, resigned Monday. Credit Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Russia and Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.
The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the D.N.C. hack, according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.
Mr. Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the accounts of the American officials in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”
Mr. Manafort added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”
Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia, and it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts may have been about business.
Officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, which Russian intelligence officials were on the calls, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.
A published report from American intelligence agencies that was made public in January concluded that the Russian government had intervened in the election in part to help Mr. Trump, but did not address whether any members of the Trump campaign had participated in the effort.
The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. During those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.
Paul D. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July.
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
But the cases are part of the routine electronic surveillance of communications of foreign officials by American intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The F.B.I. declined to comment.
Two days after the election in November, Sergei A. Ryabkov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, said [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/world/europe/trump-campaign-russia.html ] that “there were contacts” during the campaign between Russian officials and Mr. Trump’s team.
“Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” Mr. Ryabkov said in an interview with the Russian Interfax news agency.
The Trump transition team denied Mr. Ryabkov’s statement. “This is not accurate,” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said at the time.
The National Security Agency, which monitors the communications of foreign intelligence services, initially captured the communications between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russians as part of routine foreign surveillance. After that, the F.B.I. asked the N.S.A. to collect as much information as possible about the Russian operatives on the phone calls, and to search through troves of previous intercepted communications that had not been analyzed.
The F.B.I. has closely examined at least three other people close to Mr. Trump, although it is unclear if their calls were intercepted. They are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign; Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative; and Mr. Flynn.
As part of the inquiry, the F.B.I. is also trying to assess the credibility of information contained in a dossier that was given to the bureau last year by a former British intelligence operative. The dossier contained a raft of salacious allegations about connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and the Russian government. It also included unsubstantiated claims that the Russians had embarrassing videos that could be used to blackmail Mr. Trump.
The F.B.I. has spent several months investigating the leads in the dossier, but has yet to confirm any of its most explosive allegations.
Senior F.B.I. officials believe that the former British intelligence officer who compiled the dossier, Christopher Steele, has a credible track record, and he briefed F.B.I. investigators last year about how he obtained the information. One American law enforcement official said that F.B.I. agents had made contact with some of Mr. Steele’s sources.
The F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring as an outgrowth of a criminal investigation into his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and for the country’s former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. The investigation has focused on why he was in such close contact with Russian and Ukrainian intelligence officials.
The bureau did not have enough evidence to obtain a warrant for a wiretap of Mr. Manafort’s communications, but it had the N.S.A. closely scrutinize the communications of Ukrainian officials he had met.
The F.B.I. investigation is proceeding at the same time that separate investigations into Russian interference in the election are gaining momentum on Capitol Hill. Those investigations, by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, are examining not only the Russian hacking but also any contacts that Mr. Trump’s team had with Russian officials during the campaign.
On Tuesday, top Republican lawmakers said that Mr. Flynn should be one focus of the investigation, and that he should be called to testify before Congress. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said that the news surrounding Mr. Flynn in recent days underscored “how many questions still remain unanswered to the American people more than three months after Election Day, including who was aware of what, and when.”
Mr. Warner said that Mr. Flynn’s resignation would not stop the committee “from continuing to investigate General Flynn, or any other campaign official who may have had inappropriate and improper contacts with Russian officials prior to the election.”
Correction: February 14, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people (in addition to Paul Manafort) whom the F.B.I. has examined. It is at least three, not at least four.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communications-trump.html?action=Click&contentCollection=BreakingNews&contentID=64914123&pgtype=article
President Obama's first tweet of the month
Happy Valentine’s Day, @michelleobama! Almost 28
years with you, but it always feels new.
oh sigh ....really and truly sigh..hurry back now --
https://twitter.com/BarackObama?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://www.obama.org/
https://www.obama.org/
We will Always Love You!
whoops --The WHITE RACISTS are GOING AFTER Priebus
The Nationalist Right Is Coming for Reince Priebus
Furious over the ouster of Mike Flynn, Trump loyalists in the right-wing media are blaming the former RNC chair for the administration's setbacks.
Carolyn Kaster / AP
Rosie Gray 5:24 PM ET
GROW UP! YOU BABIES! This is OUR COUNTRY!
Breitbart News has a target in its crosshairs following the departure of former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn from the White House in a cascade of scandal over his contacts with the Russian government: White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.
Targeting Priebus, who leads the faction of Trump aides that is composed of experienced establishment political hands, is really just a stand-in for a larger conflict about the future of Trumpism in the White House. Breitbart News is treating Flynn’s ouster as the first salvo in a war against those in the administration they deem insufficiently loyal to Trump. Backing up Breitbart are legions of other Trump loyalists in the right-wing media sphere. And their angry reaction to Flynn’s exit signals the unpopularity of the move with a vocal segment of Trump’s base.
Trump loyalists — meaning the true believers who supported Trump from the start, meaning the retarded ones not Republican politicos who became attached later on — have been privately musing about getting rid of Priebus. Now, that musing is going public. “I think this is Pearl Harbor for the true Trump supporters, the Trump loyalists,” said Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser and longtime Republican operative who still has a relationship with Trump. “I believe Reince Priebus moved on General Flynn and I think he intends to move on Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller next. He is not serving the president well. The people he hired are loyal to the Republican National Committee, not the President of the United States.”
At Breitbart, the right-wing outlet that until recently was run by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and has served as a loyal defender of Trumpism, the narrative was set early with a piece by editor-at-large Joel Pollak questioning the role of U.S. intelligence agencies in the leaks that brought down Flynn. Pollak and other Trump defenders are arguing that the real story is the fact of the leaks themselves, and not what was leaked.
“The fourth and most worrying explanation is that the government was not merely monitoring the communications of Russian diplomats, but of the Trump transition team itself,” Pollak wrote. “The fact that the contents of Flynn’s phone conversation—highly sensitive intelligence—were leaked to the media suggests that someone with access to that information also has a political axe to grind.”
(Pollak’s argument mirror’s Trump’s own message, delivered in a tweet on Tuesday morning: “The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?”)
Tuesday morning, Breitbart’s Washington Political Editor Matt Boyle—an ardent Trump supporter and known ally of Bannon—came out with a splashy scoop: “As Flynn Resigns, Priebus Future In Doubt As Trump Allies Circulate List of Alternate Chief of Staff Candidates. “
Boyle’s story [ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/02/14/flynn-resigns-priebus-future-doubt-trump-allies-circulate-list-alternate-chief-staff-candidates/ ] cites “sources close to the president” and “multiple sources close to President Trump with internal knowledge of White House operations” blaming Priebus for not moving cabinet confirmations along quickly enough and for the “botched rollout” of Trump’s controversial executive order banning people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. The order and subsequent fallout threw into stark relief the contrast between the Bannon-esque and more traditional wings of the White House; the staffer who bore most of the blame publicly was Stephen Miller, the White House senior policy adviser who played a key role in the travel ban and who has close relationships with Breitbart reporters dating back to the effort to scuttle the Senate Gang of 8 immigration reform bill in 2013.
The story accuses Priebus of knowing about anti-Trump “sleeper cells” hidden throughout the government.
“White House and other government sources say there are as many as 50 of them throughout government, and Priebus has full knowledge of their whereabouts, who they are, and what potential for damage they may cause,” Boyle reported. “He is not doing anything about it, these sources add.”
Purging “sleeper cells” of non-political government employees would be illegal, according to Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, and former Obama White House ethics czar Norm Eisen.
It’s “not legal to fire them if they have civil service jobs,” Painter said in an email. “Plenty of Bush people got those jobs in the Obama administration and they were very helpful. This ‘sleeper cell’ rhetoric is highly offensive in treating people of the other political party like terrorists.”
“You are not permitted to fire government employees willy nilly just because Breitbart accuses them of being sleeper cell members,” Eisen said in an email. “If some are civil servants, they are entitled to the full protection of civil service law.”
The story raised immediate speculation that either Bannon or Miller had planted it.
“Can you imagine Boyle running this against Bannon's wishes? No chance,” said one prominent Washington Republican with knowledge of the White House, who spoke on condition of anonymity for professional reasons. “He was the editor of Breitbart about fifteen minutes ago. This is just so brazen. How's he going to sit through meetings from Reince?”
Boyle did not respond to a request for comment.
But whether Bannon was actually involved is unclear. A source close to Bannon who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly pushed back on this idea, arguing that there is no reason to believe Bannon wants Priebus pushed out right now; Priebus’s knowledge of Washington and of Capitol Hill remains useful to enacting Bannon’s agenda. And The New York Times reported that it was actually Bannon who asked Flynn to resign over the weekend.
A senior White House official called the Breitbart story “false in every single possible respect” and dismissed the idea that Miller or Bannon had been behind it.
Bannon and Priebus have made a show of closeness recently, even giving a joint interview to New York magazine last week in which they professed to fall asleep on the phone with each other and joked about giving each other back rubs.
But the effort hasn’t tamped down anti-Priebus ardor in what BuzzFeed News’s Charlie Warzel has dubbed the “New Media Upside Down”: the constellation of pro-Trump fringe (or not so fringe) right-wing media personalities and organizations that have grown increasingly powerful. Flynn’s affinity for Russia and trafficking in conspiracy theories have endeared him to many in this group.
Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., reactivated his Twitter account the morning after Flynn’s firing. He had deleted it after calling the travel ban a “Muslim ban” last month. Flynn Jr., who was ejected from the transition team for his role in spreading misinformation like the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, has spent the day amplifying alt-right and alt-right-adjacent Twitter accounts, including Infowars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson, who wrote that “The resignation of General Flynn is part of an ongoing effort by the military-industrial complex to sabotage President Trump and re-assert control over foreign policy.”
Wikileaks has also weighed in, the sometime pro-leak organization tweeting “Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigns after destabilization campaign by US spies, Democrats, press.”
“The base was not happy when [Priebus] was appointed chief of staff,” said Mike Cernovich, a “new right” blogger and Twitter personality.“We knew he'd work hard to sabotage Trump's agenda.”
Asked if the incident has made him lose confidence in Trump, Cernovich said “Not going to give a drama kill quote like that” but “My loyalty has always been towards my fellow Americans and the broader movement––not Trump personally. He is the face of the movement but is help up by it as well. I do not work for him or the GOP and will criticize his decisions when appropriate.”
whatever all that means . .my god .. ladies ladies PLEASE!
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/the-nationalist-right-is-coming-for-priebus/516744/?utm_source=twb
here the asshole goes .. he's been itching to do this ............
hope they make a big stink! . That WILL stop it as it has so far anyway ..
now! he's picking up the dreamers ...
Exclusive: U.S. arrests Mexican immigrant in Seattle covered by Obama program
Tue Feb 14, 2017 | 6:14 PM EST
U.S. authorities have arrested an immigrant from Mexico who was brought to the United States illegally as a child and later given a work permit during the Obama administration in what could be the first detention of its kind under President Donald Trump.
Daniel Ramirez Medina, a 23-year-old with no criminal record, was taken into custody last week at his father's home in Seattle by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. The officers arrived at the home to arrest the man's father, though court documents did no make clear the reason the father was taken into custody.
Ramirez, now in custody in Tacoma, Washington, was granted temporary permission to live and work legally in the United States under a program called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, established in 2012 by Democratic President Obama, according to a court filing.
The program protects from deportation 750,000 people who were brought to the United States illegally as children, sometimes called the "dreamers," and gives them the temporary right to work legally in the United States.
Trump, a Republican who took office on Jan. 20, has promised a crackdown on the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, most of whom come from Mexico and other Latin American countries. A move against DACA recipients like Ramirez would represent a significant broadening of immigration enforcement under Trump.
Ramirez filed a challenge to his detention in Seattle federal court on Monday, arguing that the government violated his constitutional rights because he had work authorization under the DACA program.
Ethan Dettmer, a partner in the law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher who is one of the lawyers representing Ramirez, said he is not aware of any other DACA recipient who has been arrested.
"We are hoping this detention was a mistake," Dettmer said.
A BROKEN PROMISE?
Another one of his lawyers, Mark Rosenbaum of the legal advocacy group Public Counsel, characterized the DACA program as a promise from the federal government's executive branch that DACA recipients would not be targeted for deportation.
"We have no reason to believe that promise will be broken. This case should not see the inside of a courtroom," Rosenbaum said.
Ramirez was in custody and unavailable for comment. Representatives for Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined immediate comment on the lawsuit.
Emily Langley, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Seattle, said the Justice Department is still reviewing the case.
U.S. immigration officers last week arrested more than 680 people in the country illegally. Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said the operations, conducted in at least a dozen states, were routine and consistent with regular operations. But immigrant advocacy groups and Democrats have expressed concern that the Trump administration will escalate immigration enforcement efforts in line with the president's tough stance toward illegal immigrants.
Trump campaigned on a promise to roll back Obama's executive actions on immigration, but since assuming office he has kept his public comments on DACA vague.
In an interview with ABC News last month, Trump said his administration was devising a policy on how to deal with people covered by DACA. "They are here illegally. They shouldn't be very worried. I do have a big heart. We're going to take care of everybody. We're going to have a very strong border," Trump said at the time.
Under DACA, the government collected information including participants' addresses that potentially could be used to locate and deport them if the program is reversed.
Ramirez was brought to the United States from Mexico in about 2001 at about age 7, according to the lawsuit. The government granted him a DACA card in 2014 and renewed it in 2016, finding that he was no threat to public safety. He has a 3-year-old son, according to the complaint.
Ramirez in his lawsuit is seeking his immediate release and an injunction forbidding the government from arresting him again. A hearing in the case has been scheduled for Friday.
According to the lawsuit, Ramirez was asleep at his father's home last Friday morning when ICE agents arrived and arrested the father. When they entered, they asked Ramirez if he was in the country legally, and Ramirez said he had a work permit, the lawsuit stated.
ICE agents took Ramirez to a processing center in Seattle and he again disclosed his DACA work permit, the lawsuit stated.
"It doesn't matter, because you weren't born in this country," one of the agents said, according to the lawsuit.
Ramirez was fingerprinted, booked and taken to a detention center in Tacoma where he was still in custody on Tuesday, Rosenbaum said.
don't close your eyes at night asshole .. you;ll see the whites of many many eyes
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN15T307
And I find it odd that they do this FIRST in WA. State, where the FIRST lawsuit was made against him .. he's gonna get some really really good home cooked meals ... Did you see where Melania is KEEPING Michelle's garden! ... she loves all gardens !
LOLOL .. you're a riot! your face would break if you were honest about anything
no .. because he is doing it unplanned and sneaky and hurtful.. unlike Obama
With Obama .. everyone knew what to expect, whereas asshole just makes it up as he goes
My thoughts are yes we the humans cause some of this global warming but IMO opinion we should fix current problems and not worry about the future.
IMO some how mother nature will provide a volcano eruption or a comet
hitting earth which will block sunlight and cool things down.
Well then you can shut the EFF up about your big worry about your grandkids then ... remember ? so not to worry, someone or something will happen right at the moment your kids are under attack .. like a volcano or a clown will appear, some darn thing . .great ! .. ... Whatever it takes to not hear that crap from you again . .is good for me
She's a mess ... glad you easily understood it ..
ICE Backs Out Of A Meeting On Deportation Raids With Members Of Congress
ICE - Bullies with guns
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-08/from-antarctica-to-maldives-chinese-seek-lung-cleansing-trips
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ice-director-hispanic-caucus_us_58a33322e4b094a129ef445a
First blood ... who will be second?
Justin Trudeau OWNED trump, immediately GO SEE!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/justin-trudeau-trump_us_58a1dc96e4b03df370d8a29b?
Justin Trudeau Just Showed The World How To Shake Hands With Donald Trump
The Canadian prime minister wasn’t about to let his arm get ripped off.
I SO LOVE them __
What White Women Can Learn From Adele’s Grammys Speech
Take a cue from the Adele Grammys handbook: Give credit where it’s due.
02/13/2017 10:45 am ET | Updated 5 hours ago
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/adele-beyonce-grammys-what-white-women-can-learn_us_58a14d0be4b03df370d7e380
So scary Maria, scary sickening. Look at this trump tool ..
God such Idiots!__Trump's official inauguration poster has glaring typo
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/319170-trumps-official-inauguration-poster-has-glaring-typo
christ ..Once again - so stupid. Even in front of the whole world
so ashamed . .shit .. we got Haiti laughing at us!
America’s Biggest Creditors Dump Treasuries in Warning to Trump
by Brian Chappatta
February 13, 2017, 3:00 AM PST
Japanese investors cull U.S. government debt by most since ’13
Currency-hedged returns were worst on record last quarter
In the age of Trump, America’s biggest foreign creditors are suddenly having second thoughts about financing the U.S. government.
In Japan, the largest holder of Treasuries, investors culled their stakes in December by the most in almost four years, the Ministry of Finance’s most recent figures show. What’s striking is the selling has persisted at a time when going abroad has rarely been so attractive. And it’s not just the Japanese. Across the world, foreigners are pulling back from U.S. debt like never before.
From Tokyo to Beijing and London, the consensus is clear: few overseas investors want to step into the $13.9 trillion U.S. Treasury market right now. Whether it’s the prospect of bigger deficits and more inflation under President Donald Trump or higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve, the world’s safest debt market seems less of a sure thing -- particularly after the upswing in yields since November. And then there is Trump’s penchant for saber rattling, which has made staying home that much easier.
“It may be more difficult than usual for Japanese to invest in Treasuries and the dollar this year because of political uncertainty,” said Kenta Inoue, chief strategist for overseas bond investments at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities in Tokyo. “Treasury yields may rise rapidly again in the near future, which will continue to discourage them from buying aggressively.”
Nobody is saying that foreigners will abandon Treasuries altogether. After all, they still hold $5.94 trillion, or roughly 43 percent of the U.S. government debt market. (Though that’s down from 56 percent in 2008.) A significant drawdown can harm major holders like Japan and China as much as it does the U.S.
And, of course, homegrown demand has of late been able to absorb the pickup in overseas selling. Since reaching 2.64 percent in mid-December, yields on benchmark 10-year notes have come back and are essentially flat this year. They were at 2.43 percent on Monday.
Nevertheless, any consistent drop-off in foreign demand could have lasting consequences on America’s ability to finance itself cheaply, particularly in light of Trump’s ambitious plans to boost infrastructure spending, cut taxes and put “America First.” The president has singled out Japan and China, the two biggest overseas creditors, as well as Germany, for devaluing their currencies to gain an unfair advantage in trade.
In December, Japanese investors reduced their investments in U.S. debt by 2.39 trillion yen ($21.3 billion) after a smaller pullback in November. While only a fraction of Japan’s $1.1 trillion of holdings, they were first the back-to-back declines since the start of 2014. China, which owns just over $1 trillion of Treasuries, has been selling since May. Its holdings are at a seven-year low.
For now, risk-averse bond buyers like Daiwa SB Investments’s Shinji Kunibe are cutting back on Treasuries, despite some clear advantages.
Like many institutional money managers that invest abroad, Kunibe, Daiwa SB’s head of fixed-income management, likes to hedge away the risk of the dollar’s ups and downs. And right now, it makes sense. After accounting for hedging costs, 10-year Treasuries yield about 0.9 percent, roughly 10 times the return offered by Japanese government bonds. Going back to the 1980s, Treasuries have rarely enjoyed such a big edge over JGBs.
However, he sees U.S. yields rising further as Trump pursues expansionary fiscal policies and takes a protectionist stance on trade.
“Yields are going to be in an uptrend,” he said.
Big Losses
And investors like Kunibe can ill-afford more losses. Last quarter, Japanese investors who hedged all their dollar exposure in Treasuries suffered a 4.7 percent loss -- the biggest in at least three decades, data from Bank of America showed. The same thing happened in Europe, where record currency-hedged losses also stung euro-based buyers.
“It was a deer in the headlights moment,” said Zoltan Pozsar, a research analyst at Credit Suisse.
Combined with the unpredictability of Trump’s tweet storms, interest-rate increases in the U.S. could further sap overseas demand. Mark Dowding, who helps oversees about $50 billion as co-head of investment-grade debt at BlueBay Asset Management in London, says the firm has already moved to insulate itself from further losses due to higher rates.
What’s more, central bankers in Japan and Europe are still experimenting with monetary policies that may benefit bond investors locally.
Right now, it’s just “much easier to stay home than go abroad,” said Shyam Rajan, Bank of America’s head of U.S. rates strategy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-12/america-s-biggest-creditors-dump-treasuries-in-warning-to-trump
It's clear that he could have not won anything on his own, anywhere. Just as he is losing now ... it makes you cringe,
I wish he had become President of the tombs, [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tombs ] that would have been more appropriate.
Could a £400bn plan to refreeze the Arctic before the ice melts really work?
Temperatures are now so high at the north pole that scientists
are contemplating radical schemes to avoid catastrophe
Arctic sea ice under the midnight sun.
Photograph: Solent News/Rex/Shutterstock
Robin McKie Observer science editor
Sunday 12 February 2017 00.27 GMT
Physicist Steven Desch has come up with a novel solution to the problems that now beset the Arctic. He and a team of colleagues from Arizona State University want to replenish the region’s shrinking sea ice – by building 10 million wind-powered pumps over the Arctic ice cap. In winter, these would be used to pump water to the surface of the ice where it would freeze, thickening the cap.
The pumps could add an extra metre of sea ice to the Arctic’s current layer, Desch argues. The current cap rarely exceeds 2-3 metres in thickness and is being eroded constantly as the planet succumbs to climate change.
“Thicker ice would mean longer-lasting ice. In turn, that would mean the danger of all sea ice disappearing from the Arctic in summer would be reduced significantly,” Desch told the Observer.
Desch and his team have put forward the scheme in a paper that has just been published in Earth’s Future, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, and have worked out a price tag for the project: $500bn (£400bn).
It is an astonishing sum. However, it is the kind of outlay that may become necessary if we want to halt the calamity that faces the Arctic, says Desch, who, like many other scientists, has become alarmed at temperature change in the region. They say that it is now warming twice as fast as their climate models predicted only a few years ago and argue that the 2015 Paris agreement to limit global warming will be insufficient to prevent the region’s sea ice disappearing completely in summer, possibly by 2030.
“Our only strategy at present seems to be to tell people to stop burning fossil fuels,” says Desch. “It’s a good idea but it is going to need a lot more than that to stop the Arctic’s sea ice from disappearing.”
The loss of the Arctic’s summer sea ice cover would disrupt life in the region, endanger many of its species, from Arctic cod to polar bears, and destroy a pristine habitat. It would also trigger further warming of the planet by removing ice that reflects solar radiation back into space, disrupt weather patterns across the northern hemisphere and melt permafrost, releasing more carbon gases into the atmosphere.
Hence Desch’s scheme to use wind pumps to bring water that is insulated from the bitter Arctic cold to its icy surface, where it will freeze and thicken the ice cap. Nor is the physicist alone in his Arctic scheming: other projects to halt sea-ice loss include one to artificially whiten the Arctic by scattering light-coloured aerosol particles over it to reflect solar radiation back into space, and another to spray sea water into the atmosphere above the region to create clouds that would also reflect sunlight away from the surface.
All the projects are highly imaginative – and extremely costly. The fact that they are even being considered reveals just how desperately worried researchers have become about the Arctic. “The situation is causing grave concern,” says Professor Julienne Stroeve, of University College London. “It is now much more dire than even our worst case scenarios originally suggested.’
Last November, when sea ice should have begun thickening and spreading over the Arctic as winter set in, the region warmed up. Temperatures should have plummeted to -25C but reached several degrees above freezing instead. “It’s been about 20C warmer than normal over most of the Arctic Ocean. This is unprecedented,” research professor Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University told the Guardian in November. “These temperatures are literally off the charts for where they should be at this time of year. It is pretty shocking. The Arctic has been breaking records all year. It is exciting but also scary.”
Nor have things got better in the intervening months. Figures issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), in Boulder, Colorado, last week revealed that in January the Arctic’s sea ice covered 13.38 million sq km, the lowest January extent in the 38 years since satellites began surveying the region. That figure is 260,000 sq km below the level for January last year, which was the previous lowest extent for that month, and a worrying 1.26 million sq km below the long-term average for January.
In fact, sea ice growth stalled during the second week of January – in the heart of the Arctic winter – while the ice cap actually retreated within the Kara and Barents seas, and within the Sea of Okhotsk. Similarly, the Svalbard archipelago, normally shrouded in ice, has remained relatively free because of the inflow of warm Atlantic water along the western part of the island chain. Although there has been some recovery, sea ice remains well below all previous record lows.
The area covered by Arctic sea ice at least four years old has decreased from 1,860,000 sq km in September 1984 to 110,000 sq km in September 2016. In this visualisation, the age of the ice is indicated by shades ranging from blue-gray for the youngest ice to white for the oldest.
Photograph: Scientific Visualization Studio/Nasa
This paucity of sea ice bodes ill for the Arctic’s summer months when cover traditionally drops to its lower annual level, and could plunge to a record minimum this year. Most scientists expect that, at current emission rates, the Arctic will be reliably free of sea ice in summer by 2030.
By “free” they mean there will be less than 1m sq km of sea ice left in the Arctic, most of it packed into remote bays and channels, while the central Arctic Ocean over the north pole will be completely open. And by “reliably”, scientists mean there will have been five consecutive years with less than 1m sq km of ice by the year 2050. The first single ice-free year will come much earlier than this, however.
And when that happens, the consequences are likely to be severe for the human and animal inhabitants of the region. An ice-free Arctic will be wide open to commercial exploitation, for example. Already, mining, oil and tourism companies have revealed plans to begin operations – schemes that could put severe strain on indigenous communities’ way of life in the region.
Equally worrying is the likely impact on wildlife, says Stroeve. “Juvenile Arctic cod like to hang out under the sea ice. Polar bears hunt on sea ice, and seals give birth on it. We have no idea what will happen when that lot disappears. In addition, there is the problem of increasing numbers of warm spells during which rain falls instead of snow. That rain then freezes on the ground and forms a hard coating that prevents reindeer and caribou from finding food under the snow.”
Nor would the rest of the world be isolated. With less ice to reflect solar radiation back into space, the dark ocean waters of the high latitudes will warm and the Arctic will heat up even further.
“If you warm the Arctic you decrease the temperature difference between the poles and the mid-latitudes, and that affects the polar vortex, the winds that blow between the mid latitudes and the high latitudes,” says Henry Burgess, head of the Arctic office of the UK Natural Environment Research Council.
“Normally this process tends to keep the cold in the high north and milder air in mid-latitudes but there is an increasing risk this will be disrupted as the temperature differential gets weaker. We may get more and more long, cold spells spilling down from the Arctic, longer and slower periods of Atlantic storms and equally warmer periods in the Arctic. What happens up there touches us all. It is hard to believe you can take away several million sq km of ice a few thousand kilometres to the north and not expect there will be an impact on weather patterns here in the UK.”
For her part, Stroeve puts it more bleakly: “We are carrying out a blind experiment on our planet whose outcome is almost impossible to guess.”
This point is backed by Desch. “Sea ice is disappearing from the Arctic – rapidly. The sorts of options we are proposing need to be researched and discussed now. If we are provocative and get people to think about this, that is good.
“The question is: do I think our project would work? Yes. I am confident it would. But we do need to put a realistic cost on these things. We cannot keep on just telling people, ‘Stop driving your car or it’s the end of the world’. We have to give them alternative options, though equally we need to price them.”
THE BIG SHRINK
The Arctic ice cap reaches its maximum extent every March and then, over the next six months, dwindles. The trough is reached around mid-September at the end of the melting season. The ice growth cycle then restarts. However, the extent of regrowth began slackening towards the end of the last century. According to meteorologists, the Arctic’s ice cover at its minimum is now decreasing by 13% every decade – a direct consequence of heating triggered by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Climate change deniers claim this loss is matched by gains in sea ice around the Antarctic. It is not. Antarctic ice fluctuations are slight compared with the Arctic’s plummeting coverage and if you combine the changes at both poles, you find more than a million sq km of ice has been lost globally in 30 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/12/plan-to-refreeze-arctic-before-ice-goes-for-good-climate-change
US investigators corroborate some aspects of the Russia dossier
By Jim Sciutto and Evan Perez, CNN
Updated 5:25 PM ET, Fri February 10, 2017
CNN VIDEO HERE! - Go ----- - http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/10/politics/russia-dossier-update/
US officials corroborate aspects of dossier 05:51
Washington (CNN)For the first time, US investigators say they have corroborated some of the communications detailed in a 35-page dossier compiled by a former British intelligence agent, multiple current and former US law enforcement and intelligence officials tell CNN. As CNN first reported, then-President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the existence of the dossier prior to Trump's inauguration.
None of the newly learned information relates to the salacious allegations in the dossier. Rather it relates to conversations between foreign nationals. The dossier details about a dozen conversations between senior Russian officials and other Russian individuals. Sources would not confirm which specific conversations were intercepted or the content of those discussions due to the classified nature of US intelligence collection programs.
But the intercepts do confirm that some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier, according to the officials. CNN has not confirmed whether any content relates to then-candidate Trump.
The corroboration, based on intercepted communications, has given US intelligence and law enforcement "greater confidence" in the credibility of some aspects of the dossier as they continue to actively investigate its contents, these sources say.
Reached for comment this afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, "We continue to be disgusted by CNN's fake news reporting."
Spicer later called back and said, "This is more fake news. It is about time CNN focused on the success the President has had bringing back jobs, protecting the nation, and strengthening relationships with Japan and other nations. The President won the election because of his vision and message for the nation."
Spokespeople for the FBI, Department of Justice, CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
US intelligence officials emphasize the conversations were solely between foreign nationals, including those in or tied to the Russian government, intercepted during routine intelligence gathering.
Some of the individuals involved in the intercepted communications were known to the US intelligence community as "heavily involved" in collecting information damaging to Hillary Clinton and helpful to Donald Trump, two of the officials tell CNN.
Until now, US intelligence and law enforcement officials have said they could not verify any parts of the dossier.
Officials who spoke to CNN cautioned they still have not reached any judgment on whether the Russian government has any compromising information about the President.
Officials did not comment on or confirm any alleged conversations or meetings between Russian officials and US citizens, including associates of then-candidate Trump.
One of the officials stressed to CNN they have not corroborated "the more salacious things" alleged in the dossier.
CNN has not reported any of the salacious allegations.
Trump dismissed the entire dossier last month during his only news conference as President-elect, saying in January, "It's all fake news. It's phony stuff. It didn't happen."
The dossier was commissioned as opposition research by political opponents of then-candidate Trump and compiled by a former British intelligence agent. US intelligence agencies checked out the former MI6 operative and his vast network throughout Europe and found him and his sources to be credible.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/10/politics/russia-dossier-update/
It's nice to know that CNN is still working on this! ty CNN
Yes, Obama had a brain and he used it .. plus he was a humanitarian .. so the people he had picked up are quite different from the working Mothers with kids that trump is picking on.. it's just like him to.. take the easy way ... .. go grab those Moms/Pussies I believe trump calls them .. and slam then in a van. .more proof of his low class status. I'm so ashamed ...
All I'll say to you is this .. .'Just Wait'
No it's not, that's a fact. I know you can't accept facts .. I'll go find you some fake news you can
.................. .......oh nevermind to
Well, apparently not. As the stores say they had to move it out as it wasn't selling .. simple. It's business! If she had been making anyone money .. it would be very accessible and front and center. However, her line just wasn't moving ... maybe they can HUSTLE it up now ... . they're good at that .. hustling that is ..
Trump's Indonesian Business Partner Brags About His Access
"If other people have difficulty getting to him, I can do it easily."
Russ ChomaFeb. 10, 2017 12:09 PM
Achmad Ibrahim/AP
Donald Trump's Indonesian business partner is touting his relationship with the president, telling a Jakarta-based magazine that he still has ready access to the man in the Oval Office.
In a recent interview with Indonesian weekly Tempo titled "I Have Access to President Trump," [ https://en.tempo.co/read/news/2017/02/07/241843881/Hary-Tanoesoedibjo-I-have-access-to-President-Trump ] Hary Tanoesoedibjo, a billionaire who inked deals with the Trump Organization to build luxury resorts on the islands of Bali and Lido, said he has instant access to Trump's children and through them can reach Trump whenever he wants. Before assuming office, Trump declined to divest from any of his businesses but said he would no longer have any involvement with the day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization, which is now being run by his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. Trump also said his company would not initiate any new foreign deals, although it would continue to develop projects that were already in progress, including the two resorts he is building with Tanoesoedibjo that are barely underway.
Hary Tanoesoedibjo, a billionaire who inked deals with the Trump Organization to build luxury resorts on the islands of Bali and Lido, said he has instant access to Trump's children and through them can reach Trump whenever he wants. Before assuming office, Trump declined to divest from any of his businesses but said he would no longer have any involvement with the day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization, which is now being run by his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. Trump also said his company would not initiate any new foreign deals, although it would continue to develop projects that were already in progress, including the two resorts he is building with Tanoesoedibjo that are barely underway.
One of the journalists for Tempo who conducted the interview with Tanoesoedibjo said the magazine stands by the quote and has a recording and transcript to back it up. Tanoesoedibjo made similar comments about his ability to facilitate access to Trump in an interview with Reuters.
Tanoesoedibjo has political ambitions of his own in Indonesia, where he founded his own political party. In prior interviews, Tanoesoedibjo has said he was inspired by Trump's ability to transition from a wealthy businessman to a political leader. He is currently mulling a presidential bid in his home country.
Tanoesoedibjo and his wife, Liliana, attended Trump's inauguration in January, documenting the VIP treatment they received on Instagram—including a chauffeured ride down the Pennsylvania Avenue inaugural parade route, past waiting crowds and police officers standing at attention. Other Instagram posts showed the couple at exclusive parties before and after the ceremony and posing with members of Trump's family. In the Tempo interview, Tanoesoedibjo said he and his wife attended the inauguration as guests of the Trump Organization and paid their own way.
In the Tempo interview, Tanoesoedibjo said he last met with Trump on January 4, just over two weeks before Trump entered the White House, and that he held extended meetings with Trump's children on January 18 in New York City—meetings that were also documented on Instagram. Asked how often he has met with Trump, Tanoesoedibjo was elusive.
"I don't count, but often enough," he told Tempo.
Asked about what he and Trump had spoken about in early January, Tanoesoedibjo refused to comment.
"I cannot say," he told the magazine. "It would not be ethical, especially now that he is the president."
Tanoesoedibjo told Tempo that there was no conflict of interest in Trump being president of the United States and his business partner on luxury resorts in Indonesia.
"To be honest, Trump becoming president is a burden for me," Tanoesoedibjo said. "I must make sure that all projects run well because [Tanoesoedibjo's company] MNC carries Indonesia's reputation."
I'm sorry .. I left a lot of nuance & embedded links out .. no pat ie nce .. so so sorry ,,,,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/02/donald-trump-indonesian-business-partner-brags-about-his-access
plus, I just heard on the news that No ONE was there representing the US government ... Mrs. Obama was always there .. They didn't even bring in any woman from the State Dept. or anywhere to be her gal pal ....She & Michelle always had a great time when paling around! ... . they had fun together. .
( I guess Melania and Ivanka are busy hawking jewerly somewhere ..;( )
god ... they are so low class! know nothing low class white trash !
hawking everything they own everywhere, swear to god!
Appeals court upholds restraining order on Trump's Muslim ban
By Kerry Eleveld
Thursday Feb 09, 2017 · 3:16 PM PST
Protesters at San Francisco International Airport on Jan. 28, 2017.
A three-judge panel on Thursday kept in place a temporary restraining order that blocks Donald Trump's Muslim ban nationwide. Here’s the ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.