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Very definite evidence of mental-illness…

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« on: March 05, 2017, 08:19:37 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Donald Trump was a conspiracy-theory candidate.
Now he's on the edge of being a conspiracy-theory president.


Donald Trump is who we thought he was.

By CHRIS CILLIZZA | 2:50PM EST - Saturday, February 04, 2017

President Donald J. Trump. — Photograph: Aude Guerrucci/European Pressphoto Agency.
President Donald J. Trump. — Photograph: Aude Guerrucci/European Pressphoto Agency.

DONALD TRUMP's political career was born amid the fever swamps of the far right. He seized on a favorite conspiracy theory bubbling there — that then-President Barack Obama was not, in fact, born in the United States and therefore was an illegitimate president — to boost his profile in national politics.

That boost eventually led to his 2016 candidacy. That candidacy led to President Trump. But what never changed is Trump's roots in the conspiracy theory world.

Witness several Trump tweets early on Saturday morning that suggest he was the target of a wiretapping campaign authorized by Obama during the 2016 race.










There is, as you probably already guessed, no detail about the alleged wiretapping included in any of the Trump tweets. Trump's tweets appear to trace back to an article posted during Friday on Breitbart News headlined Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama's ‘Silent Coup’ vs. Trump. That article, based heavily on conservative talk radio host Levin's views, suggest the Obama administration conducted a “silent coup” to keep Trump from the presidency.

Here's the key paragraph:

In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.

The problem here, of course, is that what Levin — and Breitbart — use as evidence for these claims are a series of seemingly unconnected events — from FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court requests to Trump joking about the Russia email hack, to the release of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails in the fall. The proof that all — or any — of these events are tied together by actual facts as opposed to supposition is not offered.

The White House has offered no further evidence of Trump's claims — as of this publishing.

The idea that Obama himself authorized — and was able to get approval for — the wiretapping of the opposition party's candidate for president is, frankly, far-fetched. And if someone is making that claim — as Trump is now doing — the burden of proof is on them. If you are going to say there is a grand conspiracy that only you and a handful of others see, you need to offer a step-by-step explanation to the broader public to show why you're right.

Most of the parties involved suggest the claims are without basis.

“A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” said Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for former President Obama. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

A tweet from Jon Favreau, a speechwriter for Obama, suggests, however, the wording of that Obama statement is key.




It seems unlikely — given Trump's past pattern of making baseless claims without proof and then simply insisting he is right and no evidence is needed to prove the point — that any meaningful effort will be made by the Trump administration to connect the dots on this alleged wiretapping conspiracy.

Here's the thing: Conspiracy theorists see everything as connected. If you doubt them, well of course you do because you're in on it. That's not the standard that we can have for the president of the United States. Proof is required.

The ball is in Trump's court. Short of convincing evidence to back up the wiretapping claims — and none has emerged yet but that doesn't mean it's impossible some will — the conspiracy-theory candidate has become the conspiracy-theory president.


• Chris Cillizza writes The Fix, a politics blog for The Washington Post, and hosts the Ciquizza podcast, a weekly news quiz [Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • Trump accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ wiretap — but offers no evidence

 • Trump, citing no evidence, accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ plot to wiretap Trump Tower

 • The president accused Obama of ‘McCarthyism’. But Trump's mentor helped enforce it.

 • Obama spokesman calls Trump's claim of wiretapping by White House ‘simply false’

 • Russia is the slow burn of the Trump administration, and it's not going away

 • Despite early denials, growing list of Trump camp contacts with Russians haunts White House

 • VIDEO: Trump alleges wiretapping by Obama; gives no evidence

 • VIDEO: Trump's relationship with Obama since taking office

 • VIDEO: What is next for Trump and the intelligence community?

 • PICTURE GALLERY: Memorable tweets from President Trump


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/04/donald-trump-was-a-conspiracy-theory-candidate-now-hes-on-the-verge-of-being-a-conspiracy-theory-president
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #1 on: March 06, 2017, 02:53:08 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Trump: Bonkers, paranoid or trapped?

The questions must weigh on Trump.

By JENNIFER RUBIN | 12:01PM EST - Sunday, March 05, 2017

President Donald J. Trump at the White House on February 27th. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.
President Donald J. Trump at the White House on February 27th. — Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press.

The Washington Post reports:

President Trump on Saturday angrily accused former president Barack Obama of orchestrating a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election.

While citing no evidence to support his explosive allegation, Trump said in a series of five tweets sent Saturday morning that Obama was “wire tapping” his New York offices before the election in a move he compared to McCarthyism. “Bad (or sick) guy!” he said of his predecessor, adding that the surveillance resulted in “nothing found.”


AN Obama spokesman gave an emphatic, but noticeably limited response: “A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

With no comment yet from the FBI or Justice Department, the possibility remains that Trump was under some sort of surveillance in the course of an intelligence investigation. A showing of probable cause to a court would have been required to obtain a wiretap of the type Trump alleged.

In the course of less than a week we've gone from “Trump presidency on the rocks” to “What a normal speech!” to “How many Trump associates had contact with the Russians, and why did they lie about it?” to “Trump was bugged, really?!?

There are several explanations — not necessarily mutually exclusive — for the latest outburst from the president.

First, he is increasingly out of touch with reality. Just as he obsessed over the crowd size at his inauguration and the fictional illegal voters upward of 3 million, Trump's mammoth ego cannot take the daily drumbeat of attacks and accusations. When adversity strikes — as it did with new allegations concerning Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was forced to recuse himself from any campaign-related investigation — he becomes unhinged and paranoid. He can stick to a teleprompter speech for an hour, but soon reverts to form.

A variation on the first possibility would be that Trump correctly realizes the intelligence community has a good deal more information on what contacts his associates had with Russians than he does. A New York Times story last week confirmed that the intelligence community also has intercepts of Russian officials discussing their contacts with Trump associates. Trump, under this theory, is panicked. An exaggerated, unsupported claim from a right-wing provocateur and gadfly Mark Levin that Trump was directly wiretapped is enough to set him off into a Twitter frenzy. As they said about Richard Nixon, even paranoids have enemies.

Another explanation is that Trump, as he does when things go wrong (the Sessions recusal, disarray on tax and health-care legislation, accusations about his foreign holdings), deliberately creates distractions. He'd rather the media chatter about whether he is sane than focus on the need to obtain his taxes to determine what connections he and his family have to Russia. (Recall that last week a story surfaced that Donald Trump Jr. was paid handsomely for a speech in France for a pal of the Putin oligarchs.)

And finally, it is possible that he is right that Trump communications were under investigation — but only up to a point. We go back to a story from late October 2016 in which FBI officials allegedly investigated a connection between computer servers owned by the Trump Organization and the Russian Alpha Bank. The New York Times reported that there could be an “innocuous explanation” for 2,700 so-called look-up messages sent from Alpha servers to Trump's. This does not necessarily mean the FBI or anyone else was “wiretapping” Trump Towers, but we have yet to find out the extent of its investigation and whether, for example, the FBI discovered additional ties between Trump associates and Kremlin allies.

Apart from the server story, news reports have suggested, as a TIME story did, that “as major banks in America stopped lending him money following his many bankruptcies, the Trump organization was forced to seek financing from non-traditional institutions. Several had direct ties to Russian financial interests in ways that have raised eyebrows.” (Trump denies he has any ties to Russia. “I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don't have any deals in Russia,” he said recently, leaving open the possibility that he and/or his sons have ties to Russians operating outside of Russia.)

After Trump's Twitter outburst some lawmakers, like Senator Ben Sasse (Republican-Nebraska), chose to take him “seriously,” that is, to call for proof of his claims. Others argued that his accusations only underscored the need for a definitive, independent investigation conducted by either a commission with subpoena power or a special prosecutor named by the deputy attorney general (Sessions, who has recused himself, could not do so). Realizing their error in inviting more scrutiny, Sean Spicer tried to walk back the allegations on Sunday morning. He called for Congress — which is already investigating Trump's Russia connection — to look into improper surveillance during the campaign. He almost begged the press to drop it, saying that no further remarks on the topic would be forthcoming. Good luck with that.

Trump inadvertently emphasized that at the core this is about whether the intelligence community has discovered the president of the United States is compromised. That cannot very well be left solely to congressional partisans or to a Justice Department that reports to him.


• Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog at The Washington Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • VIDEO: 10 reactions to Trump's wiretapping allegations against Obama


https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/03/05/trump-bonkers-paranoid-or-trapped
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« Reply #2 on: March 06, 2017, 02:54:20 pm »

SOME LEFTY'S ARE REALLY STUPID AND NEED TO BE TAUGHT

mental illness is believing there is no conspiracy
when it's blatantly in front of everybody's face to see


the nsa spies on everyone on the planet they know every one of your dirty secrets
oh yes  new zealand is involved in collecting this data

New Zealand spying on Pacific allies for 'Five Eyes' and NSA, Snowden files show


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/05/new-zealand-spying-on-pacific-allies-for-five-eyes-and-nsa-snowden-files-show

Canada halts intelligence sharing with Five Eyes after ‘accidentally’ sending over Canadians’ data

https://www.rt.com/news/330530-canada-halts-intelligence-sharing-nsa/



so once again you and the washington post are lying with more fake news for stupid dumbed down humans like you ?


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« Reply #3 on: March 06, 2017, 04:55:19 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Inside Trump's fury: The president rages at leaks,
setbacks and accusations


At the center of the turmoil in the White House is an impatient President Trump increasingly
frustrated by his administration's inability to erase the impression that his campaign was
engaged with Russia, to stem leaks and to implement any signature achievements.
Interviews with 17 insiders offer a look at the tumultuous recent days.


By PHILIP RUCKER, ROBERT COSTA and ASHLEY PARKER | 8:18PM PST - Sunday, March 05, 2017

President Trump walks to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House with his grandchildren Joseph and Arabella Kushner, before departing for Florida on March 3rd. — Photograph: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post.
President Trump walks to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House with his grandchildren Joseph and Arabella Kushner,
before departing for Florida on March 3rd. — Photograph: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post.


PRESIDENT TRUMP spent the weekend at “the winter White House,” Mar-a-Lago, the secluded Florida castle where he is king. The sun sparkles off the glistening lawn and warms the russet clay Spanish tiles, and the steaks are cooked just how he likes them (well done). His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — celebrated as calming influences on the tempestuous president — joined him. But they were helpless to contain his fury.

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad.

Trump's young presidency has existed in a perpetual state of chaos. The issue of Russia has distracted from what was meant to be his most triumphant moment: his address last Tuesday to a joint session of Congress. And now his latest unfounded accusation — that Barack Obama tapped Trump's phones during last fall's campaign — had been denied by the former president and doubted by both allies and fellow Republicans.

When Trump ran into Christopher Ruddy on the golf course and later at dinner on Saturday, he vented to his friend. “This will be investigated,” Ruddy recalled Trump telling him. “It will all come out. I will be proven right.”

“He was pissed,” said Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company. “I haven't seen him this angry.”

Trump enters week seven of his presidency the same as the six before it: enmeshed in controversy while struggling to make good on his campaign promises. At a time when White House staffers had sought to ride the momentum from Trump's speech to Congress and begin advancing its agenda on Capitol Hill, the administration finds itself beset yet again by disorder and suspicion.

At the center of the turmoil is an impatient president increasingly frustrated by his administration's inability to erase the impression that his campaign was engaged with Russia, to stem leaks about both national security matters and internal discord and to implement any signature achievements.

This account of the administration's tumultuous recent days is based on interviews with 17 top White House officials, members of Congress and friends of the president, many of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Gnawing at Trump, according to one of his advisers, is the comparison between his early track record and that of Obama in 2009, when amid the Great Recession he enacted an economic stimulus bill and other big-ticket items.

Trump's team is trying again to reboot this week, with the president expected to sign a new executive order on Monday implementing an entry ban for some countries after the initial one was blocked in federal court. The administration also intends to introduce a legislative plan later in the week to repeal and replace Obama's health-care law, officials said.

The rest of Trump's legislative plan, from tax reform to infrastructure spending, is effectively on hold until Congress first tackles the Affordable Care Act.

White House legislative staffers concluded late last week that the administration was spinning in circles on the health-care plan, amid mounting criticism from conservatives that the administration was fumbling.

With Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price on the road with Vice President Pence, a decision was made: Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, would become the point person, though officials insisted Price had not been sidelined.

On Friday, Mulvaney convened a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with top administration officials and senior staff of House and Senate leaders to hammer out the final details of the proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act.

“Mulvaney has been essential in helping us get health care over the finish line,” said Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director.

On Capitol Hill, Price is seen by some Republicans as more knowledgeable about health-care policy than Mulvaney, given his experience as a physician and his time as chairman of the House Budget Committee. But Mulvaney benefits from the close relationships he has forged with Trump's top advisers and with the House's conservative wing.

Trump, meanwhile, has been feeling besieged, believing that his presidency is being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures — not to mention the media, which he has called “the enemy of the American people”.

That angst over what many in the White House call the “deep state” is fermenting daily, fueled by rumors and tidbits picked up by Trump allies within the intelligence community and by unconfirmed allegations that have been made by right-wing commentators. The “deep state” is a phrase popular on the right for describing entrenched networks hostile to Trump.

Representative Dana Rohrabacher (Republican-California), an advocate of improved relations between the United States and Russia, said he has told friends in the administration that Trump is being punished for clashing with the hawkish approach toward Russia that is shared by most Democrats and Republicans.

“Remember what Dwight Eisenhower told us: There is a military-industrial complex. That complex still exists and has a lot of power,” he said. “It's everywhere, and it doesn't like how Trump is handling Russia. Over and over again, in article after article, it rears its head.”

The president has been seething as he watches round-the-clock cable news coverage. Trump recently vented to an associate that Carter Page, a one-time Trump campaign adviser, keeps appearing on television even though he and Trump have no significant relationship.


President Trump arrives at the White House after a trip to Newport News, Virginia, to visit a new aircraft carrier on March 2nd. — Photograph: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post.
President Trump arrives at the White House after a trip to Newport News, Virginia, to visit a new aircraft carrier on March 2nd.
 — Photograph: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post.


Stories from Breitbart News, the incendiary conservative website, have been circulated at the White House's highest levels in recent days, including one story where talk-radio host Mark Levin accused the Obama administration of mounting a “silent coup,” according to several officials.

Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist who once ran Breitbart, has spoken with Trump at length about his view that the “deep state” is a direct threat to his presidency.

Advisers pointed to Bannon's frequent closed-door guidance on the topic and Trump's agreement as a fundamental way of understanding the president's behavior and his willingness to confront the intelligence community — and said that when Bannon spoke recently about the “deconstruction of the administrative state”, he was also alluding to his aim of rupturing the intelligence community and its influence on the U.S. national security and foreign policy consensus.

Bannon's view is shared by some top Republicans.

“It's not paranoia at all when it's actually happening. It's leak after leak after leak from the bureaucrats in the [intelligence community] and former Obama administration officials — and it's very real,” said Representative Devin Nunes (Republican-California), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “The White House is absolutely concerned and is trying to figure out a systemic way to address what's happening.”

The mood at the White House on Tuesday night was different altogether — jubilant. Trump returned from the Capitol shortly before midnight to find his staff assembled in the residence cheering him. Finally, they all thought, they had seized control. The president had even laid off Twitter outbursts — a small victory for a staff often unable to drive a disciplined message.

“He nailed it, and he knew it,” said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president.

The merriment came to a sudden end on Wednesday night, when The Washington Post first reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met with the Russian ambassador despite having said under oath at his Senate confirmation hearing that he had no contact with the Russians.

Inside the West Wing, Trump's top aides were furious with the defenses of Sessions offered by the Justice Department's public affairs division and felt blindsided that Sessions's aides had not consulted the White House earlier in the process, according to one senior White House official.

The next morning, Trump exploded, according to White House officials. He headed to Newport News, Virginia, on Thursday for a splashy commander-in-chief moment. The president would trumpet his plan to grow military spending aboard the Navy's sophisticated new aircraft carrier. But as Trump, sporting a bomber jacket and Navy cap, rallied sailors and shipbuilders, his message was overshadowed by Sessions.

Then, a few hours after Trump had publicly defended his attorney general and said he should not recuse himself from the Russia probe, Sessions called a news conference to announce just that — amounting to a public rebuke of the president.

Back at the White House on Friday morning, Trump summoned his senior aides into the Oval Office, where he simmered with rage, according to several White House officials. He upbraided them over Sessions's decision to recuse himself, believing that Sessions had succumbed to pressure from the media and other critics instead of fighting with the full defenses of the White House.

In a huff, Trump departed for Mar-a-Lago, taking with him from his inner circle only his daughter and Kushner, who is a White House senior adviser. His top two aides, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Bannon, stayed behind in Washington.

As reporters began to hear about the Oval Office meeting, Priebus interrupted his Friday afternoon schedule to dedicate more than an hour to calling reporters off the record to deny that the outburst had actually happened, according to a senior White House official.

“Every time there's a palace intrigue story or negative story about Reince, the whole West Wing shuts down,” the official said.

Ultimately, Priebus was unable to kill the story. He simply delayed the bad news, as reports of Trump dressing down his staff were published by numerous outlets on Saturday.

Trouble for Trump continued to spiral over the weekend. Early during Saturday morning, he surprised his staff by firing off four tweets accusing Obama of a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap his Trump Tower phones in the run-up to last fall's election. Trump cited no evidence, and Obama's spokesman denied any such wiretap was ordered.

That night at Mar-a-Lago, Trump had dinner with Sessions, Bannon, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, among others. They tried to put Trump in a better mood by going over their implementation plans for the travel ban, according to a White House official.

Trump was brighter on Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story, the official said.

But he found reason to be mad again: Few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday political talk shows. Some Trump advisers and allies were especially disappointed in Senator Marco Rubio (Florida), who two days earlier had hitched a ride down to Florida with Trump on Air Force One.

Pressed by NBC's Chuck Todd to explain Trump's wiretapping claim, Rubio demurred.

“Look, I didn't make the allegation,” he said. “I'm not the person that went out there and said it.”


Damian Paletta contributed to this report.

• Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.

• Robert Costa is a national political reporter at The Washington Post.

• Ashley Parker is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2017, after 11 years at The New York Times, where she covered the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns and Congress, among other things.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • Wiretapping accusation pushes Trump presidency onto a road with no guardrails

 • Comey asked Justice officials to refute Trump's unproven wiretapping claims

 • The Trump Experiment may come to an early tipping point

 • How Trump could settle the debate around his wiretapping allegations

 • Upheaval is now standard operating procedure inside the White House


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-fury-the-president-rages-at-leaks-setbacks-and-accusations/2017/03/05/40713af4-01df-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html
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« Reply #4 on: March 07, 2017, 02:59:16 pm »

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Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

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« Reply #5 on: March 07, 2017, 03:26:44 pm »


from The Washington Post....

The dangerous rage of Donald Trump

When he's mad, he just says stuff.

By CHRIS CILLIZZA | 11:30AM EST - Monday, March 06, 2017

President Donald J. Trump. — Photograph: Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
President Donald J. Trump. — Photograph: Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

HERE'S HOW The Washington Post described President Trump's mood heading into this past weekend: “Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad.”

Here's Politico's take: “Trump, who complained loudly to top aides during a tense Oval Office meeting on Friday over how things in his White House were going….”

And here's ABC News: “President Donald Trump summoned some of his senior staff to the Oval Office and went ‘ballistic’.”

The president, it seems fair to say, wasn't happy then on Saturday morning when he sent a flurry of tweets alleging — with zero evidence — that Trump Tower had been wiretapped in the course of the 2016 campaign under orders from then-President Barack Obama. Anger — and a persistent sense that people were out to get him or weren't treating him fairly — motivated Trump to make a massive charge: That the man he was running to replace purposely sought to sway the election via misuse of the intelligence community.

This isn't the first time we've seen what President Trump acts like when he's angry. Think back to Trump's news conference on February 16th. In it, Trump offered raw and personal attacks against the media who, he insisted, were creating a fake news story out of the ties between his campaign and the Russians. He insisted he wasn't angry at all — a statement totally belied by his actions and words.

We can safely conclude then that when Trump gets angry, he looks for a way to strike back. And he is willing to stretch — or break with — the truth to give himself a measure of satisfaction in that regard.

As a candidate for president, we saw this side of Trump regularly — particularly in a debate setting. When, say, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, an also-ran, attacked Trump, the front-runner was unable to resist hitting back. His attacks on “low energy” Jeb Bush, “little” Marco Rubio and “lyin'” Ted Cruz were all, to Trump's mind, ways of leveling the playing field after he had been attacked. Whether it made sense as a political strategy was beside the point; Trump felt better after he swung back — so he always swung back.


President Trump returns to the White House on Sunday. — Photograph: European Pressphoto Agency.
President Trump returns to the White House on Sunday. — Photograph: European Pressphoto Agency.

The trouble for Trump — and all of the rest of us — is that Trump is now president. And there are real-world consequences to both how angry he gets and how he chooses to blow off that steam. An angry call with the Australian prime minister, for example, has real-world implications. So does an open and aggressive attempt to disqualify the free and independent press. Or the accusation that your predecessor used the powers of the federal government to specifically target you.

The question now is if Trump is willing to do the sorts of things listed above primarily because he is angry, what else is he willing to do to vent his frustrations? The president of the United States is a bounded job — checks and balances and all that — but even so, Trump can have massive influence, for positive or negative, based on a single tweet. He either doesn't understand that power or doesn't seem care about it when he's mad.

What's even more harrowing is the fact that in the wake of Trump's Twitter tirade on tapping, two things happened.

1. He felt better. This from The Washington Post story: “Trump was brighter on Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story.”

2. He got angry again. Again, The Post: “But he found reason to be mad again: Few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday political talk shows.”

This feels like a cycle that is going to keep repeating itself. Anger, release, anger. The issue is that Trump's “release” mechanism is getting more and more dangerous. If he's offering (so far) unfounded allegations about being wiretapped by the former president less than two months into his tenure, what will he be saying in a year's time when something provokes him to anger?


• Chris Cillizza writes The Fix, a politics blog for The Washington Post, and hosts the Ciquizza podcast, a weekly news quiz.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • President for a Day’, starring Donald Trump

 • White House aides struggle to defend Trump's wiretap claim

 • Can Trump weather the storms of his own making?

 • No matter the evidence, Trump won't stop believing

 • ‘Stupid Watergate’: John Oliver mocks Trump’s Russia scandal — and the president’s response

 • Why does Trump think his phones were tapped? An investigation.

 • VIDEO: What you need to know about Trump's wiretapping claim


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/06/the-dangerous-anger-of-donald-trump
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« Reply #6 on: March 07, 2017, 06:20:00 pm »

washington post is working for putin spreading more fake news



my advice to trump is dont get mad but get even by destroying his enemies
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« Reply #7 on: March 07, 2017, 07:13:48 pm »


from The Washington Post....

President for a Day’, starring Donald Trump

Trump seems to have come up with a new reality show with himself as the main character.

By RICHARD COHEN | 7:33PM EST - Monday, March 06, 2017

President Donald J. Trump addresses a joint session of Congress in Washington. — Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/Associated Press.
President Donald J. Trump addresses a joint session of Congress in Washington. — Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/Associated Press.

DONALD TRUMP, clever guy that he is, has come up with a new reality show. It's called “President for a Day” and the way it works is that, every so often, maybe once a month, Trump acts presidential, gives a speech in which an aide is not standing by with meds, and many in the media and politics hug themselves and roll around on the floor, praising the president for his very presidentialness and cheering the emergence of the man who has been there all along but no one in the media or the creepy “deep state” seemed to notice. Thank God, that's over. He has arrived!

This happened last week after Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress. All over Washington, people fell off their chairs in shock that no one had been insulted, no brazen lies were uttered and no weird conspiracy theories had been advanced. My former Washington Post colleague Ronald Kessler told Newsmax TV that the speech showed “the real Donald Trump.” It was such a relief to learn that whoever it was who had insisted Barack Obama was born in Kenya and who had called Mexicans “rapists” and who had disparaged the heroism of Senator John McCain was not the guy in the Oval Office. Had he been, I know Kessler and others on the right would not have supported him.

At The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan treated the speech like it was a hypodermic: “He normalized himself.” Just like that, roll up your sleeves, Mr. President, this won't hurt and it will block eruptions of narcissism and self-pity. This allowed Noonan and others to suggest — nay, to hope — that Trump “may have a capacity to grow into the office.” Let us pray.

But within days, the normalization drug had worn off. Trump was having Oval Office tantrums. He was furious that Jeff Sessions had recused himself from investigating the relationship between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The attorney general would have had a clear conflict of interest, but that is nothing compared with allowing some special prosecutor from within the deep state to get at the truth, which would have been fake news anyway. The ranting and raving was so intense that word of it got to reporters. In many condo communities, this sort of behavior is not allowed.

By Saturday morning, the unreal Trump, the un-normalized one, was back on Twitter. Good morning, America — Barack Obama has had my phone tapped. “This is Nixon/Watergate,” he tweeted. “Bad (or sick) guy!” A still-sleepy America had trouble taking it all in. The New Trump, Mr. Pivot Man, was saying that the then-president of the United States had, during the campaign, tapped his phone. (This is the way those Kenyans are.) Was it possible?

No, said the former president's spokesman. No, said the director of the FBI. No, said the former director of national intelligence. No, said everyone familiar with the procedures for obtaining a wiretap, such as getting permission from a special judge. In other words, no, no, no and no.

But these were some of the same people who denied that 3 million or so illegal immigrants, taking a day off from rampant crime, had somehow cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton, accounting — as anyone can see — for her popular-vote margin. This was the deep state at work again. Ask Stephen K. Bannon. He knows. He was once at Breitbart.

I know what's happening. I've been reading a lot lately about the infatuation some leftists once had with communism. Many felt they lived in an either-or world — either you were a communist or you were a fascist. They could not be the latter so they chose the former. Besides, the reds were the only ones around who fought racism and anti-Semitism.

Somewhat the same thing is happening now. Many conservatives have gone over to Trump because they hate his enemies more than they do him. They see Trump as the un-liberal, the un-PC person, the un-programmed pol who eschews talking points and identity politics. For too many people, their best and only reason for voting for Trump was that he was not Clinton. They had a point.

But being president for a day is not enough. And sticking with Trump out of a refusal to admit a mistake is hardly wise. One day a month or so, America has a decent president. The rest of the time it's Romper Room in the White House. Recant, Trump supporters. I won't forgive you, but history might.


• Richard Cohen writes a weekly political column for The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • E.J. Dionne Jr.: The Trump Experiment may come to an early tipping point

 • Garrison Keillor: Trump is your old uncle with better lighting

 • Eugene Robinson: Does Trump know he's president?


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/president-for-a-day-starring-donald-trump/2017/03/06/0b53de46-02a0-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html
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« Reply #8 on: March 08, 2017, 12:19:38 am »



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« Reply #9 on: March 08, 2017, 05:57:39 am »


Trump....put up the evidence Obama spied on you to PROVE you aren't FULL-OF-SHIT!!

So far....no evidence has been forthcoming from Trump (as always).

Trump never provides any evidence when he makes accusations, because he is always FULL-OF-SHIT!!

He is a LIAR, just like his employed LIAR monkey, Sean Spicer.

If Trump wasn't a LIAR, then he would put up the evidence, yet he never does. Join the dots!!
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« Reply #10 on: March 08, 2017, 03:08:53 pm »


You do know you're not talking to trump?

if you want to talk to trump you will need twitter lol

but with the mental illness you have
i suggest you copy and past trumps picture and swear at it all day

message in a bottle from ktj to all the people who left
Xtra News Community 2 > Forum lmfao

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« Reply #11 on: March 08, 2017, 08:03:40 pm »


Mark Morford

When the president is a madman

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 8:48AM PST - Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Trump points to which White House visitors he'd like to have arrested and/or killed for not taking a flattering enough picture of him.
Trump points to which White House visitors he'd like to have arrested and/or killed for not taking a flattering enough picture of him.

HE IS inept and incompetent. He is petulant and hugely disorganized, sloppy by multiple definitions, his harried, frustrated staff ever in a state of confusion, a mad scramble for footing that's never to be found.

He is temperamental, raging, a truly unstable old man-child with terrible impulse control, tweeting, replete with tyyppos and ALL CAPS, one moment about how former president Obama “wire tapped” his hotel, and then, apparently bored with that extremely serious but entirely unfounded criminal accusation, choosing, less than an hour later, to blast Arnold Schwarzenegger's low ratings on Celebrity Apprentice, the President of the United States whipsawing between whiny emotional sneer and nutball right-wing conspiracy theory like a glue-sniffing 'tween.

There is no accounting for it all, except to suggest mental instability, a savage derangement wrought of too much power swallowed too quickly into a bloated orange fleshball completely incapable of handing it; there is no compass of any kind, nothing to prevent the President of the United States from drunk-texting America in a spazzy, demon-haunted pre-dawn fury.


Your neo-Nazi , destroy-the-state adviser, looking healthy and clear-eyed and not at all clogged to the brim with demons and cheap bourbon.
Your neo-Nazi , destroy-the-state adviser, looking healthy and clear-eyed and not at all clogged to the brim
with demons and cheap bourbon.


Is he bipolar? Schizophrenic? He never released his medical records, so it's impossible to say just how many demons afflict him at any given moment, but lo, they are legion. He is most certainly enormously paranoid, given his panicked outrage at the recusal of Jeff “Forrest Gump” Sessions and his tweets about wiretaps; he doubtlessly knows the Feds are closing in on him, is surely aware that multiple intelligence agencies around the world are gathering all kinds of rock-solid intel on his vast, treasonous corruptions with the Russians (among multiple others), and it's only the lead-booted, totalitarian power-suck of the GOP coupled to various madcap distractions — immigration bans! Guantanamo Bay! Gutting your health care! Campaign rallies in Florida! — that keep it all from collapsing in on itself. For the moment.

One thing is clear: Trump hates this job. He hates the press corps, the various protocols, the lack of freedom, the “acting presidential” thing, all the people he has to pretend to care about. He even hates the White House itself, spending fully a third of his short time as president at his eminently tacky golf resort in Florida.

He holds a special place of hatred for democracy itself: for the courts, federal agencies, regulations, investigations, congress. Witness: Trump (at Bannon's behest) has deliberately left hundreds of vital positions unfilled across multiple federal agencies, countless vital junior-level diplomatic and administrative roles essential to a functioning country, from the State Department to HUD to the Treasury, all in a calculated attempt to destabilize the basic workings of government and create a power vacuum that Bannon will fill with flying monkeys and moral cyanide and, apparently, copious amounts of vodka.


Trump, in situ. The president, watching Fox News at 3am in a paranoid delirium, just before tweeting about bad hombres and sluts.
Trump, in situ. The president, watching Fox News at 3am in a paranoid delirium,
just before tweeting about bad hombres and sluts.


He remains obsessed with Obama, with Hillary, with The New York Times, with Fox News and right-wing talk radio conspiracy theories spun of the nation's most laughable — but now bizarrely dangerous — fake-new imbeciles. He eats only junk food, watches “the Sunday shows” to see how they're talking about him, believes whatever Fox & Friends says, disregarding his own access to the best intelligence in the world.

He's all about appearances. Despite employing the world's shlubbiest neo-Nazi alcoholic as his top adviser, despite wearing ill-fitting suits and applying copious shellack to his paper-thin raccoon hat, despite drenching all his properties in gold leaf, garish marble and giant chandeliers, he is perhaps most obsessed with thinking it all looks classy, when it actually looks like Hugh Hefner did some meth and crashed into Liberace at Disneyland.




It's all just madness, really, barely controlled, intensely shoddy and deeply weird, to a degree that the media can barely keep up (though they're getting better), Europe is preparing for the worst, and the despicable Republican party lets him inflict whatever horror he wants, lest it restrict their ability to gut health care, cut taxes for the rich and cram through their shockingly poisonous, unpopular agenda.

Meanwhile, the resistance is working, in fits and pockets, to push back, as the Democrats are gaining voice and finding their spines as fast as possible — which isn't nearly fast enough, given how we are living in one of the most volatile, dangerous moments in history — and we haven't even had a serious crisis yet, one in which Trump & Bannon will surely leverage to bash all criticism, invoke a police state and, who knows what else, shut down the press, create a state-controlled media, arrest and beat all protesters? It's all more than possible. Don't believe it? You're not paying attention.

One thing is certain: We will, should we survive this cancerous blip relatively intact, look back upon this period with nothing less than deep shame and mortification, the time when America went off the rails, when, after moving carefully, thoughtfully, calmly a number of steps forward, the most fearful, uneducated and paranoid among us hurled us a lifetime of steps, a vicious punch in the face and a vile grope of the crotch, backwards.






Email: Mark Morford

Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2017/03/07/when-the-president-is-a-madman
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« Reply #12 on: March 08, 2017, 08:46:49 pm »

mark the moron is a stupid knob eater pussy lol
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« Reply #13 on: March 08, 2017, 09:22:35 pm »


from The Washington Post....

The Trump White House is totally changing its tune
on wiretapping and hoping you don't notice


An investigation to find the evidence that Trump already said he had.

By CHRIS CILLIZZA | 3:09PM EST - Tuesday, March 07, 2017

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on March 7th said President Trump has “absolutely” no regrets about claiming that President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap on him. Trump has not provided any evidence for the claims. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer on March 7th said President Trump has “absolutely” no regrets about claiming
that President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap on him. Trump has not provided any evidence for the claims.
 — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.


ON Saturday morning, President Trump tweeted this:



On Tuesday afternoon, in his first on-camera briefing in a week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said this when asked for proof of Trump's wiretapping claims: “It's not a question of new proof or less proof or whatever.” Instead, he insisted, the goal of Trump's tweets was simply to get congressional investigators to look into the possibility of wiretapping. Congress is now doing this, so, in Spicer's mind, mission accomplished.

Except that what Trump tweeted and what Spicer is now saying aren't the same thing. Not at all. And it is a question of “new proof.” Or, at the very least, some — any? — proof.

Trump tweeted early on Saturday that he had “just found out” that then-President Barack Obama had ordered a wiretap at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. That means conclusive evidence existed and had been presented to Trump about the wiretapping. There's no other interpretation for the language in that tweet.

What Spicer is saying now is that Trump thinks the right thing to do is to have Congress investigate to find out whether wiretapping occurred.

But Trump already stated definitively that it had! Why does Congress need to investigate something the president of the United States already has evidence of?

The most likely answer — and Spicer didn't mention this — is that Trump doesn't really have evidence of Obama wiretapping him during the 2016 campaign. Instead, as has been well documented, he read a Breitbart News story detailing conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin's theory of an attempted “silent coup” by Obama during the campaign and simply tweeted it.

In the aftermath of that tweet, everyone from Obama to FBI Director James B. Comey to former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. insisted that Trump's claim was without merit, that no wiretap of Trump Tower had ever been approved by the Obama administration.

With no actual evidence to go on, the White House decided to pivot. It's no longer a question of what evidence Trump had (or didn't have), Spicer argued on Tuesday. Instead it's about Congress doing its due diligence by investigating whether Trump Tower was wiretapped.

In short: The White House is now pushing for investigations in search of the very evidence that Trump claimed he already possessed.

This isn't about a separation of powers — as Spicer claimed Tuesday — or anything else. It's about Trump tweeting first and thinking second. And a White House scrambling to make lemonade — or at least lemon water — from lemons.


• Chris Cillizza writes The Fix, a politics blog for The Washington Post, and hosts the Ciquizza podcast, a weekly news quiz [Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher].

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • VIDEO: Spicer: Trump has ‘absolutely” no regrets about wiretapping claims

 • Trump loved WikiLeaks as a candidate. But as president, he is not a fan of leaks.

 • A look inside the country's real-life spy thriller


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/07/the-trump-white-house-is-changing-its-tune-on-wire-tapping-and-hoping-you-dont-notice





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« Reply #14 on: March 08, 2017, 11:18:44 pm »

why do you believe WP bullshit unless you're a silly cunt

its fun to hear the elite alt left poodle arse sucking fake press whining like children

do you realise obama does not need a warrant to wiretap anyone so by doing so he's not breaking any laws
but by trump getting congress to investigate if they find anything it will expose what a total creep obama is which would be priceless.

  
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« Reply #15 on: March 09, 2017, 02:14:48 am »

IN CIA WE TRUST THANKS OBAMA

Wikileaks Unveils 'Vault 7': "The Largest Ever Publication Of Confidential CIA Documents"; Another Snowden Emerges

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-07/wikileaks-hold-press-conference-vault-7-release-8am-eastern
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« Reply #16 on: March 09, 2017, 08:20:35 am »


Why are you Woodville country bumpkins so simpleton in your intellectual abilities that you swallow Trump's bullshit without ever demanding proof?

The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and other mainstream news media always provide links to proof backing up what they publish. Trump, Breithart, InfoWars and other stupid news outlets for dumb morons NEVER provide proof, just innuendo, whacky theories, alternative so-called facts and conspiracy theories. That is NOT proof.
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« Reply #17 on: March 09, 2017, 11:42:43 am »


your team of retards lost so try and get over it
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« Reply #18 on: March 09, 2017, 09:16:25 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Welcome to Trump's Fantasyland

The president's loose relationship with the truth strikes again on health care and Obama.

By E.J. DIONNE Jr. | 7:35PM EST - Wednesday, March 08, 2017

President Trump walks down the stairs of Air Force One in West Palm Beach, Florida, on March 3rd. — Photograph: Luis M. Alvarez/Associated Press.
President Trump walks down the stairs of Air Force One in West Palm Beach, Florida, on March 3rd.
 — Photograph: Luis M. Alvarez/Associated Press.


WE shouldn't blithely move on to other matters until we deal with the institutional carnage inflicted upon us by President Trump.

The current president of the United States has accused former president Barack Obama of committing a felony by having him wiretapped. But Trump refuses to offer a shred of evidence for perhaps the most incendiary charge one president has ever leveled against another. Trump recklessly set off a mighty explosion and his spokespeople duck and dodge, hoping we'll pretend nothing happened.

If our republic had a responsible Congress, its leaders would accept their duty to demand that a president who shakes his country and the world with such an outlandish allegation either put up proof or apologize.

Unfortunately, we have no such Congress.

Senator John McCain (Republican-Arizona) modeled what House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Republican-Wisconsin) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican-Kentucky) could say. The American people, McCain declared on Monday, “have a right to know on what basis the president of the United States said that his predecessor had broken the law.”

Honestly: Is it so hard for Ryan and McConnell at least to whisper something like this?

Instead, Republican leaders think it is time for business as usual, which in their case means figuring out how to deprive low-income people of health insurance while cutting taxes on the rich and increasing the deficit.

This is what their replacement of Obamacare would do. Democrats have quickly labeled the bill “Trumpcare”, and why not? Trump described it as “wonderful”. What's interesting about his embrace is that the proposal fails (forgive me) bigly in living up to the joyous health-care future Trump envisioned.

“Everybody's got to be covered,” the magician of Mar-a-Lago said on “60 Minutes in September 2015. “I am going to take care of everybody. I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now.” Trump’s campaign pledges were so sweeping that Senator Ted Cruz (Texas), his then-rival for the Republican presidential nomination, cast Trump as a fan of a single-payer system.

Trump's health-care vows are as credible as his assertions against Obama and as reliable as the guarantees he made to students at Trump University. They sued him over how fake his claims were, and he had to settle.

No one should act as if Trump didn't warn us about his negotiable relationship with the truth. He laid it out in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote: “I play to people's fantasies…. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” He spoke of “truthful hyperbole” — an oxymoron for the ages — which he defined as “an innocent form of exaggeration.”

But exaggeration is not innocent when it means depriving the old, the sick and the poor of health insurance. If there is one beautiful thing about the health-care proposal House Republicans released this week, it is that it exposes how much untruthful hyperbole Republicans engaged in about Obamacare and what they would replace it with.

Republicans are badly split over this bill because, like Trump, GOP leaders could never keep all the promises they made. The ultra-conservatives have denounced the spending it authorizes. Well, yes, even inadequate efforts to subsidize health insurance cost a lot of money.

And Republicans from states with many Obamacare beneficiaries are wary that this House confection could endanger the coverage of many of their constituents, particularly with its unconscionable long-term federal cuts to Medicaid. Memo to political consultants: Remember all the GOP voters who have been helped by the Affordable Care Act.

You know the Republicans are in trouble because Ryan said that all the mysteries would be resolved if citizens would only “read the bill”. So I did, and my experience confirmed that Ryan's invitation was a typical example of obfuscatory Beltway nonsense. The speaker knows that gems such as language calling for amending “subsection (d)(1), by striking ‘to which’ and inserting ‘to which, subject to section 1903A(a)’,” are incomprehensible to anyone but lawyers, policy experts and crack legislative drafters. Reading this thing doesn't make it better.

It is sad, to paraphrase the tweeter in chief himself, that Washington is now a city of avoidance, denial and deception. Whether he's talking about policy or his political adversaries, Trump is simply not believable. And his friends in Congress are proving themselves no more trustworthy. Welcome to Fantasyland.


• E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog at The Washington Post. He is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University and a commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC's “This Week” and MSNBC. He is the author of Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism — From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • Dana Milbank: The Republican health-care plan's top critics? Republicans.

 • Andy Slavitt: The House Republicans' health-care bill is a thicket of bad incentives

 • Timothy Stoltzfus Jost: The Republican health-care bill is all about shortchanging the poor


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/welcome-to-trumps-fantasyland/2017/03/08/1989f698-0440-11e7-b9fa-ed727b644a0b_story.html
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« Reply #19 on: March 10, 2017, 05:08:22 pm »

takes time to drain the swamp

the washington post clowns are saying that the man in charge of the us needs to show proof
trump can now open and see all the concealed secrets that the obama government was hiding from the public

and he want's an inquiry into the spying by congress making the people who were spying on him before the elections happened sweat and panic.

tell me why should he needs to show instant proof before any legal process starts?
when first in order to do that he would need to declassify top secrets.

i believe he should drag it out slowly so in can sink into the public mind before exposing all the corruption then destroy his enemies lol



 
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« Reply #20 on: March 10, 2017, 08:25:53 pm »


from The Washington Post....

EDITORIAL: The most powerful check on President Trump

Reality!

By EDITORIAL BOARD | 7:13PM EST - Thursday, March 09, 2017

President Trump meets with teachers, school administrators and parents in the Roosevelt Room. — Photograph: Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
President Trump meets with teachers, school administrators and parents in the Roosevelt Room.
 — Photograph: Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.


THE ELECTION of President Trump has prompted a lot of talk about the checks and balances of the American constitutional system. As guarantors of freedom and stability, James Madison's cherished devices — separation of powers, an independent judiciary, freedom of the press — will be tested as never before, it has been said. But another potential check on presidential action has gotten less attention: the sheer power of reality. There are some things Mr. Trump won't be able to do because, well, he just can't. Call it the reality check.

To be clear: We are not referring to political reality. Of course there are certain things the president can't do, at least not immediately, because of opposition at home or abroad: In the face of Arab-world opposition, for example, he has hesitated on his promise to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. What we have in mind, rather, are things that are impossible, period — such as massively cutting taxes and leaving entitlement programs alone, while simultaneously reducing the federal debt. Or deconstructing the “administrative state” while beefing up the federal government's capacity to find and deport undocumented immigrants. Or protecting a sacrosanct right to gun ownership while stopping the mayhem in Chicago.

The contradictions have been heightening as Mr. Trump and his team attempt to cobble together a federal budget, with a blueprint for discretionary spending due on March 16th. At his Senate hearing to be confirmed as treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin asserted forcefully that the Internal Revenue Service needed more funding, which would more than pay for itself in enhanced tax compliance. Yet the White House budget office, searching for cuts to pay for Mr. Trump's proposed $54 billion defense increase, has proposed slashing the already tight IRS budget 14.1 percent. Mr. Trump is bound and determined to step up security along the U.S.-Mexico border, including by building a wall. To get the resources, his budgeters are reportedly targeting the Coast Guard's $9 billion budget for a $1.3 billion cut. Sounds like an invitation for drug smugglers and migrants to come in by water instead of by land.

Mr. Trump's pitch to the American electorate in 2016 was that they could have it all — low taxes and generous government benefits; a dynamic economy that “protects” existing jobs — and that the only thing preventing this nirvana was the perfidy of Washington's elite. Entrust me with power, he declared, and everything will be different. Of all his many false promises, this was probably both the most effective and the phoniest. Government's resources and capabilities are limited, and trade-offs are real. Like all his predecessors, Mr. Trump will be forced, by reality, to set priorities and make choices, whether he ever acknowledges that openly or not. And sooner or later, he will be held accountable for them.


__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • Catherine Rampell: Trump's gift to Americans: Making it easier to cheat on their taxes

 • The Washington Post's View: Trump's bad math on the budget

 • Michael Gerson: Reality will get its revenge on Donald Trump

 • Orin Kerr: The Trump break point


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-most-powerful-check-on-president-trump/2017/03/09/e26ada64-0436-11e7-b1e9-a05d3c21f7cf_story.html
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« Reply #21 on: March 11, 2017, 11:33:39 am »

So you think you can trust the washington post.  "Good Luck With That"

The CIA and the NSA is full of rogue Obama plants that still need to be cleaned out
facebook,amazon,google,yahoo,microsoft and most of the mainstream media work for the CIA

It's called operation mockingbird

The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know



 This article  by Professor James Tracy first published in August 2015 is of particular relevance in relation to the “fake news” campaign directed against the alternative media.

In a bitter irony, the media coverup of  the CIA’s covert support to Al Qaeda and the ISIS is instrumented by the CIA which also oversees the mainstream media.

Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, if any, relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate collaboration indicates a far different story–indeed, one that media historians are reluctant to examine.

When seriously practiced, the journalistic profession involves gathering information concerning individuals, locales, events, and issues. In theory such information informs people about their world, thereby strengthening “democracy.” This is exactly the reason why news organizations and individual journalists are tapped as assets by intelligence agencies and, as the experiences of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte (entry 47 below) suggest, this practice is at least as widespread today as it was at the height of the Cold War.

Consider the coverups of election fraud in 2000 and 2004, the events of September 11, 2001, the invasions Afghanistan and Iraq, the destabilization of Syria, and the creation of “ISIS.” These are among the most significant events in recent world history, and yet they are also those much of the American public is wholly ignorant of. In an era where information and communication technologies are ubiquitous, prompting many to harbor the illusion of being well-informed, one must ask why this condition persists.

Further, why do prominent US journalists routinely fail to question other deep events that shape America’s tragic history over the past half century, such as the political assassinations of the 1960s, or the central role played by the CIA major role in international drug trafficking?

Popular and academic commentators have suggested various reasons for the almost universal failure of mainstream journalism in these areas, including newsroom sociology, advertising pressure, monopoly ownership, news organizations’ heavy reliance on “official” sources, and journalists’ simple quest for career advancement. There is also, no doubt, the influence of professional public relations maneuvers. Yet such a broad conspiracy of silence suggests another province of deception examined far too infrequently—specifically the CIA and similar intelligence agencies’ continued involvement in the news media to mold thought and opinion in ways scarcely imagined by the lay public.

The following historical and contemporary facts–by no means exhaustive–provides a glimpse of how the power such entities possess to influence if not determine popular memory and what respectable institutions deem to be the historical record.

The CIA’s Operation MOCKINGBIRD is a long-recognised keystone among researchers pointing to the Agency’s clear interest in and relationship to major US news media. MOCKINGBIRD grew out of the CIA’s forerunner, the Office for Strategic Services (OSS, 1942-47), which during World War Two had established a network of journalists and psychological warfare experts operating primarily in the European theatre.
Many of the relationships forged under OSS auspices were carried over into the postwar era through a State Department-run organization called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) overseen by OSS staffer Frank Wisner.
The OPC “became the fastest-growing unit within the nascent CIA,” historian Lisa Pease observes, “rising in personnel from 302 in 1949 to 2,812 in 1952, along with 3,142 overseas contract personnel. In the same period, the budget rose from $4.7 million to $82 million.” Lisa Pease, “The Media and the Assassination,” in James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X, Port Townsend, WA, 2003, 300.
Like many career CIA officers, eventual CIA Director/Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms was recruited out of the press corps by his own supervisor at the United Press International’s Berlin Bureau to join in the OSS’s fledgling “black propaganda” program. “‘[Y]ou’re a natural,” Helms’ boss remarked. Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency, New York: Random House, 2003, 30-31.
Wisner tapped Marshall Plan funds to pay for his division’s early exploits, money his branch referred to as “candy.” “We couldn’t spend it all,” CIA agent Gilbert Greenway recalls. “I remember once meeting with Wisner and the comptroller. My God, I said, how can we spend that? There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing.” Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: The New Press, 2000, 105.
When the OPC was merged with the Office of Special Operations in 1948 to create the CIA, OPC’s media assets were likewise absorbed.
Wisner maintained the top secret “Propaganda Assets Inventory,” better known as “Wisner’s Wurlitzer”—a virtual rolodex of over 800 news and information entities prepared to play whatever tune Wisner chose. “The network included journalists, columnists, book publishers, editors, entire organizations such as Radio Free Europe, and stringers across multiple news organizations.” Pease, “The Media and the Assassination,” 300.
A few years after Wisner’s operation was up-and-running he “’owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, and other communication vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a CIA analyst. Each one was a separate ‘operation,’” investigative journalist Deborah Davis notes, “requiring a code name, a field supervisor, and a field office, at an annual cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars—there has never been an accurate accounting.” Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, Second Edition, Bethesda MD: National Press Inc, 1987, 139.
Psychological operations in the form of journalism were perceived as necessary to influence and direct mass opinion, as well as elite perspectives. “[T]he President of the United States, the Secretary of State, Congressmen and even the Director of the CIA himself will read, believe, and be impressed by a report from Cy Sulzberger, Arnaud de Borchgrave, or Stewart Alsop when they don’t even bother to read a CIA report on the same subject,” noted CIA agent Miles Copeland. Cited in Pease, “The Media and the Assassination,” 301.
By the mid-to-late 1950s, Darrell Garwood points out, the Agency sought to limit criticism directed against covert activity and bypass congressional oversight or potential judicial interference by “infiltrat[ing] the groves of academia, the missionary corps, the editorial boards of influential journal and book publishers, and any other quarters where public attitudes could be effectively influenced.” Darrell Garwood, Under Cover: Thirty-Five Years of CIA Deception, New York: Grove Press, 1985, 250.
The CIA frequently intercedes in editorial decision-making. For example, when the Agency proceeded to wage an overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954, Allen and John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and CIA Director respectively, called upon New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger to reassign reporter Sydney Gruson from Guatemala to Mexico City. Sulzberger thus placed Gruson in Mexico City with the rationale that some repercussions from the revolution might be felt in Mexico. Pease, “The Media and the Assassination,” 302.
Since the early 1950s the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives,” Carl Bernstein reported in 1977. “One such publication was the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s.” Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
The CIA exercised informal liaisons with news media executives, in contrast to its relationships with salaried reporters and stringers, “who were much more subject to direction from the Agency” according to Bernstein. “A few executives—Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times among them—signed secrecy agreements. But such formal understandings were rare: relationships between Agency officials and media executives were usually social—’The P and Q Street axis in Georgetown,’ said one source. ‘You don’t tell William Paley to sign a piece of paper saying he won’t fink.’” Director of CBS William Paley’s personal “friendship with CIA Director Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant in the communications industry,” author Debora Davis explains. “He provided cover for CIA agents, supplied out-takes of news film, permitted the debriefing of reporters, and in many ways set the standard for the cooperation between the CIA and major broadcast companies which lasted until the mid-1970s.” Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, Second Edition, Bethesda MD: National Press Inc, 1987, 175.
“The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials,” Bernstein points out in his key 1977 article. “From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.” In addition, Sulzberger was a close friend of CIA Director Allen Dulles. “’At that level of contact it was the mighty talking to the mighty,’ said a high‑level CIA official who was present at some of the discussions. ‘There was an agreement in principle that, yes indeed, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions. It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates…. The mighty didn’t want to know the specifics; they wanted plausible deniability.’” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
CBS’s Paley worked reciprocally with the CIA, allowing the Agency to utilize network resources and personnel. “It was a form of assistance that a number of wealthy persons are now generally known to have rendered the CIA through their private interests,” veteran broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr wrote in 1977. “It suggested to me, however, that a relationship of confidence and trust had existed between him and the agency.” Schorr points to “clues indicating that CBS had been infiltrated.” For example, “A news editor remembered the CIA officer who used to come to the radio control room in New York in the early morning, and, with the permission of persons unknown, listened to CBS correspondents around the world recording their ‘spots’ for the ‘World News Roundup’ and discussing events with the editor on duty. Sam Jaffe claimed that when he applied in 1955 for a job with CBS, a CIA officer told him that he would be hired–which he subsequently was. He was told that he would be sent to Moscow–which he subsequently was; he was assigned in 1960 to cover the trial of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. [Richard] Salant told me,” Schorr continues, “that when he first became president of CBS News in 1961, a CIA case officer called saying he wanted to continue the ‘long standing relationship known to Paley and [CBS president Frank] Stanton, but Salant was told by Stanton there was no obligation that he knew of” (276). Schorr, Daniel. Clearing the Air, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, 277, 276.
National Enquirer publisher Gene Pope Jr. worked briefly on the CIA’s Italy desk in the early 1950s and maintained close ties with the Agency thereafter. Pope refrained from publishing dozens of stories with “details of CIA kidnappings and murders, enough stuff for a year’s worth of headlines” in order to “collect chits, IOUs,” Pope’s son writes. “He figured he’d never know when he might need them, and those IOUs would come in handy when he got to 20 million circulation. When that happened, he’d have the voice to be almost his own branch of government and would need the cover.” Paul David Pope, The Deeds of My Fathers: How My Grandfather and Father Built New York and Created the Tabloid World of Today, New York: Phillip Turner/Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, 309, 310.
One explosive story Pope’s National Enquirer‘s refrained from publishing in the late 1970s centered on excerpts from a long-sought after diary of President Kennedy’s lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was murdered on October 12, 1964. “The reporters who wrote the story were even able to place James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s head of counterintelligence operations, at the scene.” Another potential story drew on “documents proving that [Howard] Hughes and the CIA had been connected for years and that the CIA was giving Hughes money to secretly fund, with campaign donations, twenty-seven congressmen and senators who sat on sub-committees critical to the agency. There are also fifty-three international companies named and sourced as CIA fronts .. and even a list of reporters for mainstream media organizations who were playing ball with the agency.” Pope, The Deeds of My Fathers, 309.
Angleton, who oversaw the Agency counterintelligence branch for 25 years, “ran a completely independent group entirely separate cadre of journalist‑operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files.” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
The CIA conducted a “formal training program” during the 1950s for the sole purpose of instructing its agents to function as newsmen. “Intelligence officers were ‘taught to make noises like reporters,’ explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told ‘You’re going to he a journalist,’” the CIA official said.” The Agency’s preference, however, was to engage journalists who were already established in the industry. Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
Newspaper columnists and broadcast journalists with household names have been known to maintain close ties with the Agency. “There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources,” Bernstein maintains. “They are referred to at the Agency as ‘known assets’ and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects.” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, and Washington Post publisher Phillip Graham were close associates, and the Post developed into one of the most influential news organs in the United States due to its ties with the CIA. The Post managers’ “individual relations with intelligence had in fact been the reason the Post Company had grown as fast as it did after the war,” Davis (172) observes. “[T]heir secrets were its corporate secrets, beginning with MOCKINGBIRD. Phillip Graham’s commitment to intelligence had given his friends Frank Wisner an interest in helping to make the Washington Post the dominant news vehicle in Washington, which they had done by assisting with its two most crucial acquisitions, the Times-Herald and WTOP radio and television stations.” Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, 172.
In the wake of World War One the Woodrow Wilson administration placed journalist and author Walter Lippmann in charge of recruiting agents for the Inquiry, a first-of-its-kind ultra-secret civilian intelligence organization whose role involved ascertaining information to prepare Wilson for the peace negotiations, as well as identify foreign natural resources for Wall Street speculators and oil companies. The activities of this organization served as a prototype for the function eventually performed by the CIA, namely “planning, collecting, digesting, and editing the raw data,” notes historian Servando Gonzalez. “This roughly corresponds to the CIA’s intelligence cycle: planning and direction, collection, processing, production and analysis, and dissemination.” Most Inquiry members would later become members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Lippmann would go on to become the Washington Post’s best known columnists. Servando Gonzalez, Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People, Oakland, CA: Spooks Books, 2010, 50.
The two most prominent US newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek, kept close ties with the CIA. “Agency files contain written agreements with former foreign correspondents and stringers for both the weekly newsmagazines,” according to Carl Bernstein. “Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.”  Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
In his autobiography former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt quotes Bernstein’s “The CIA and the Media” article at length. “I know nothing to contradict this report,” Hunt declares, suggesting the investigative journalist of Watergate fame didn’t go far enough. “Bernstein further identified some of the country’s top media executives as being valuable assets to the agency … But the list of organizations that cooperated with the agency was a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of the media industry, including ABC, NBC, the Associated Press, UPI, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, and others.” E. Howard Hunt, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond, Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007, 150.
When the first major exposé of the CIA emerged in 1964 with the publication of The Invisible Government by journalists David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, the CIA considered purchasing the entire printing to keep the book from the public, yet in the end judged against it. “To an extent that is only beginning to be perceived, this shadow government is shaping the lives of 190,000,000 Americans” authors Wise and Ross write in the book’s preamble. “Major decisions involving peace and war are taking place out of public view. An informed citizen might come to suspect that the foreign policy of the United States often works publicly in one direction and secretly through the Invisible Government in just the opposite direction.”Lisa Pease, “When the CIA’s Empire Struck Back,” Consortiumnews.com, February 6, 2014.
Agency infiltration of the news media shaped public perception of deep events and undergirded the official explanations of such events. For example, the Warren Commission’s report on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was met with almost unanimous approval by US media outlets. “I have never seen an official report greeted with such universal praise as that accorded the Warren Commission’s findings when they were made public on September 24, 1964,” recalls investigative reporter Fred Cook. “All the major television networks devoted special programs and analyses to the report; the next day the newspapers ran long columns detailing its findings, accompanied by special news analyses and editorials. The verdict was unanimous. The report answered all questions, left no room for doubt. Lee Harvey Oswald, alone and unaided, had assassinated the president of the United States.” Fred J. Cook, Maverick: Fifty Years of Investigative Reporting, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984, 276.
In late 1966 the New York Times began an inquiry on the numerous questions surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination that were not satisfactorily dealt with by the Warren Commission. “It was never completed,” author Jerry Policoff observes, “nor would the New York Times ever again question the findings of the Warren Commission.” When the story was being developed the lead reporter at the Times‘ Houston bureau “said that he and others came up with ‘a lot of unanswered questions’ that the Times didn’t bother to pursue. ‘I’d be off on a good lead and then somebody’d call me off and send me out to California on another story or something. We never really detached anyone for this. We weren’t really serious.’” Jerry Policoff, “The Media and the Murder of John Kennedy,” in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch and Russell Stetler, eds., The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, New York: Vintage, 1976, 265.
When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison embarked on an investigation of the JFK assassination in 1966 centering on Lee Harvey Oswald’s presence in New Orleans in the months leading up to November, 22, 1963, “he was cross-whipped with two hurricane blasts, one from Washington and one from New York,” historian James DiEugenio explains. The first, of course, was from the government, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, and to a lesser extent, the White House. The blast from New York was from the major mainstream media e.g. Time-Life and NBC. Those two communication giants were instrumental in making Garrison into a lightening rod for ridicule and criticism. This orchestrated campaign … was successful in diverting attention from what Garrison was uncovering by creating controversy about the DA himself.”  DiEugenio, Preface, in William Davy, Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim Garrison Investigation, Reston VA: Jordan Publishing, 1999.
The CIA and other US intelligence agencies used the news media to sabotage Garrison’s 1966-69 independent investigation of the Kennedy assassination. Garrison presided over the only law enforcement agency with subpoena power to seriously delve into the intricate details surrounding JFK’s murder. One of Garrison’s key witnesses, Gordon Novel, fled New Orleans to avoid testifying before the Grand Jury assembled by Garrison. According to DiEugenio, CIA Director Allen “Dulles and the Agency would begin to connect the fugitive from New Orleans with over a dozen CIA friendly journalists who—in a blatant attempt to destroy Garrison’s reputation—would proceed to write up the most outrageous stories imaginable about the DA.” James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and The Garrison Case, Second Edition, New York: SkyHorse Publishing, 2012, 235.
CIA officer Victor Marchetti recounted to author William Davy that in 1967 while attending staff meetings as an assistant to then-CIA Director Richard Helms, “Helms expressed great concerns over [former OSS officer, CIA operative and primary suspect in Jim Garrison's investigation Clay] Shaw’s predicament, asking his staff, ‘Are we giving them all the help we can down there?’” William Davy, Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim Garrison Investigation, Reston VA: Jordan Publishing, 1999.
The pejorative dimensions of the term “conspiracy theory” were introduced into the Western lexicon by CIA “media assets,” as evidenced in the design laid out by Document 1035-960 Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report, an Agency communiqué issued in early 1967 to Agency bureaus throughout the world at a time when attorney Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment was atop bestseller lists and New Orleans DA Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination began to gain traction.
Time had close relations with the CIA stemming from the friendship of the magazine’s publisher Henry Luce and Eisenhower CIA chief Allen Dulles. When former newsman Richard Helms was appointed DCI in 1966 he “began to cultivate the press,” prompting journalists toward conclusions that placed the Agency in a positive light. As Time Washington correspondent Hugh Sidney recollects, “‘[w]ith [John] McCone and [Richard] Helms, we had a set-up when the magazine was doing something on the CIA, we went to them and put it before them … We were never misled.’ Similarly, when Newsweek decided in the fall of 1971 to do a cover story on Richard Helms and ‘The New Espionage,’ the magazine, according to a Newsweek staffer, went directly to the agency for much of the information. And the article … generally reflected the line that Helms was trying so hard to sell: that since the latter 1960s … the focus of attention and prestige within CIA’ had switched from the Clandestine Services to the analysis of intelligence, and that ‘the vast majority of recruits are bound for’ the Intelligence Directorate.” Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, 362-363.
In 1970 Jim Garrison wrote and published the semi-autobiographical A Heritage of Stone, a work that examines how the New Orleans DA “discovered that the CIA operated within the borders of the United States, and how it took the CIA six months to reply to the Warren Commission’s question of whether Oswald and [Jack] Ruby had been with the Agency,” Garrison biographer and Temple University humanities professor Joan Mellen observes. “In response to A Heritage of Stone, the CIA rounded up its media assets” and the book was panned by reviewers writing for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun Times, and Life magazine. “John Leonard’s New York Times review went through a metamorphosis,” Mellen explains. “The original last paragraph challenged the Warren Report: ‘Something stinks about this whole affair,’ Leonard wrote. ‘Why were Kennedy’s neck organs not examined at Bethesda for evidence of a frontal shot? Why was his body whisked away to Washington before the legally required Texas inquest? Why?’ This paragraph evaporated in later editions of the Times. A third of a column gone, the review then ended: ‘Frankly I prefer to believe that the Warren Commission did a poor job, rather than a dishonest one. I like to think that Garrison invents monsters to explain incompetence.’” Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History, Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2005, 323, 324.
CIA Deputy Director for Plans Cord Meyer Jr. appealed to Harper & Row president emeritus Cass Canfield Sr. over the book publisher’s pending release of Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, based on the author’s fieldwork and Yale PhD dissertation wherein he examined the CIA’s explicit role in the opium trade. “Claiming my book was a threat to national security,” McCoy recalls, “the CIA official had asked Harper & Row to suppress it. To his credit, Mr. Canfield had refused. But he had agreed to review the manuscript prior to publication.” Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Chicago Review Press, 2003, xx.
Publication of The Secret Team, a book by US Air Force Colonel and Pentagon-CIA liaison L. Fletcher Prouty recounting the author’s firsthand knowledge of CIA black operations and espionage, was met with a wide scale censorship campaign in 1972. “The campaign to kill the book was nationwide and world-wide,” Prouty notes. “It was removed from the Library of Congress and from college libraries as letters I received attested all too frequently … I was a writer whose book had been cancelled by a major publisher [Prentice Hall] and a major paperback publisher [Ballantine Books] under the persuasive hand of the CIA.” L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, New York: SkyHorse Publishing, 2008, xii, xv.
During the Pike Committee hearings in 1975 Congressman Otis Pike asked DCI William Colby, “Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?” Colby responded, “This, I think, gets into the kind of details, Mr. Chairman, that I’d like to get into in executive session.” Once the chamber was cleared Colby admitted that in 1975 specifically “the CIA was using ‘media cover’ for eleven agents, many fewer than in the heyday of the cloak-and-pencil operations, but no amount of questioning would persuade him to talk about the publishers and network chieftains who had cooperated at the top.” Schorr, Clearing the Air, 275.
“There is quite an incredible spread of relationships,” former CIA intelligence officer William Bader informed a US Senate Intelligence Committee investigating the CIA’s infiltration of the nation’s journalistic outlets. “You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are Agency people at the management level.” Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
In 1985 film historian and professor Joseph McBride came across a November 29, 1963 memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover, titled, “Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” wherein the FBI director stated that his agency provided two individuals with briefings, one of whom was “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” ” When McBride queried the CIA with the memo a “PR man was tersely formal and opaque: ‘I can neither confirm nor deny.’ It was the standard response the agency gave when it dealt with its sources and methods,” journalist Russ Baker notes. When McBride published a story in The Nation, “The Man Who Wasn’t There, ‘George Bush,’ C.I.A. Operative,” the CIA came forward with a statement that the George Bush referenced in the FBI record “apparently” referenced a George William Bush, who filled a perfunctory night shift position at CIA headquarters that “would have been the appropriate place to receive such a report.” McBride tracked down George William Bush to confirm he was only employed briefly as a “probationary civil servant” who had “never received interagency briefings.” Shortly thereafter The Nation ran a second story by McBride wherein “the author provided evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency had foisted a lie on the American people … As with McBride’s previous story, this disclosure was greeted with the equivalent of a collective media yawn.” Since the episode researchers have found documents linking George H. W. Bush to the CIA as early as 1953. Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 7-12.
Operation Gladio, the well-documented collaboration between Western spy agencies, including the CIA, and NATO involving coordinated terrorist shootings and bombings of civilian targets throughout Europe from the late 1960s through the 1980s, has been effectively expunged from major mainstream news outlets. A LexisNexis Academic search conducted in 2012 for “Operation Gladio” retrieved 31 articles in English language news media—most appearing in British newspapers. Only four articles discussing Gladio ever appeared in US publications—three in the New York Times and one brief mention in the Tampa Bay Times. With the exception of a 2009 BBC documentary, no network or cable news broadcast has ever referenced the state-sponsored terror operation. Almost all of the articles referencing Gladio appeared in 1990 when Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti publicly admitted Italy’s participation in the process. The New York Times downplayed any US involvement, misleadingly designating Gladio “an Italian creation” in a story buried on page A16. In reality, former CIA director William Colby revealed in his memoirs that covert paramilitaries were a significant agency undertaking set up after World War II, including “the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington [and] NATO.” James F. Tracy, “False Flag Terror and Conspiracies of Silence,” Global Research, August 10, 2012.
Days before the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City DCI William Colby confided to his friend, Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp his personal concerns over the Militia and Patriot movement within the United States, then surging in popularity due to the use of the alternative media of that era–books, periodicals, cassette tapes, and radio broadcasts. “I watched as the Anti-War movement rendered it impossible for this country to conduct or win the Vietnam War,” Colby remarked. “I tell you, dear friend, that the Militia and Patriot movement in which, as an attorney, you have become one of the centerpieces, is far more significant and far more dangerous for American than the Anti-War movement ever was, if it is not intelligently dealt with. And I really mean this.” David Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, Venice CA: Feral House, 1998, 367.
Shortly after the appearance of journalist Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury News chronicling the Agency’s involvement in drug trafficking, the CIA’s public affairs division embarked on a campaign to counter what it termed “a genuine public relations crisis for the Agency.” Webb was merely reporting to a large audience what had already been well documented by scholars such as Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the 1989 Kerry Committee Report on Iran-Contra—that the CIA had long been involved in the illegal transnational drug trade. Such findings were upheld in 1999 in a study by the CIA inspector general. Nevertheless, beginning shortly after Webb’s series ran, “CIA media spokesmen would remind reporters seeking comment that this series represented no real news,” a CIA internal organ noted, “in that similar charges were made in the 1980s and were investigated by the Congress and were found to be without substance. Reporters were encouraged to read the “Dark Alliance’ series closely and with a critical eye to what allegations could actually be backed with evidence.” http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0001372115.pdf
On December 10, 2004 investigative journalist Gary Webb died of two .38 caliber gunshot wounds to the head. The coroner ruled the death a suicide. “Gary Webb was MURDERED,” concluded FBI senior special agent Ted Gunderson in 2005. “He (Webb) resisted the first shot [to the head that exited via jaw] so he was shot again with the second shot going into the head [brain].” Gunderson regards the theory that Webb could have managed to shoot himself twice as “impossible!” Charlene Fassa, “Gary Webb: More Pieces in the Suicided Puzzle,” Rense.com, December 11, 2005.
The most revered journalists who receive “exclusive” information and access to the corridors of power are typically the most subservient to officialdom and often have intelligence ties. Those granted such access understand that they must likewise uphold government-sanctioned narratives. For example, the New York Times’ Tom Wicker reported on November 22, 1963 that President John F. Kennedy “was hit by a bullet in the throat, just below the Adam’s apple.” Yet his account went to press before the official story of a single assassin shooting from the rear became established. Wicker was chastised through “lost access, complaints to editors and publishers, social penalties, leaks to competitors, a variety of responses no one wants.” Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception: The Media Coverup of 9/11, Gabrioloa Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2006, 169-170.
The CIA actively promotes a desirable public image of its history and function by advising the production of Hollywood vehicles, such as Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. The Agency retains “entertainment industry liaison officers” on its staff that “plant positive images about itself (in other words, propaganda) through our most popular forms of entertainment,” Tom Hayden explains in the LA Review of Books. “So natural has the CIA–entertainment connection become that few question its legal or moral ramifications. This is a government agency like no other; the truth of its operations is not subject to public examination. When the CIA’s hidden persuaders influence a Hollywood movie, it is using a popular medium to spin as favorable an image of itself as possible, or at least, prevent an unfavorable one from taking hold.” Tom Hayden, “Review of The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television by Tricia Jenkins,” LA Review of Books, February 24, 2013,
Former CIA case officer Robert David Steele states that CIA manipulation of news media is “worse” in the 2010s than in the late 1970s when Bernstein wrote “The CIA and the Media.” “The sad thing is that the CIA is very able to manipulate [the media] and it has financial arrangements with media, with Congress, with all others. But the other half of that coin is that the media is lazy.” James Tracy interview with Robert David Steele, August 2, 2014,
A well-known fact is that broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper interned for the CIA while attending Yale as an undergraduate in the late 1980s. According to Wikipedia Cooper’s great uncle, William Henry Vanderbilt III, was an Executive Officer of the Special Operations Branch of the OSS under the spy organization’s founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan. While Wikipedia is an often dubious source, Vanderbilt’s OSS involvement would be in keeping with the OSS/CIA reputation of taking on highly affluent personnel for overseas derring-do. William Henry Vanderbilt III, Wikipedia.
Veteran German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, author of the 2014 book Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists) revealed how under the threat of job termination he was routinely compelled to publish articles written by intelligence agents using his byline. “I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service,” Ulfkotte explained in a recent interview with Russia Today. “German Journo: European Media Writing Pro-US Stories Under CIA Pressure,” RT, October 18, 2014.
In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm seeking to “identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge information technologies that serve United States national security interests.” The firm has exercised financial relationships with internet platforms Americans use on a routine basis, including Google and Facebook. “If you want to keep up with Silicon Valley, you need to become part of Silicon Valley,” says Jim Rickards, an adviser to the U.S. intelligence community familiar with In-Q-Tel’s activities. “The best way to do that is have a budget because when you have a checkbook, everyone comes to you.” At one point IQT “catered largely to the needs of the CIA.” Today, however, “the firm supports many of the 17 agencies within the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate.” Matt Egan, “In-Q-Tel: A Glimpse Inside the CIA’s Venture Capital Arm,” FoxBusiness.com, June 14, 2013.
At a 2012 conference held by In-Q-Tel CIA Director David Patraeus declared that the rapidly-developing “internet of things” and “smart home” will provide the CIA with the ability to spy on any US citizen should they become a “person of interest’ to the spy community,” Wired magazine reports. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,’ Patraeus enthused, ‘particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft’ … ‘Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Patraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.” Spencer Ackerman, “CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher,” Wired, March 15, 2012.
In the summer of 2014 a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the CIA began servicing all 17 federal agencies comprising the intelligence community. “If the technology plays out as officials envision,” The Atlantic reports, “it will usher in a new era of cooperation and coordination, allowing agencies to share information and services much more easily and avoid the kind of intelligence gaps that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” “The Details About the CIA’s Deal With Amazon,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2014.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-and-the-media-50-facts-the-world-needs-to-know/5471956
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« Reply #22 on: March 11, 2017, 12:29:00 pm »

You are backing the wrong horse lol

What more proof do you need that your precious washington post is a propaganda outlet for the CIA

The Details About the CIA's Deal With Amazon

A $600 million computing cloud built by an outside company is a "radical departure" for the risk-averse intelligence community.



https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/
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« Reply #23 on: March 11, 2017, 02:50:31 pm »


Even journalists from the “rightie” side of the fence can see right through Trump's stupidity & titter bullshit....



from The Washington Post....

Down the conspiracy rabbit hole

Washington has worked itself into a frenzy over two different conjectures.

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER | 7:20PM EST - Thursday, March 09, 2017

President Trump at the White House. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
President Trump at the White House. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.

WHEN he was Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, George Shultz was once asked about the CIA's disavowal of involvement in a mysterious recent bombing in Lebanon. Replied Shultz: “If the CIA denies something, it's denied.”

Has there ever been a more dry, more wry, more ironic verdict on the world of espionage? Within it, there is admission and denial, smoke and mirrors, impenetrable fog and deliberate obfuscation. Truth? Ask the next guy.

Which is why my default view of espionage is to never believe anyone because everyone is trained in deception. This is not a value judgment; it's a job description.

We learn, for example, from Tuesday's spectacular WikiLeaks dump that among the CIA's various and nefarious cybertools is the capacity to simulate intrusion by a foreign power, the equivalent of planting phony fingerprints on a smoking gun.

Who are you going to believe now? I can assure you that some enterprising Trumpite will use this revelation to claim that the whole storyline pointing to Russian interference in the U.S. election was a fabrication. And who was behind that? There is no end to this hall of mirrors. My rule, therefore, is: Stay away.

Hard to do with Washington caught up in one of its periodic conspiracy frenzies. Actually, two. One, anti-Trump, is that he and his campaign colluded with Russian intelligence. The other, anti-Obama-CIA-“deep state”, is that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower to ensnare candidate Trump.

The odd thing is that, as of today, there is no evidence for either charge. That won't, of course, stop the launch of multiple all-consuming investigations.

1. Collusion…

James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence, who has been deeply and publicly at odds with Trump, unequivocally states that he has seen zero evidence of any Trump campaign collusion with Russia. Nor has anyone else.

The contrary suspicion arises because it's hard to explain why Michael Flynn falsely denied discussing sanctions with the Russian ambassador and why Attorney General Jeff Sessions falsely denied having any contacts at all. That suggests concealment. But there was nothing inherently inappropriate with either behavior. So why conceal?

Suspicion, nonetheless, is far short of assertion — and a fairly thin basis for a major investigation, let alone for a special prosecutor. To prosecute what exactly?


2. Wiretap…

The other storyline is simply fantastical. Congressional Republicans have uniformly run away from Trump's Obama-wiretap accusation. Clapper denies it. FBI Director James Comey denies it. Not a single member of Trump's own administration is willing to say it's true.

Loopier still is to demand that Congress find the truth when the president could just pick up the phone and instruct the FBI, CIA and DNI to declare on the record whether this ever occurred. And if there really was an October 2016 FISA court order to wiretap Trump, the president could unilaterally declassify the information yesterday.

The bugging story is less plausible than a zombie invasion. Nevertheless, one could spin a milder — and more plausible — scenario of executive abuse. It goes like this:

The intelligence agencies are allowed to listen in on foreigners. But if any Americans are swept up in the conversation, their part of it is supposed to be redacted or concealed to protect their identity. According to The New York Times, however, the Obama administration appears to have gone out of its way to make sure that information picked up about Trump associates' contacts with Russians was as widely disseminated as possible.

Under Obama, did the agencies deliberately abuse the right to listen in on foreigners as a way to listen in, improperly, on Americans?

If they did, we will find out. But for now, all of this is mere conjuring. There is no evidence for either the collusion or the wiretap charge. We are headed down a rabbit hole. An enormous amount of heat and energy will be expended, ending — my guess — roughly where we started.

What a waste. There is a major national agenda waiting to be debated and enacted. And there is trouble beyond the cozy confines of the capital that needs to be confronted. Self-created crisis can leave us distracted, spent and unprepared when the real thing hits.

It's unquiet out there. North Korea keeps testing missiles as practice for attacking U.S. bases in Japan. Meanwhile, we are scrambling to install an anti-missile shield in South Korea as early as next month. Fuses are burning. When the detonations begin, we'd better not be in the rabbit hole.


• Charles Krauthammer writes a weekly political column that runs in The Washington Post's print edition on Fridays. He is also a Fox News commentator and appears nightly on “Special Report with Bret Baier”. Krauthammer joined The Post as a columnist in 1984, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1987 for “his witty and insightful columns on national issues”. Krauthammer began his journalism career at The New Republic, where he was a writer and editor and won the 1984 National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism. Before going into journalism, he was a speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale in 1980, he helped direct planning in psychiatric research for the Carter administration, and he practiced medicine for three years as a resident and then chief resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. Krauthammer was born in New York City and grew up in Montreal, Quebec. He attended McGill University, Balliol College, Oxford and Harvard Medical School.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • David Kris: How wiretaps actually work — and what's really going on here

 • The Washington Post's View: Trump may regret asking for an investigation into wiretapping

 • Robert Kagan: Republicans are becoming Russia's accomplices

 • The Washington Post's View: The nation needs answers, not deflections, on Russia and Trump


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/down-the-conspiracy-rabbit-hole/2017/03/09/e2b96392-04fd-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html
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« Reply #24 on: March 11, 2017, 02:54:55 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Bannon and Trump leave the State Department stranded on the sidelines

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PST - Friday, March 10, 2017



IN RECENT DECADES, Americans have become more aware, and more appreciative, of the sacrifices made by the men and women in the U.S. armed forces. It would be a good thing if we could develop the same sense of gratitude for the men and women in our diplomatic corps.

Many more American soldiers would have died on battlefields if American diplomats — from skilled ambassadors down to the most anonymous, unsung employees of the State Department — had not been doing the knotty business of preserving peace by building alliances, negotiating with adversaries and cultivating new friends in flashpoints across the globe. The Defense Department lays claim to half the discretionary federal budget while diplomatic programs limp along with barely 2%, but that relatively small expenditure has had as much to do with maintaining America's pre-eminent position of leadership in the world as the trillions that have gone to the military.

Apparently, though, the Trump administration does not appreciate the indispensable contribution made by American diplomats. In fact, the president's closest advisor, Stephen Bannon, exhibits a deep mistrust of State Department officials. Bannon is a hyper-nationalist and an enemy of what he calls “globalism”. Behind the scenes, he seems to be the one whispering words in President Trump's ear that later come out in tweets or speeches that slam the usefulness of NATO, the importance of the European Union, the value of multilateral trade deals and the principle of opposing human rights violations in places such as Russia.

Numerous reports indicate that the Bannon-dominated White House is treating the State Department like a wayward child that needs to be spanked and sent to bed without supper. Apparently, the department's chronically underfunded budget will be slashed as Trump shifts dollars to the Pentagon and to his border wall folly. Large numbers of veteran diplomats and experts who have served multiple presidents have been dismissed. Hundreds of jobs remain unfilled. Those who stay on have received scant direction about what they are supposed to be doing. Dangerously, in the day-to-day business of protecting U.S. interests in international relations, Americans are suddenly missing in action.

There is a new secretary of State, of course — former Exxon Mobil boss Rex Tillerson. Given his heft in the corporate world, it was expected he would be a major player in an administration staffed by lightweights. But Tillerson was not allowed to pick his own deputy. His choice, Elliot Abrams, was nixed by Trump. Reports indicate that Bannon made sure the president was reminded of negative statements Abrams had made about Trump during the campaign.

Neither Tillerson nor anyone at the State Department was brought in to offer advice when Bannon and the White House crew were cobbling together their ill-fated ban on immigrants from seven Muslim nations. Tillerson has been left out of meetings with several world leaders, including the prime ministers of Canada and Japan. Meanwhile, U.S. policy to promote peace in the Middle East has been handed off to Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a young man with zero experience in foreign affairs.

Tillerson is doing one thing that probably gets the new president's approval; he is shunning the media. He allowed only a few journalists to travel with him on his recent trips to Mexico and Europe and is heading off on a very important journey to China, Japan and South Korea with no reporters at all in tow. CNN's Jake Tapper expressed his concern about this in a tweet: “Not bringing press on a trip like that is unusual & insulting to any American who is looking for anything but a state-run version of events.”

Making it difficult for the media to get access is a bad thing. Even worse, though, is the inclination of the president and his tiny circle of novices to make things up as they go along instead of giving the patriots in the State Department the support they need to do their jobs.


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-state-sidelined-20170310-story.html
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