All posts by Ken Cole

Bernstein: There Will Be ‘Very Damaging’ Leaks From Hillary Email Investigation, Her Actions Reckless and Entitled

On Wednesday’s “CNN Tonight,” Journalist and author Carl Bernstein stated that there would be “very damaging” leaks from the investigation into Democratic presidential candidate former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email, and described her conduct as “what she did was an act of recklessness, and entitlement, that there’s no excuse for.”

Bernstein began by stating that in the general election “all bets are off,” including the usual GOP-Dem breakdown as an important factor, celebrity might be more important than ideology, and “TMZ, Drudge, new media, [are] going to have a huge role in this, much more than the usual, fact-based media…

Bernstein then said, “[T]he folks around Hillary, who are not the usual Clinton Kool Aid drinkers…they’re worried, they know that their candidate has performed awfully, and that [Democratic presidential candidate Senator] Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has drubbed her.” …

Full

Fox News Takes A HUGE HIT In The Ratings – No Longer First, Here’s WHY!

FACTS ON:
TRUTH ON:
Megan Kelly relentlessly attacked and tried to destroy Donald Trump
Roger Ailes (head of Fox) pushed everyone to destroy Donald Trump

Longtime viewers simply walked away.

Trump has an uncanny ability to “Change the Conversation” and expose hidden agendas.

Prophet in the zone at FOX and CNN warning FOX: “You’re ratings will drop for attacking Trump”. FOX mocked, FOX ratings Plummeted.
FACTS OFF:
TRUTH OFF”

NEWS ON:
In a surprising development from one of the weirdest election cycle we’ve ever had, it looks like CNN has knocked Fox News from it’s enormous pedestal in the ratings game!

CNN announced their victory with gleeful joy:

CNN ranked #1 in cable news in prime time in April. CNN beat Fox News for the fifth time in the last eight months in M-Su prime time (four of the past eight in M-F prime) among adults 25-54. The last time CNN had this many prime time wins in an eight-month period versus Fox News was over 14 years ago (Nov. 2001).
NEWS OFF:

The following is the spin which is exactly opposite of why Fox ratings dropped.

SPIN ON:
CONFUSION ON:
Many people are pointing to Fox News’ unrelenting pro-Trumpism for the falling numbers. Sean Hannity, Eric Bolling, Greta Van Susteren, and Bill O’Reilly have all been accused of coddling The Donald while going after his competitors. And that just doesn’t make for interesting television.

Heck he’s even gotten Megyn Kelly to befriend him, after months of very public feuding after the first Fox News debate – and Donald Trump’s supporters have been giving her death threats!!
SPIN OFF:
CONFUSION OFF:

FACTS ON:
TRUTH ON:
NOTE: Fox has only begun to be nice in the last few weeks, after months and months of rating drops during the time Megan and the rest (via Roger Ailes direction) were attacking Trump due to Roger being in bed with the RNC agenda. Long time faithful viewers of Fox got fed up months and months ago as relentless attacks and traps were set against Trump and stopped watching. Due to ratings drop Fox News now has no choice but to befriend Donald. Guess what, the long time viewers are just not coming back…

They found another news network:
http://oann.com
Anyone watching their ratings climbing?
FACTS OFF:
TRUTH OFF:

Original Spin On

Glenn Beck Invites America to Join Him in Another Fast

As Glenn Beck continues to push religion, his company fails, yet he still cannot put two and two together. Simply amazing…

It’s been a difficult past week for Beck, following news of another round of mass layoffs at his troubled media empire. On Friday, after giving an impassioned “farewell address” of sorts to his 40 laid-off employees from his replica Oval Office, the former radio shock jock joined his co-hosts in donning swim goggles and rubbing his face in a bowl of crushed Cheetos to see if they could “look like Donald Trump.”

“HEY GLENN, A LITTLE HARD TO KICK AGAINST THE GOADS EH?”

Full Article

CIA document details cover-up of drug trafficking by Contras, to Black Neighborhoods in the United States

…Webb’s articles revealed that the US government continued to support Contra elements even with the knowledge that the latter were engaged in trafficking cocaine into major US cities and using the proceeds to finance their war against the Sandinista (FSLN) government of Nicaragua. Webb’s investigation showed that representatives of the US-backed right-wing militias worked with gangs in Los Angeles to sell tons of cocaine, leading to speculation from other commentators that the CIA DIRECTED THE FLOW OF DRUGS TO TARGET BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS…

FULL ARTICLE

Prince Talks About The Illuminati, Chemtrails and other influence that he wrote about

We all know the CIA was complicit in the sales of drugs into black communities in LA, NY and across the nation during the Arms for Drugs Contra scandal white man Gary Webb exposed and was assassinated for…

and now,
Prince talks about Chemtrails causing black people in neighborhoods to fighting and at the 4 Min mark you will hear Dick Gregory and how black people are concerned about the white race putting chemicals “in my water”.

China Flight Tests New Multiple-Warhead Missile

DF-41 launch comes amid heightened tensions over S. China Sea
April 19, 2016 5:00 am

China conducted another flight test of its newest and longest-range intercontinental ballistic missile last week amid growing tensions with the United States over the South China Sea.

Pentagon officials told the Free Beacon the flight test of the new road-mobile DF-41 missile took place Tuesday with two multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, that were monitored in flight by U.S. military satellites and other regional sensors.

Officials did not say where the test took place. Past DF-41 launches were carried out from the Wuzhai Missile and Space Test Center in central China.

The latest flight test followed an earlier, rail-based canister ejection test of a DF-41 on Dec. 5.

U.S. Strategic Command commander Adm. Cecil Haney said Jan. 22 that China’s multiple warhead missiles are part of a significant investment in both nuclear and conventional forces.

“China is re-engineering its long-range ballistic missiles to carry multiple nuclear warheads,” Haney said in a speech.

The flight test came around the same time that a high-ranking Chinese general made an unusual visit to a disputed South China Sea island. Also, the missile test occurred three days before Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited the aircraft carrier USS Stennis as it sailed in the South China Sea.

Pentagon officials said the visit to Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Islands by Gen. Fan Changlong was timed to the Carter visit to the region. Fan is vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, the most powerful military organ under the ruling Communist Party of China.

The Pentagon has said China is covertly building military bases on disputed islands in the sea. Beijing has accused Washington of militarizing the sea by deploying warships and bolstering regional alliances.

Disclosure of the DF-41 test follows a newsletter report last month that stated China is nearing deployment of the new ICBM.

Kanwa Asian Defense reported last month that the new ICBM is in the final testing phase, and its expected deployment area will be near Xinyang in Henan province, in central China.

From that location, the missile would be capable of striking the United States in around 30 minutes, either through a polar trajectory or over the Pacific.

READ MUCH MORE

PRINCE TREATED FOR DRUG OVERDOSE DAYS BEFORE DEATH

Prince was treated for a drug overdose 6 days before his death … multiple sources tell TMZ.
We broke the story … Prince’s private jet made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois last Friday, hours after he performed in Atlanta. At the time his reps said he was battling the flu … something we questioned because his plane was only 48 minutes from home before the unscheduled landing.
Multiple sources in Moline tell us, Prince was rushed to a hospital and doctors gave him a “save shot” … typically administered to counteract the effects of an opiate.
Our sources further say doctors advised Prince to stay in the hospital for 24 hours. His people demanded a private room, and when they were told that wasn’t possible … Prince and co. decided to bail. The singer was released 3 hours after arriving and flew home.
We’re told when Prince left he “was not doing well.”
We know authorities in Minnesota are trying to get the hospital records from Moline to help determine cause of death.
We have made more than a dozen attempts to reach Prince’s reps for comment, but they went radio silent.

READ MORE

HOLY BIBLE ON LIST OF ‘CHALLENGED’ BOOKS AT LIBRARIES

NEW YORK (AP) — On the latest list of books most objected to at public schools and libraries, one title has been targeted nationwide, at times for the sex and violence it contains, but mostly for the legal issues it raises.

The Bible.

“You have people who feel that if a school library buys a copy of the Bible, it’s a violation of church and state,” says James LaRue, who directs the Office for Intellectual Freedom for the American Library Association, which released its annual 10 top snapshot of “challenged” books on Monday, part of the association’s “State of Libraries Report” for 2016.

“And sometimes there’s a retaliatory action, where a religious group has objected to a book and a parent might respond by objecting to the Bible.”

LaRue emphasized that the library association does not oppose having Bibles in public schools. Guidelines for the Office for Intellectual Freedom note that the Bible “does not violate the separation of church and state as long as the library does not endorse or promote the views included in the Bible.” The ALA also favors including a wide range of religious materials, from the Quran to the Bhagavad Gita to the Book of Mormon. LaRue added that the association does hear of complaints about the Quran, but fewer than for the Bible.

The Bible finished sixth on a list topped by John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” which has been cited for “offensive language” and sexual content. The runner-up, challenged for obvious reasons, was E L James’ raunchy romance “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

“I Am Jazz,” a transgender picture book by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, was No. 3, followed by another transgender story, Susan Kuklin’s “Beyond Magenta.” The list also includes Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” Craig Thompson’s “Habibi,” Jeanette Winter’s “Nasreen’s Secret School: A True Story from Afghanistan” and David Leviathan’s “Two Boys Kissing,” with one objection being that it “condones public displays of affection.”

“Many of the books deal with issues of diversity,” LaRue said. “And that often leads to challenges.”

The association bases its list on news reports and on accounts submitted from libraries and defines a challenge as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” Just 275 incidents were compiled by the ALA, down from 311 the year before and one of the lowest on record. The ALA has long believed that for every challenge brought to its attention, four or five others are not reported. LaRue says the association does not have a number for books actually pulled in 2015.

Challenged works in recent years have ranged from the Harry Potter novels to Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Discussing recent events, LaRue said he was concerned by legislation that Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe recently vetoed forcing schools to warn parents if their children will be assigned books with sexually explicit content. A Fairfax County mother had protested the use of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Beloved” in her son’s high school senior class. The 1987 novel set in the post-Civil War era includes scenes depicting sex, rape and bestiality and has appeared occasionally on the ALA challenged books list.

“We see the danger of censorship moving from the school library into the English classroom,” LaRue said.

ORIGIONAL

Europe and NATO

I will be leaving shortly for a week in Europe, visiting Slovakia, Romania, and the Czech Republic. After 1989, these former Soviet satellites sought integration with Europe—and, in a sense, salvation—by becoming members of the two major transnational organizations: the European Union and NATO. The former was strictly European, while the latter bound Europe and the United States together.
Recent chaos in the EU and the return of Russian assertiveness has placed these three countries in difficult positions. The Czech Republic is deeply bound economically with Germany. Prague is comfortable with that relationship and shares Berlin’s fate in many ways. When I visit the Czech Republic, I am going to be talking about what I see as Germany’s weakness.

Romania has opted to draw closer to the United States. It’s a difficult relationship, but even under communism, the Romanians distrusted the Russians. I have long argued that a close collaboration with the United States is essential to Romania. I will get a chance to hear from Romanians about the progress of our collaboration. The next critical step in the relationship is arranging significant investment from the United States for much-needed development of the Romanian energy sector—in spite of the fact that investing in energy right now is a tough proposition.

My first visit will be to Slovakia, a country that has struggled to keep its relations with Russia intact. Each year there is a conference in Bratislava called Globsec, where people who are focused on Central Europe and Russia gather. National leaders frequently speak, but they rarely say anything new, since they can’t. It is the people a tier or two down, some of whom I’ve known for years, who reveal the most by what they say or don’t say about what really makes them angry or worried. These people are the ones who give you get a sense of what is coming— or at least what they think is coming.

This year, a major topic at Globsec will be NATO. The choice of topic has to do partly with Donald Trump’s statements that Europe isn’t paying its “fair share” and, further, that it would be fine if NATO broke up. Such remarks by US presidential candidates are regarded with great care and concern in Eastern Europe. On a broader scale, Russia and the Middle East both present national security issues for all of Europe. Europe has no integrated military capability except for NATO, and NATO is now, to my mind, a shambles. It is a military alliance, but Europe has allowed its military capability, limited to begin with in the wake of WWII, to weaken dramatically.

As Europeans come to realize that Russia has not gone away and the United States has not actually overreacted to Islamist terrorism, Trump’s words on NATO are raising alarm. The Europeans worry that the US has lost confidence in NATO. I will be speaking on this subject, and what I have to say will not be reassuring. Many Europeans see NATO as the guarantor of their national security. In other words, they depend on the United States… the only NATO member with a global military capability.

From the start, the Europeans wanted NATO to serve as the mechanism for approving and overseeing military operations. They wanted a decisive voice in how NATO members, including the United States, applied their military power. However, their forces were so small that in most cases their participation was little more than symbolic. NATO became less and less a factor in US decision-making, and the Europeans compensated by congratulating themselves for their sophistication compared to the American “cowboys.”

The Europeans celebrated a concept called soft power, which involves the use of sanctions, the mobilization of public opinion, and other strategies that avoid military action. They wanted an option that cost less than becoming a global power costs. Frankly, from my point of view, their embracing soft power was simply a way to evade reality. As the Russians loomed larger and the Middle East spilled over into Europe, the Europeans discovered that soft power was… soft. And that they needed hard power, which the United States had (and to a far lesser extent Britain and France), but no one else did. Suddenly the world seemed out of control to the Europeans, since they lacked the hard power to shape events.

In terms of soft power, NATO began to take on a function it was never designed for. As communism fell, post-communist European states sought membership in NATO, not so much to be defended but to become integrated and Europeanized. Membership in the EU and NATO, it was believed, would turn these former Soviet satellites into Western countries. But NATO is a military alliance. It’s about tanks and planes and war plans. To become a mechanism for socializing new countries into Western Europe was not its purpose. Defending these countries and the rest of Europe was NATO’s function, but that function atrophied as war seemed increasingly irrelevant.

Since the US is a member, the Europeans felt that the United States’ power should be available to them through NATO. From Trump (and from far lesser figures like me), they are now hearing the message that the United States is not prepared to spend a vast amount of money on its military and then allow the Europeans a voice in its use. This is not a new reality, but it is one about which the United States is becoming much less apologetic.

The issue is not NATO itself but the defense relationship between Europe and the United States. NATO is simply the old framework for that relationship, which was established after World War II. At the time, the United States towered over Europe economically and militarily. Europe had little that it could contribute to defense, while the United States had an overriding interest in preventing the Soviets from seizing Western Europe. The US, comfortable with the asymmetrical arrangement, contributed the bulk of the military power to potentially fight a war on European territory, while Europe took the primary risk. That was the foundation of NATO.

That foundation crumbled long ago, most emphatically with the fall of the Soviet Union and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty that created the European Union. The total population of the European Union is just over 508 million people. The population of the United States is about 320 million people. The GDP of the European Union is $18.45 trillion. The GDP of the United States is about $18.3 trillion. In other words, Europe and the United States are equal in wealth, while Europe has almost 200 million people more than the US does.

There is therefore no reason why the Europeans should not have a military capability equal to or even greater than that commanded by the United States. Though Europe was understandably the junior partner in the 1950s, neither demographics nor economics show the continent to be a junior partner now.

Today, a structural problem driven by policy decisions ensures the ongoing asymmetry between the US’s commitment to NATO and Europe’s. The structural problem is that the European Union lacks a defense dimension. European unification is a complex quilt of relationships, and defense rests in the hands of individual sovereign states. The largest state, Germany, which should be devoting the most to a European defense force, devotes little even to its own force. Britain is cutting back its defense expenditures, and while France is raising the issue of increasing defense budgets, it still has a military force with limited capability.

There is an assumption in NATO that each country will devote 2% of its GDP to defense. A few do this, but most do not, and Europe as a whole does not come close. The American contribution to NATO is 2.7% of US GDP. The extraordinary fact is not that Trump pointed out this disparity and made clear that it couldn’t continue, but that it took Trump to make this a major issue.

During the Cold War, NATO’s mission was clear. It was to defend Western Europe from a Soviet attack. Military alliances function best with simple objectives. In this case, the military mission evaporated, but the alliance continued in place. Lacking a clear and present military mission, Europeans became even more reluctant to invest in defense. The need for defense seemed distant from the reality Europe was living in.

Now, the Russians are reasserting their place in history, and the Islamic State is targeting European capitals. It is not clear how the threats they pose are to be countered, but the challenge will demand military force in some capacity. In Europe, the United States has been seen as vastly overreacting to 9/11. A counterargument is that the Europeans simply didn’t believe they would become targets, but they have. Today, the fears fanned by terrorist acts in Europe have less to do with the number killed than with the disconcerting reality that a strike may come at any place and at any time. A state that does not act quickly and decisively to counter terrorism within its borders loses legitimacy and the trust of its public and its allies.

The Europeans must act. For its part, the United States has determined that it will no longer act alone. In the case of Syria, the US is prepared to use air power but will not deploy the multidivisional force needed to bring peace to the country. Instead, the US wants fellow NATO partners to shoulder a much larger part of the burden. And while the US is prepared to play a part, it does not intend to take the leading role.

Europe, however, is incapable of taking that role because it does not have the troops, hardware, or motivation to do so. Thus the Europeans will continue to hope for soft power solutions, so as to avoid the pain of hard power actions. They will not be able to act decisively, even if they wish to do so, for many years. As for Russia and the situation in Ukraine, the US is taking steps in conjunction with Poland and Romania, but geography dictates that it cannot be the primary player there.

The foundations of NATO have dissolved. Europe’s financial commitment to NATO is not credible. The willingness of the US to operate within the constraints of NATO is long gone. A unified strategic outlook is missing. NATO can be repaired, but it is hard to see that there is any unified vision or will to do so. Multinational institutions do not die. They continue to have annual meetings, such as NATO’s upcoming summit in Poland in July. But what is a military alliance without a military or a mission? It is just an anachronism.

I will be saying these things in Europe. My remarks will not be taken well. The Europeans understand the problem but want it to go away because dealing with it is much too hard. The problem will not go away, but the United States will, as the partnership with Europe is largely an illusion. The threats posed by Russian ambitions and terrorist plots will not go away but will simply become increasingly difficult to manage. Good will and conferences cannot solve the problem. I think that the 20th century exhausted Europe’s will to do difficult things, and for more than half a century, the things Europe had to do were relatively simple. That is no longer the case. In Bratislava, we will all agree that something needs to be done. We will also know that nothing will be.

George Friedman
Editor, This Week in Geopolitics

BOSTON GLOBE HAPPY WITH ANTI CHURCH WIN, GOES AFTER TRUMP WITH FAKE HEADLINES

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THE Boston Globe has hammered Donald Trump with a satirical front page depicting what they believe America would be like if he were in the White House.
But Trump has responded to the front page, calling it “stupid” and “worthless”.
The US publication used their Sunday edition to raise the alarm about a Trump presidency with a series of fake headlines and articles, calling it “the front page we hope we never have to print.”
“DEPORTATIONS TO BEGIN,” the top headline blares. “President Trump calls for tripling of ICE force; riots continue”
Other headlines include:
“Markets sink as trade war looms”
“New libel law targets ‘absolute scum’ in press”
“US soldiers refuse orders to kill ISIS families”
“Bank glitch halts border wall work”
“Trump on Nobel prize short list”