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WTH is going on in Iran? Is
the US headed for war?
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Dianne Fein-stein And Chris Murphy:
Anti-Gun LIARS
by Dave Workman they’ve been trying to peddle for years as the panacea to violent crime, a veteran firearms industry insider and attorney put their contentions through the shredder. Larry Keane, vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation has never been a wallflower when it comes to correcting the record. So, when Fein-stein and Murphy contended that more needs to be done, including bans on AR-type rifles because they “aren’t used for hunting,” Keane came out swinging. “Instead of basing their arguments on evidence and facts,” says Keane, “they take the emotional-low road.” He notes that they “pivot from tragedy to call for new laws.”“What they fail to do is to show that the laws would have prevented any of these tragedies,” he explains. “Why is that? Why do these senators with multiple offices full of staffers dedicated to conducting exactly this kind of research fail to make this connection between emotion and proposals? Well, the evidence simply does not exist. Law-abiding citizens qualified to own firearms follow the laws. Criminals and those mentally ill who seek to harm others do not. Enacting more laws will not change that.” In their Time op-ed, Fein-stein and Murphy declare, “One thing is clear: the laws on the books are insufficient and an ineffective deterrent. The proof is in the ever-increasing death toll, and an overwhelming majority of Americans now agrees we should implement stricter gun regulations. Translation: Gun control has failed. The solution is more of the same gun control, repackaged to impress the media and further inconvenience the rubes...
https://lidblog.com/dianne-feinstein-chris-murphy/ .
Have We Learned Nothing From the Iraq War?
by theintercept.com: Calls for military action against Iran grew louder this week in response to the Trump administration’s claims that the Islamic Republic was responsible for attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman... Many analysts and politicians, both in the U.S. and abroad, expressed skepticism of those claims. But the U.S. media appears to be falling into a familiar pattern, providing a sympathetic platform for the administration without fundamentally questioning its premises. What can we learn from the last push for a war in the Middle East 17 years ago? Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell during the run-up to the Iraq War, joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss the lessons of recent history. Lawrence Wilkerson: The credibility of the United States on intelligence is really low right now. If that intelligence is going to cause U.S. forces to die and bleed in combat, the U.S. to deploy military force, I’m going to be very skeptical of that intelligence. Very skeptical.
Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Mehdi Hasan. It’s a Middle Eastern country with lots of oil, the first three letters are I, R and A, and America wants to bomb it. In 2003, it was Iraq. Today, it’s Iran. The parallels are beyond eerie.
LW: John Bolton and Mike Pompeo look a lot like the characters from the Bush administration with Pompeo being the sycophant and Bolton being the leader.
MH: That’s my guest today, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Colin Powell in the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003 and subsequently became a very vocal critic of that conflict, and of the George W. Bush administration. So on today’s show, we’ll discuss: how close are we to a catastrophic conflict with Iran and what lessons can we all learn — politicians, the media, the public — from the 2003 Iraq war debacle? Is the Iranian government behind a series of recent attacks on a number of tankers in the Gulf, most recently on a pair of Norwegian and Japanese tankers carrying petrochemicals? And if it turns out that the Iranians are responsible, is that a casus belli for a new war in the Middle East between the United States and the Islamic Republic? The U.S. government has released a video supposedly showing Iranian Revolutionary Guards on a patrol boat trying to covertly remove an undetonated mine from the hull of one of the two tankers. And President Trump, speaking on state television’s Fox and Friends the other morning, said there was no doubt in his mess of a mind as to who was to blame...
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/20/iran-crisis-have-we-learned-nothing-from-the-iraq-war/?utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_campaign=38f9482f23-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_06_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e00a5122d3-38f9482f23-131896129 .
Donald Trump, Iran, and the
Gulf of Tonkin Redux
by theintercept.com: Powerful forces within the Trump administration appear intent on war against Iran. This week on Intercepted... As the U.S. accuses Iran of attacking civilian ships while offering scant evidence, grave historical parallels are emerging with the Gulf of Tonkin incidents in 1964 that were manipulated to justify Lyndon Johnson’s dramatic escalation of the war in Vietnam. California Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna is preparing legislation aimed at stopping an attack on Iran, and he says he would not put it past national security adviser John Bolton to manipulate evidence. Journalist Negar Mortazavi of The Independent analyzes what war with Iran would look like and exposes the State Department’s funding of propaganda operations against Iran. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman talks about the parallels with the build up to the Iraq invasion of 2003 and shares stories from her early life as a journalist. Newscaster: The interview that’s already causing a Twitter storm. President Trump, 30 hours. Here’s George Stephanopoulos.
Announcer: The hypochondriac. Donald J. Trump: Let’s do that over. He’s coughing in the middle of my answer.
George Stephanopoulos: Yeah, okay.
DJT: I don’t like that. If you’re going to cough, please leave the room.
Announcer: No wonder his wife kicked him out.
DJT: I watched Richard Nixon go around firing everybody and that didn’t work out too well. Oh, let me call the FBI. Give me a break. There’s never been a time in the history of our country where somebody was so mistreated as I have been. I never suggested firing Mueller...
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Polish Parliament Member Invites
commie-AOC To Visit Real Concentration Camps
by Jeff Dunetz He extended an “olive branch of education,” inviting her to visit the worst of Hitler’s concentration camps in Poland so she can in learn the why it’s so wrong to inappropriately use the Holocaust for political purposes. Tarczynski did not seem too happy with commie-Ocasio-Cortez’s comments, calling them a cheapening of history used to score political points. Regarding the Holocaust and Poland being the site of Europe’s biggest network of Nazi death camps, he wrote in his letter that this has caused “a deep wound that persists on our proud Polish and European history that we must deal with every single day and that we reaffirm to one another can never be forgotten, and never allowed to happen again.” This is why when someone cheapens the history or uses it for political point-scoring, we become agitated and upset. “I understand that there are heightened tensions in your politics right now, but I would urge severe caution in attempting to leverage phrases such as ‘concentration camp’ for political ends. It will lead nowhere good,” the letter said. He offered for her to visit the sites at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Majdanek which were among the camps in Poland where “over three million human souls were extinguished, and millions more detained and affected directly.” Maybe he could invite Pat Buchanan to Treblinka, he challenged the historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel exhaust there, saying “Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.”...
https://lidblog.com/concentration-camps/ .
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Trump's Art of the Trade Deals With Mexico and ChinaPolitical Editors: This week has seen big updates on the trade front. The White House reported late yesterday, “A day after Mexico’s 114-4 landslide vote to become the first country to ratify the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Washington today. In addition to meeting with President Donald J. Trump at the White House, the Prime Minister encouraged Congress to make USMCA a bipartisan priority.” In other words, memo to House Speaker liar-Nancy Pulosi: Knock it off with the Obstruct Trump™ agenda and do something positive for a change.
While Trump was busy fixing trade with Mexico he was also leveraging our southern neighbor on immigration. Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics makes an interesting observation: “Mexico just agreed to expend its resources to stem the flow of migrants from Central America through Mexico into the United States. In essence, Trump just delivered on the biggest, craziest campaign promise in history. He just used tariffs to get Mexico to agree to pay for the wall.” A metaphorical wall, to be sure, but that’s something. And Trump playing hardball by tying tariffs to immigration didn’t derail trade negotiations as some feared.
But Trump wasn’t only working with Mexico and Canada this week. He announced Tuesday that he “had a very good telephone conversation with President Xi [Jinping] of China” and that the two leaders planned to have “an extended meeting next week at the G-20 in Japan.” The potential for an end to the trade war via the possibility of a new trade deal between the world’s two largest economies injected a positive surge in the markets — the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1.4% upon the news.
The Wall Street Journal notes, “The G-20 gathering of political leaders from large economies can often be a threat to the health of those economies. But if Mr. Trump can use this meeting to persuade Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to stop mistreating U.S. companies — in return for ending American tariffs — economic health is sure to improve worldwide.” Xi may be motivated to make concessions because Chinese manufacturing is hurting in part due to the tariffs.
As we have regularly noted, there is a third player in this particular trade war — Beijing’s North Korean puppet, Kim Jong-un. Last week, Xi took the unusual step of meeting with Kim in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. It appears that Xi may be working to leverage the trade talks with the promise of some sort of nuclear concession from Kim. Any deal is still a long way from done, but at least the initial signs are promising. As we’ve said before of China and North Korea, trade and national security are inextricably linked.
Finally, it’s worth reiterating U.S. trade numbers with Mexico and China for perspective. In 2018, the U.S. exported $299 billion to Mexico while importing $372 billion, for a trade deficit of nearly $73 billion. As for China, the U.S. exported just $74 billion while importing $297 billion, leaving the trade deficit at an eye-popping $222 billion. Given that America is essentially funding China’s military with that money, Trump’s more than justified in pointing to that as a big problem, even if Mexico is the bigger trade partner. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/63784?mailing_id=4349&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4349&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
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