Report: FBI General Counsel Allegedly Under Investigation for Leaks
FBI General Counsel James Baker is allegedly under investigation by the Justice Department in connection with leaks of classified national security information to the media, Circa is reporting.
The website attributed its information to "multiple government officials close to the probe" and the officials spoke on the condition they not be identified.
The website attributed its information to "multiple government officials close to the probe." The officials spoke on the condition they not be identified, according to Circa.
Three sources told Circa that Baker is a suspect in a leak investigation. However, the website has confirmed what information was allegedly leaked.
Baker is said to be close with former FBI Director James Comey, and according to the website, recent media reports suggested he was advising the then-FBI director on legal matters after private meetings Comey had with President Donald Trump earlier this year.
Comey appointed Baker to his post in 2014, according to information on the FBI's website.
He had previously worked as the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, where he "developed, coordinated, and implemented national security policy with regard to intelligence and counterintelligence matters."
Circa said the FBI would not confirm or deny any investigation of Baker.
The website's report comes as Attorney General Jeff Sessions is expected to announce several criminal leak investigations, Fox News reports.
And just this week, President Donald Trump, who has been highly critical of the attorney general, said: Session had to be "tougher" on leaks, The Washington Post noted.
"You can't let that happen," Trump said of the leaks.
© 2017 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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ReplyDeleteThe following article is by Gareth Porter, an experienced war analyst. The story and timeline he lays out seem credible to me.
How the CIA and ME Allies Trapped Obama Into the Syrian 'Arms for Moderates' Debacle
...In the ideology of the national security elite—especially its Democratic wing—regional alliances are essential building blocks of what is styled as the U.S.-sponsored global “rules-based order.” In practice, however, they have served as instruments for the advancement of the power and prestige of the national security bureaucracies themselves. The payoffs of U.S. alliances in the Middle East have centered on the military bases in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar that allow the Pentagon and the military brass to plan and execute military operations that guarantee extraordinary levels of military spending. But enormous Saudi arms purchases and the financing of any covert operations the CIA doesn’t wish to acknowledge to Congress have long been prime benefits for those powerful organizations and their senior officials.
Then CIA Director David Petraeus was particularly interested in ginning up a covert operation to arm and train the Syrian opposition. With the security bureaucracies supporting the allies’ desire to unseat Assad, Hillary Clinton, whose sympathies and political strategy always lay with the war, eagerly took the lead to take the lead in the administration on arming the rebels and calling for a “no fly zone,” which the Turks badly wanted.
Despite this set of interrelated factors pulling the administration toward a policy of regime change, Obama said no to heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and an official U.S. role in arms supply. What he did agree to, however, was a covert CIA operation designed by Petraeus to load weapons from Libyan government stocks in Benghazi on ships and arrange for them to be shipped to the war zone. It was Obama’s way of placating all of the actors pushing for an aggressive policy of regime change in Syria without being publicly committed to regime change...
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ReplyDeleteThough it pains me to admit it, Trump pulled off two deals that were positive in the last week, the crackdown on the gangs and ordering the end to the 'arms to rebels' program in Syria.
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Your pains are joy to my ears, Quirk-O !
DeleteYou may recall that those that suggested the CIA was transferring captured Libyan arms to Syria, were widely ridiculed. The entire Obama administrative chorus claimed that the Benghazi attack was all about an anti-Islamic video.
ReplyDeletePrior to the election, I was perplexed at the frantic intensity of Obama's campaigning for Hillary. I was surprised when he did not pardon her.
Clinton is dirty and always has been. She has something on Obama.
It's a den of thieves. They all have something on each other. This is why they don't like outsiders. It messes up the playpen. It disrupts the circle jerk.
ReplyDeleteHave Comey and Mueller investigate Baker.
ReplyDeleteBaker can be their lawyer.
DeleteThe legal fees would be galactic !
THEY LOOK LIKE FOOLS BECAUSE THEY ARE FOOLS
ReplyDeletePresident Trump said Saturday that Republican senators look like “fools” for refusing to change Senate rules that would allow legislation such to pass with a simple majority, and suggested that he’s looking at ending health-care subsidies for members of Congress.
“If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!” the president tweeted. “After seven years of ‘talking’ Repeal & Replace, the people of our great country are still being forced to live with imploding ObamaCare!”
The president appeared to be referring to a part of the 2010 health care law that shifted members of Congress and many staffers out of the normal health-benefits plan for federal employees and into the new Obamacare insurance exchanges. The Office of Personnel Management decided that the employer contribution portion of premiums could be provided through the exchange in the District.
Some conservative groups have been calling for that policy to be revoked.
CHUCK SCHUMER WILL TAKE ABOUT SEVEN MINUTES TO X OUT THE FILIBUSTER RULE WHEN THE DEMS TAKE THE SENATE
How is McCain Doing?
ReplyDeleteOh, sorry to hear that.
ReplyDeleteDucey to decide McCain’s health-care vote
Deletehttp://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2017/07/24/ducey-decide-mccains-health-care-vote/503762001/
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CAACAO_enUS720US720&q=who+will+doug+ducey+choose+to+replace+mccain%3F&oq=who+will+doug+ducey+choose+to+replace+mccain%3F&gs_l=psy-ab.3...9599.40668.0.42348.61.54.7.0.0.0.317.10018.0j29j21j1.51.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..3.46.7626.6..0j0i67k1j35i39k1j0i20k1j0i131k1j0i3k1j0i13k1j0i22i30k1j0i22i10i30k1j33i22i29i30k1j33i160k1j33i21k1.p47xJduFJoY
HERO
ReplyDeleteAt Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.
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ReplyDeleteMcCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.
There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."
On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.
"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."
"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.
"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.
"Why? Where are you going to, John?"
"Oh, I'm going to Rio."
"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"
McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.
"I got a better chance of getting laid."
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THE SAME ASSHOLE HE ALWAYS WAS
Delete{...}
Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."
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DeleteMcCAIN FIRST
his is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.
In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.
In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.
This, of course, is not the story McCain tells about himself. Few politicians have so actively, or successfully, crafted their own myth of greatness. In McCain's version of his life, he is a prodigal son who, steeled by his brutal internment in Vietnam, learned to put "country first." Remade by the Keating Five scandal that nearly wrecked his career, the story goes, McCain re-emerged as a "reformer" and a "maverick," righteously eschewing anything that "might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office."
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HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
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It's a myth McCain has cultivated throughout his decades in Washington. But during the course of this year's campaign, the mask has slipped. "Let's face it," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. "John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he doesn't bend his principles for politics. That's just not true."
We have now watched McCain run twice for president. The first time he positioned himself as a principled centrist and decried the politics of Karl Rove and the influence of the religious right, imploring voters to judge candidates "by the example we set, by the way we conduct our campaigns, by the way we personally practice politics." After he lost in 2000, he jagged hard to the left — breaking with the president over taxes, drilling, judicial appointments, even flirting with joining the Democratic Party.
In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as "agents of intolerance," promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has reassembled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove's base. And he has engaged in a "practice of politics" so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain's campaign ads go "too far" and fail the "truth test."
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DeleteThe missing piece of this puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who has fallen out with the senator over his neoconservatism, is a third, never realized, campaign that McCain intended to run against Bush in 2004. "McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics, campaign finance and Enron — the corrupt relationship between Bush's team and the corporate sector," says the former friend, a prominent conservative thinker with whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in 2001. "But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a second life. He saw Bush and Cheney's ability to draw stark contrasts between black and white, villains and good guys. And that's why McCain changed."
(The McCain campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)
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DeleteIndeed, many leading Republicans who once admired McCain see his recent contortions to appease the GOP base as the undoing of a maverick. "John McCain's ambition overrode his basic character," says Rita Hauser, who served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004. But the truth of the matter is that ambition is John McCain's basic character. Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what's best for himself. To put the matter squarely: John McCain is his own special interest.
"John has made a pact with the devil," says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague's readiness to sacrifice principle for power. Chafee and McCain were the only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts. They locked arms in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And they worked together in the "Gang of 14," which blocked some of Bush's worst judges from the federal bench.
"On all three — sadly, sadly, sadly — McCain has flip-flopped," Chafee says. And forget all the "Country First" sloganeering, he adds. "McCain is putting himself first. He's putting himself first in blinking neon lights."
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While everyone is saluting this "true American Hero" better known at Bottom-Gun.
DeleteBOTTOM GUN
In the cockpit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.
"I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flier more than I enjoyed the actual flying," McCain writes. "I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties." McCain chased a lot of tail. He hit the dog track. Developed a taste for poker and dice. He picked up models when he could, screwed a stripper when he couldn't.
In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing. The plane stalled, and McCain was knocked cold on impact. When he came to, the plane was underwater, and he had to swim to the surface to be rescued. Some might take such a near-death experience as a wake-up call: McCain took some painkillers and a nap, and then went out carousing that night.
Off duty on his Mediterranean tours, McCain frequented the casinos of Monte Carlo, cultivating his taste for what he calls the "addictive" game of craps. McCain's thrill-seeking carried over into his day job. Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described "daredevil clowning" plunged much of the area into a blackout.
That should have been the end of McCain's flying career. "In the Navy, if you crashed one airplane, nine times out of 10 you would lose your wings," says Butler, who, like his former classmate, was shot down and taken prisoner in North Vietnam. Spark "a small international incident" like McCain had? Any other pilot would have "found themselves as the deck officer on a destroyer someplace in a hurry," says Butler.
"But, God, he had family pull. He was directly related to the CEO — you know?"
McCain was undeterred by the crashes. Nearly a decade out of the academy, his career adrift, he decided he wanted to fly combat in Vietnam. His motivation wasn't to contain communism or put his country first. It was the only way he could think of to earn the respect of the man he calls his "distant, inscrutable patriarch." He needed to secure a command post in the Navy — and to do that, his career needed the jump-start that only a creditable war record could provide
McCAIN CRASHES AGAIN
DeleteAs he would so many times in his career, McCain pulled strings to get ahead. After a game of tennis, McCain prevailed upon the undersecretary of the Navy that he was ready for Vietnam, despite his abysmal flight record. Sure enough, McCain was soon transferred to McCain Field — an air base in Meridian, Mississippi, named after his grandfather — to train for a post on the carrier USS Forrestal.
With a close friend at the base, an alcoholic Marine captain, McCain formed the "Key Fess Yacht Club," which quickly became infamous for hosting toga parties in the officers' quarters and bringing bands down from Memphis to attract loose women to the base. Showing his usual knack for promotion, McCain rose from "vice commodore" to "commodore" of the club.
In 1964, while still at the base, McCain began a serious romance with Carol Shepp, a vivacious former model who had just divorced one of his classmates from Annapolis. Commandeering a Navy plane, McCain spent most weekends flying from Meridian to Philadelphia for their dates. They married the following summer.
That December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia, where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game, McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk, Virginia. This time he managed to bail out at 1,000 feet. As his parachute deployed, his plane thundered into the trees below.
By now, however, McCain's flying privileges were virtually irrevocable — and he knew it. On one of his runs at McCain Field, when ground control put him in a holding pattern, the lieutenant commander once again pulled his family's rank. "Let me land," McCain demanded over his radio, "or I'll take my field and go home!"
TRIAL BY FIRE
DeleteAs he would so many times in his career, McCain pulled strings to get ahead. After a game of tennis, McCain prevailed upon the undersecretary of the Navy that he was ready for Vietnam, despite his abysmal flight record. Sure enough, McCain was soon transferred to McCain Field — an air base in Meridian, Mississippi, named after his grandfather — to train for a post on the carrier USS Forrestal.
With a close friend at the base, an alcoholic Marine captain, McCain formed the "Key Fess Yacht Club," which quickly became infamous for hosting toga parties in the officers' quarters and bringing bands down from Memphis to attract loose women to the base. Showing his usual knack for promotion, McCain rose from "vice commodore" to "commodore" of the club.
In 1964, while still at the base, McCain began a serious romance with Carol Shepp, a vivacious former model who had just divorced one of his classmates from Annapolis. Commandeering a Navy plane, McCain spent most weekends flying from Meridian to Philadelphia for their dates. They married the following summer.
That December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia, where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game, McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk, Virginia. This time he managed to bail out at 1,000 feet. As his parachute deployed, his plane thundered into the trees below.
By now, however, McCain's flying privileges were virtually irrevocable — and he knew it. On one of his runs at McCain Field, when ground control put him in a holding pattern, the lieutenant commander once again pulled his family's rank. "Let me land," McCain demanded over his radio, "or I'll take my field and go home!"
SHIT BIRD STRIKES AGAIN
DeleteMcCain displayed little of Hope's valor. Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who "stayed to help the pilots fight the fire," McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself.
After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the "ready room," where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room's closed-circuit television — bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.
As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. "This distressed me considerably," he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. "I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal."
The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. "Johnny" Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War.
The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as "some welcome R&R."
A REAL STANDUP GUY
HERO
DeleteVIOLATING THE CODE
Ensconced in Apple's villa in Saigon, McCain and the Times reporter forged a relationship that would prove critical to the ambitious pilot's career in the years ahead. Apple effectively became the charter member of McCain's media "base," an elite corps of admiring reporters who helped create his reputation for "straight talk."
Sipping scotch and reflecting on the fire aboard the Forrestal, McCain sounded like the peaceniks he would pillory after his return from Hanoi. "Now that I've seen what the bombs and napalm did to the people on our ship," he told Apple, "I'm not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam." Here, it seemed, was a frank-talking warrior, one willing to speak out against the military establishment in the name of truth.
But McCain's misgivings about the righteousness of the fight quickly took a back seat to his ambitions. Within days, eager to get his combat career back on track, he put in for a transfer to the carrier USS Oriskany. Two months after the Forrestal fire — following a holiday on the French Riviera — McCain reported for duty in the Gulf of Tonkin.
McCain performed adequately on the Oriskany. On October 25th, 1967, he bombed a pair of Soviet MiGs parked on an airfield outside Hanoi. His record was now even. Enemy planes destroyed by McCain: two. American planes destroyed by McCain: two.
The next day, McCain embarked on his fateful 23rd mission, a bombing raid on a power plant in downtown Hanoi. McCain had cajoled his way onto the strike force — there were medals up for grabs. The plant had recently been rebuilt after a previous bombing run that had earned two of the lead pilots Navy Crosses, one of the force's top honors.
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DeleteIt was a dangerous mission — taking the planes into the teeth of North Vietnam's fiercest anti-aircraft defenses. As the planes entered Hanoi airspace, they were instantly enveloped in dark clouds of flak and surface-to-air missiles. Still cocky from the previous day's kills, McCain took the biggest gamble of his life. As he dived in on the target in his A-4, his surface-to-air missile warning system sounded: A SAM had a lock on him. "I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers," McCain writes. "The A-4 is a small, fast" aircraft that "can outmaneuver a tracking SAM."
But McCain didn't "jink." Instead, he stayed on target and let fly his bombs — just as the SAM blew his wing off.
To watch the Republican National Convention and listen to Fred Thompson's account of John McCain's internment in Vietnam, you would think that McCain never gave his captors anything beyond his name, rank, service number and, under duress, the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line. His time in Hanoi, we're to understand, steeled the man — transforming him from a fighter jock who put himself first into a patriot who would henceforth selflessly serve the public good.
Then, in an instant, the world around McCain erupted in flames. A six-foot-long Zuni rocket, inexplicably launched by an F-4 Phantom across the flight deck, ripped through the fuel tank of McCain's aircraft. Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came ablaze. Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the belly of McCain's stubby A-4, the Navy's "Tinkertoy Bomber," into the fire.
When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant — even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to "bilge out" because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy's commandant stepped in. Calling McCain "spoiled" to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.
There is no question that McCain suffered hideously in North Vietnam. His ejection over a lake in downtown Hanoi broke his knee and both his arms. During his capture, he was bayoneted in the ankle and the groin, and had his shoulder smashed by a rifle butt. His tormentors dragged McCain's broken body to a cell and seemed content to let him expire from his injuries. For the next two years, there were few days that he was not in agony.
But the subsequent tale of McCain's mistreatment — and the transformation it is alleged to have produced — are both deeply flawed. The Code of Conduct that governed POWs was incredibly rigid; few soldiers lived up to its dictate that they "give no information . . . which might be harmful to my comrades." Under the code, POWs are bound to give only their name, rank, date of birth and service number — and to make no "statements disloyal to my country."
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THE CLOSEST McCAIN CAME TO ACTUALLY BEING AN AMERICAN HERO WAS WHEN HE FAILED AT IT
Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital," he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. "I had to tell them," he insisted to Dramesi, "or I would have died in bed."
Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain's service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot's behavior as heroic — "he wasn't exceptional one way or the other" — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. "This business of my country before my life?" Dramesi says. "Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he'd be dead."
Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the "crown prince," they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. "It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral's son," he writes, "and I knew that my father's identity was directly related to my survival." But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report — picked up by The New York Times — in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was "moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated." He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.
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MORE IF YOU CAN STAND IT
Deletehttp://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/make-believe-maverick-20081016
BOTTOM LINE:
Throughout the campaign this year, McCain has tried to make the contest about honor and character. His own writing gives us the standard by which he should be judged. "Always telling the truth in a political campaign," he writes in Worth the Fighting For, "is a great test of character." He adds: "Patriotism that only serves and never risks one's self-interest isn't patriotism at all. It's selfishness. That's a lesson worth relearning from time to time." It's a lesson, it would appear, that the candidate himself could stand to relearn.
"I'm sure John McCain loves his country," says Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar under Bush. "But loving your country and lying to the American people are apparently not inconsistent in his view."
John McCain: Make-Believe Maverick
DeleteA closer look at the life and career of the candidate reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
ROLLING STONE - By Tim Dickinson
October 16, 2008
From the above:
DeleteBoth were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity.
The other being George W. Bush.
:) That about hits the ball out of the park.
re: NORKOR ICBM:
ReplyDeleteSkip to 5 Minutes for specific instructions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFT8hLjHtuE
Ah, the good old days !
DeleteAre you a Citizen, or a Quirk?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w86QhV7whjs#t=89.304437
We should go 100% battery powered cars, the better to weather a Grid Failure.
ReplyDeleteHere's a good idea -
ReplyDeleteTrump Threatens to Cancel Health-Care Benefits for Congress....DRUDGE
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DeleteWhat a nitwit.
Do I mean him for suggesting it or you for applauding it?
Yes.
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I don't like Mooch -
ReplyDeleteScaramucci’s Fed-Up Wife Left Him While Nine Months Pregnant
....Anthony Scaramucci’s wife demanded a divorce three weeks ago, while she was nine months pregnant, sources told The Post.
Deidre Scaramucci, 38, fed up with her three-year marriage to the new White House communication director, filed divorce papers on July 6 in Nassau County Supreme Court.
On Monday, while Anthony was in West Virginia with President Trump for the Boy Scouts Jamboree, Deidre gave birth to the couple’s baby boy James. As of Friday evening, a full four days after delivery, her 53-year-old husband had yet to meet his newborn son, though an associate close to Anthony said he visited the child late that night.....
http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2017/07/29/scaramuccis-fed-up-wife-left-him-while-nine-months-pregnant/
A Love Story.
Delete...and another Fatherless Home.
States with highest overdose rates:
ReplyDeleteWest Virginia
New Hampshire
Kentucky
Ohio
Rhode Island
Pennsylvania
Massachusetts
New Mexico
Utah
Tennessee
http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2017/07/28/what_states_have_the_highest_death_rates_from_drug_overdose.html
We are up to the 58,000 deaths a year level now.
DeleteDog Helps Girls Struck By Lightning
ReplyDeleteBEAVER COUNTY, Utah (KDKA) — A dog helped family members find two girls who were struck by lightning while hiking in Utah on Friday morning.
According to a release from the Beaver County Sheriff’s Office, two girls, ages 8 and 16, were camping during a family reunion and left their camp on an ATV, taking a family dog with them.
Officials told CBS affiliate KUTV that while the girls were hiking, lightning struck the 8-year-old girl on the top of her head and traveled into the 16-year-old girl.
The dog returned to the camp alone and led family members back to the two girls, who were found unconscious on the ground. The girls were then flown to a local hospital.
The 8-year-old girl was last reported to be in critical condition, and the 16-year-old girl was in serious but stable condition.
http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2017/07/29/girls-struck-by-lightning-dog/
What says you, Ash ?
ReplyDeleteMedia blackout on NASA report that sea level has fallen the last two years
July 29, 2017
Warmist doomsayers have another inconvenient "pause" on their hands. More.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/07/media_blackout_on_nasa_report_that_sea_level_has_fallen_the_last_two_years.html
Ash will probably say Obama stopped the rising of the seas, and even reversed it.
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DeleteGood lord, you're kidding right?
:o)
I know you are an English major but shit.
.
Heh :)
ReplyDeleteA Scaramucci-watchers guide to Italian speech: Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley, Opinion columnist Published 12:10 p.m. ET July 28, 2017 | Updated 12:21 p.m. ET July 28, 2017
President Trump's communications director sounds like a lunatic because he broke important rules for Italian venting.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/07/28/anthony-scaramucci-here-guide-italian-speech-jonathan-turley-column/519901001/
July 29, 2017
ReplyDeleteHamburg knife attacker known to authorities 'but not considered dangerous'
By Rick Moran
The terrorist who stabbed six people at a Hamburg supermarket, killing one, was known to authorities as an Islamic extremist but was not considered dangerous.
The attacker was a rejected asylum-seeker who was waiting for deportation papers, say authorities. They say that "Ahmed A" had "contact with the Islamist scene" but did nothing to keep an eye on him......
....They are so terrified of being accused of Islamophobia that the rational centers of their brains have been short-circuited....
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/07/hamburg_knife_attacker_known_to_authorities_but_not_considered_dangerous.html
Quirkinized
DeleteQuirkified.
DeleteAsh'mo'paralysis.
Why India and Pakistan Hate Each Other
ReplyDeleteThree score and ten years after their acrimonious split, India and Pakistan remain at daggers drawn. Max Rodenbeck asks if they can ever make up
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21725099-three-score-and-ten-years-after-their-acrimonious-split-india-and-pakistan-remain?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/whyindiaandpakistanhateeachother
The short answer is no, not until Pakistan gives up Islam.
Wait for that to happen, if you will.
ReplyDeleteFW de Klerk: South Africa at the Crossroads
The South African Miracle is in deep trouble, writes F.W. de Klerk. President Zuma, through a cocktail of corruption, mismanagement, and racism, is undermining Nelson Mandela’s legacy.
Peter Foley/Pool/EPA
JULY 27, 2017
South Africa’s “miracle,” the great nonracial constitutional accord negotiated in the early 1990s, is in deep trouble. Ten years ago, Jacob Zuma was elected leader of the ruling African National Congress. At the ANC’s 2007 national conference, 60% of delegates voted for Zuma in full knowledge of the 783 outstanding fraud and corruption charges against him.
They chose Zuma as their candidate because of his struggle credentials, his charisma and his appeal to African traditionalists — he has four wives and 22 children and delights in dancing and singing revolutionary songs at rallies. However, Zuma turned out to be a far more formidable politician than they had anticipated. They have once again been sidelined and now bitterly regret their role in his ascendance.
....In 2008 Zuma and his supporters deposed a dumfounded President Thayo Mbeki and progressively jettisoned his policies. One of their first steps was to disband the “Scorpions,” a corruption-fighting unit that had relentlessly investigated corrupt officials, including Zuma himself many other senior ANC members. Soon after being elected President in 2009, Zuma began to seize personal control of key state institutions by appointing loyalists to lead them, in a process now referred to as ‘state capture’......
.....THE ZUMA GOVERNMENT IS ACTIVELY UNDERMINING THE RACIAL RECONCILIATION THAT NELSON MANDELA WORKED SO HARD TO ESTABLISH AFTER 1994. IT HAS ADOPTED AN OPENLY HOSTILE ATTITUDE TO WHITES WHOM IT ROUTINELY CHARACTERIZES AS ‘“COLONIALISTS’” AND BLAMES FOR ITS OWN FAILURES.....
https://raddingtonreport.com/fw-de-klerk-south-africa-crossroads/
Good luck....
No one seems to even mention the wonders of Zimbabwe any longer.
DeleteI am unable to find really good news anywhere, except perhaps in a few European countries, Australia, India, Israel and the USA.
ReplyDeleteWORLD AFFAIRS
Photo of Miguel Rodriguez Mendoza
MIGUEL RODRIGUEZ MENDOZA
Miguel Rodriguez Mendoza, former Deputy Director of the World Trade Organization, is an international consultant working on trade and economic issues.
PrintJUL 25, 2017 0
Venezuela’s Freedom Fighters
GENEVA – After months of violence and anti-government protests, Venezuela is approaching the political precipice. President Nicolás Maduro’s push toward autocratic rule culminates on July 30, with the planned election of a constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution. And while there is still time to change course, the path back toward democracy is quickly fading from view.
In May, when Maduro announced his plan to establish a constituent assembly, he presented it as a way to restore confidence in his government, which has struggled to recover from economic decline amid collapsing oil prices. But as the vote has drawn closer, it has become clear that Maduro’s intent has always been to consolidate his power, and impose on Venezuela’s 31 million people an authoritarian, pseudo-socialist system. By rigging the vote with handpicked candidates, the president appears willing to use any means to maintain power.
The world got a taste of Maduro’s true aims earlier this month. On July 5, government- backed paramilitary forces, in collusion with the National Guard, attacked the opposition-controlled National Assembly. For six hours, politicians and employees were held at gunpoint; one hostage, Assembly President Julio Borges, described the siege as evidence of the country’s descent into complete “anarchy.”....
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/venezuela-deepening-political-crisis-by-miguel-rodriguez-mendoza-2017-07
Sin Bad Jesus Good
ReplyDeletehttps://www.facebook.com/theorlandojones/photos/a.10150492721206264.428470.24530951263/10154671367356264/?type=3&theater
:)
DeleteJuly 29, 2017
ReplyDeleteNo, Islamofascists can't be gently talked out of it
By Monica Showalter
In Europe, there's a pervasive idea that halting Islamofascist radicalism is mainly a matter "preventing incarceration" for illegal associations and activities and just talking young migrants and their confused, resentful offspring out of it. Why wouldn't someone who goes from zero to hero in his own mind and has the mandate of heaven and the promise of eternal paradise change his mind when presented not just with the goodies of Western civilization, but its ideas as well? That women are equal, that gay is OK, that tolerance of all lifestyles is desirable, that secularism is grand, and the state is all powerful – who wouldn't swap out the promise of eternal paradise and martyrdom for all those pro-offered ideas, just by talking to them through "de-radicalization" re-education.
Such is the delusion over there: that stone-cold Islamofascists with pillage and terrorism in their minds can be flipped into secular-minded, wholesome, tolerant, self-guilting uni-worlders with views not at all different from those of the average European Union denizen. All nice people, it seems.
We saw it in Norway, where rape-minded migrants were expected to be talked into dropping their stone-age attitudes and loathing of the West all through the miracle of re-education, a highly touted re-orientation for the unassimilated migrants including the terrorists among them. Based on what is read in the news, it's not working.
We know that even Saudi Arabian de-radicalization efforts have failed, too. We can safely assume that these re-education efforts are not populated by European Union-style re-educators who will advise their supposed charges about the importance of gay rights and women's liberation - because many of these supposedly deradicalized have used these schools and camps as conducts for returning back to the battlefield.
Now we read that France's effort to de-radicalize Islamic militants has been an abject failure, too. Newsweek reports:....
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/07/no_islamofascists_cant_be_gently_talked_out_of_it.html#ixzz4oHmfq4xZ
'The tactics are terrorism are hard and merciless. The only thing that can really break a diamond is another diamond. Punishing radicalism, not coddling terrorists, is the only known tactic against terrorism that works.'
DeleteMASSIVE Anti-Israel Protest in CANADA Calls for New Genocide of the Jews
ReplyDeleteBy Pamela Geller - on July 29, 2017
CANADA
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
That means Israel will be completely destroyed, and millions of Jews will be killed. And that is what these savages want. They also chanted, “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” This is refers to Muhammad’s massacre at the Khaybar oasis in Arabia of Jewish farmers who were simply going about their business and completely blindsided by the appearance of Muhammad and his armies.
These are calls for a genocide of the Jews right in Mississauga, Ontario. Will Canadian authorities charge these people with “hate speech”? Or is that something only non-Muslims can commit?
http://pamelageller.com/2017/07/anti-israel-genocide.html/
What says you, Ash ?
Look who is buying the F-35 Now
ReplyDeletehttps://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/07/look-whos-buying-lockheed-martins-f-35-now.aspx