#u.s presidential dea

[mariacallous]

(JTA) — The United States Postal Service has released a new series of Forever stamps honoring Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Jewish Supreme Court justice and liberal icon who died in 2020.

The stamp, which became available for purchase on Monday, shows Ginsburg wearing her black judge’s robe and signature white collar. It was announced last year as part of the postal service’s 2023 lineup of new stamps, reflecting a jump on the service’s standard timeline for honoring deceased people.

The stamp’s release comes three years and two weeks after Ginsburg’s death at 87, after 27 years on the Supreme Court. Her death, from pancreatic cancer, came on the eve of Rosh Hashanah at a time of intense political polarization — which deepened as then-President Donald Trump pushed through a conservative replacement despite a looming presidential election.

“Honor an icon of American culture with this new Ruth Bader Ginsburg stamp,” the USPS says on its website. It says about Ginsburg: “She began her career as an activist lawyer fighting gender discrimination. She went on to become a judge who was unafraid to disagree with her colleagues. Ginsburg gained a reputation as a respected voice for equal justice.”

The RBG stamp costs $.66 but will hold its value over time as part of the Forever series. The portrait was drawn by Michael Deas, who has painted dozens of stamps, under the direction of the USPS’ Jewish art director, Ethel Kessler. The stamp will be celebrated at an official unveiling Monday evening at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Postal Service’s special edition stamps commemorating notable Americans have included many Jews, including the physicist Richard Feynman in 2005, cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg in 1995 and, in 1991, comedian Fanny Brice, the inspiration for the musical “Funny Girl.” The series in which Brice appeared was drawn by the Jewish illustrator Al Hirschfeld. Last year, the service released a special-edition stamp featuring the Jewish poet Shel Silverstein.

The USPS has also offered a range of Hanukkah stamps and last year introduced a new one, its ninth since 1996. The new stamp, which remains available, was drawn by Jeanette Kuvin Oren, a Jewish artist who also designs ritual objects for home and synagogue use.

[absolxguardian]

A reply on this post

@crypticdoe Legal weed being technically unconstitutional has nothing to do with drug legislation itself. Rather it has to do with the Supremacy Clause of the constitution. If something is a valid federal law- not violating the constitution and given federal jurisdiction either through being an enumerated power or an implied power (the Wikipedia article on the Commerce Clause explains it pretty well, and specifically includes the justification for drug laws)- federal law preempts state law. Weed is still federally illegal, so the state laws legalizing weed are unconstitutional.

The executive branch of the federal government is currently executing prosecutorial/administrative discretion by not having the FBI/DEA arrest everyone involved in legal weed across the country. That's the same as a state prosecutor choosing not to press charges. They can change the situation at any moment if they wished. Congress probably also has the power to pass a 'actually do your job' law, but that's the kind of thing where it has to actually happen and have the constitutionality decided to be able to say if it would be valid.

I learned this from my AP Gov class, so here's what the textbook said:

The 1970 Controlled Substances Act remains federal law. What happens, then, when a state legalizes marijuana while the drug remains illegal at the national level? The answer depends on whom you ask, which level and branch of government are being asked, and the political mood of the nation and states. As the legalization movement was under way, but before it had crossed a tipping point, federal authorities in Republican President George W. Bush’s administration began a crackdown on marijuana growing operations and medical marijuana dispensaries in California. Legalization advocates and patients sued the federal government, arguing that states had the authority under the Tenth Amendment and the police powers doctrine to determine the status of the drug’s legality. However, on appeal, in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution’s commerce clause entitles Congress to determine what may be bought and sold. Thus, federal marijuana crimes were upheld.

Though that precedent still stands, the Justice Department under Democratic President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder took a different approach. Through his eight years as president, eight states—those laboratories of democracy—legalized recreational marijuana. In 2014, the attorney general announced the Obama administration’s revised approach to enforcing marijuana violations. In doing so, he did not rewrite the law. Holder did, however, declare that the Justice Department would not use federal resources to crack down on selling or using the drug in states where voters had democratically deemed marijuana legal. Ultimately, federal arrests for marijuana became nearly nonexistent.

Until recently, Democrats and Independents supported legalization more than Republicans. However, as Gallup reports, most Republicans now support legalizing marijuana. The policy debate on legalization and how federal law would be enforced surfaced in the 2016 primary and general elections for president with a variety of responses from candidates in both parties. After Donald Trump took office and Attorney General Jeff Sessions—an anti-drug conservative—was sworn in, pot users and medical marijuana proponents watched closely. During the Trump administration, the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared that local U.S. attorneys—those presidentially appointed prosecutors who bring federal crime cases to court in their districts across the country shall be the local determiners of how federal marijuana policy is handled. In fact, the Justice Department attorneys and the FBI deal with a variety of federal crimes on a daily basis and decide whether to prosecute and which crimes are higher on their priority list. This inconsistency from administration to administration may be confusing and destabilizing to some, but it is an inevitable element of administrative discretion.

#us law

[newstfionline]

Monday, February 19, 2024

Flood watches issued as another round of wet winter storms hits California (AP) The latest in a series of wet winter storms blew ashore in Northern California on Sunday, with forecasters warning of possible flooding, hail, strong winds and even brief tornadoes as the system moves south over the next few days. Gusts topped 30 mph (48 kph) in Oakland and San Jose as a mild cold front late Saturday gave way to a more powerful storm that will gain strength into early Monday, said meteorologist Brayden Murdock with the National Weather Service office in San Francisco. California’s central coast is at risk of “significant flooding,” with up to 5 inches (12 cm) of rain predicted for many areas, according to the weather service. Isolated rain totals of 10 inches (25 cm) are possible in the Santa Lucia and Santa Ynez mountain ranges as the storm heads toward greater Los Angeles.

Prominent Black Church Leaders Call for End of U.S. Aid to Israel (NYT) Leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the country’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, called this week for the United States to end its financial aid to Israel, saying the monthslong military campaign in Gaza amounted to “mass genocide.” Black churches and other faith groups have pushed for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war for months in advertisements, open letters and social media campaigns. Black faith leaders across denominations have amplified their calls as the number of dead rises. More than 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to health officials there, many of them women and children. But the A.M.E. council’s statement goes further than a cease-fire demand, insisting that the United States immediately stop its financial support of Israel. It came as Israeli forces pushed into southern Gaza and prepared for a ground assault on Rafah, where more than a million displaced Palestinians are trapped.

Tens of thousands rail against Mexico’s president and ruling party in ‘march for democracy’ (AP) Tens of thousands of demonstrators cloaked in pink marched through cities in Mexico and abroad on Sunday in what they called a “march for democracy” targeting the country’s ruling party in advance of the country’s June 2 elections. The demonstrations called by Mexico’s opposition parties advocated for free and fair elections in the Latin American nation and railed against corruption the same day presidential front-runner Claudia Sheinbaum registered as a candidate for ruling party Morena. Approximately 90,000 people turned out to rail against the leader, according to government figures. Sheinbaum is largely seen as a continuation candidate of Mexico’s highly popular populist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He’s adored by many voters who say he bucked the country’s elite parties from power in 2018 and represents the working class. But the 70-year-old president has also been accused of making moves that endanger the country’s democracy.

Surging cocaine violence has Uruguay clamoring for DEA help (Reuters) Uruguay’s main port received two cargo scanners sixteen years ago to detect drugs and other suspicious loads. Unfortunately, during delivery one of them fell into the sea. Since then, cocaine shipments to Europe have surged through the port of Montevideo, which handled a record 1.1 million containers last year, fueling a rise in gang violence and undermining Uruguay’s reputation as a beacon of stability in turbulent South America. Uruguay’s current center-right government, which took office the following year, has repeatedly asked the DEA to return but U.S. officials say there are no imminent plans to do so. Three former DEA officials told Reuters that—with Washington focused on fentanyl flooding its borders from Mexico and little of the cocaine that transits through Uruguay heading to the United States—there’s scant appetite for seeking congressional approval to re-open a Montevideo office. “Everything’s fentanyl now,” said former DEA official Larry Reichner, who oversaw Uruguay as the DEA’s assistant regional director for southern South America from 2015-2019. “They couldn’t give a rat’s — about cocaine.”

Britain’s David Cameron visits the Falkland Islands as Argentina renews its sovereignty claim (AP) Foreign Secretary David Cameron will visit the Falkland Islands this week to show they are a “valued part of the British family,” the U.K. government said Sunday. Britain’s top diplomat is making the trip amid renewed calls by Argentina for negotiations over the contested South Atlantic archipelago. The Foreign Office said Cameron will meet Falklands government officials, pay his respects to war dead and visit some of the islands’ 3,500 people and 1 million penguins. He’s the first British Cabinet minister since 2016 to visit the Falklands, over which Britain and Argentina fought a brief war in 1982.

Macron says recognizing a Palestinian state is not a taboo for France (AP) French President Emmanuel Macron says recognizing a Palestinian state is not a “taboo” for France, as international frustration grows with Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territories. France and the EU have long supported a two-state solution in the Mideast, but as part of a negotiated settlement. With talks long stalled and Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza deepening, some European countries are voicing support for recognizing a Palestinian state sooner. “Recognizing a Palestinian state is not a taboo for France,” Macron said Friday at a meeting in Paris with Jordan’s King Abdullah. “We owe it to Palestinians, whose aspirations have been trampled on for too long. We owe it to Israelis, who lived through the worst antisemitic massacre of our time. We owe it to a region that is seeking to rise above those who promote chaos and seed revenge.”

Over 400 detained in Russia as country mourns the death of Alexei Navalny (AP) Over 400 people were detained in Russia while paying tribute to opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died at a remote Arctic penal colony, a prominent rights group reported. The sudden death of Navalny, 47, was a blow to many Russians. Navalny remained vocal in his unrelenting criticism of the Kremlin even after surviving a nerve agent poisoning and receiving multiple prison terms. The news reverberated across the globe, and hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities streamed to ad-hoc memorials and monuments to victims of political repressions with flowers and candles on Friday and Saturday to pay a tribute to the politician. In over a dozen cities, police detained 401 people by Saturday night.

Iran, wary of wider war, urges its proxies to avoid provoking U.S. (Washington Post) Iran, eager to disrupt U.S. and Israeli interests in the Middle East but wary of provoking a direct confrontation, is privately urging Hezbollah and other armed groups to exercise restraint against U.S. forces, according to officials in the region. Israel’s brutal war on Hamas in Gaza has stoked conflict between the United States and Iran’s proxy forces on multiple fronts. With no cease-fire in sight, Iran could face the most significant test yet of its ability to exert influence over these allied militias. When U.S. forces launched strikes this month on Iran-backed groups in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, Tehran publicly warned that its military was ready to respond to any threat. But in private, senior leaders are urging caution, according to Lebanese and Iraqi officials who were briefed on the talks.

Netanyahu Says He Won’t Bow to Pressure to Call Off Rafah Invasion (NYT) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel insisted on Saturday that Israel would not bow to international pressure to call off its plan for a ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza that is now packed with more than a million Palestinians. Many of the people now in Rafah are displaced and living in schools, tents or the homes of friends and relatives, part of a desperate search for any safe refuge from Israel’s military campaign, which has dragged on for more than four months. Their lives are a daily struggle to find enough food and water to survive. “Those who want to prevent us from operating in Rafah are basically telling us: Lose the war,” Mr. Netanyahu said at a news conference in Jerusalem on Saturday evening. “It’s true that there’s a lot of opposition abroad, but this is exactly the moment that we need to say that we won’t be doing a half or a third of the job.”

Nigeria’s currency has fallen to a record low (AP) Nigerians are facing one of the West African nation’s worst economic crises in years triggered by surging inflation, the result of monetary policies that have pushed the currency to an all-time low against the dollar. The situation has provoked anger and protests across the country. The latest government statistics released Thursday showed the inflation rate in January rose to 29.9%, its highest since 1996, mainly driven by food and non-alcoholic beverages. Nigeria’s currency, the naira, further plummeted to 1,524 to $1 on Friday, reflecting a 230% loss of value in the last year. “My family is now living one day at a time (and) trusting God,” said trader Idris Ahmed, whose sales at a clothing store in Nigeria’s capital of Abuja have declined from an average of $46 daily to $16.

Coming to an airport near you (NYT) Biometrics are transforming the way we travel. The technology, which identifies travelers using unique physical traits like fingerprints and faces, is becoming more common at airports in the United States. As a result, time-consuming rituals that once required repeated ID checks—such as bag dropping, security screening and boarding—are getting easier and faster. Some experts believe that this will be the year that biometric use, primarily facial recognition, becomes standard at many airports. The technology offers several advantages: enhanced security, quicker processing of passengers and a more convenient airport experience. Executives at various airlines tell me they believe passengers are becoming more comfortable with using biometrics in their daily lives. Many people regularly use facial recognition to unlock their phones, and shoppers can use their palms to pay for groceries at some Whole Foods stores. Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel on privacy and technology at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the government had not yet shown a demonstrated need for facial-recognition technology at airports. And he expressed concern over what he called the “nuclear scenario.” “Facial recognition technology,” he said, could be “the foundation for a really robust and widespread government surveillance and tracking network.”

Tai chi reduces blood pressure better than aerobic exercise, study finds (NPR) Tai chi, a traditional, slow-moving form of Chinese martial art, is known to increase flexibility and improve balance. Now, new research suggests it's better than more vigorous aerobic exercises for lowering blood pressure in people with prehypertension. Prehypertension is blood pressure that's higher than normal but doesn't quite reach the level of high blood pressure, or hypertension. The new findings, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, add to a large body of research pointing to health benefits from tai chi, a wellness practice that combines slow, gentle movements and postures with mindfulness. It's often called meditation in motion.

#headlines #news

[healthstyle101]

Mexico’s fifth largest employer is helping kill Americans. Some Republicans are ready to declare literal war

Cartels are collectively Mexico's fifth-largest employer, according to a recent study, and some Republican presidential candidates are ready to take them out with military force. A mathematical model of the criminal organizations' recruitments and losses revealed that Mexican cartels collectively employ some 175,000 people, according to a study published in the journal Science. The groups have been blamed for flooding fentanyl into the U.S. Over 200,000 Americans have overdosed and died from synthetic opioids like fentanyl since 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ron DeSantis said he would authorize lethal U.S. military force to combat Mexican drug cartels if he were elected president. (Fox News) Gov. Ron DeSantis "is fully committed to sending U.S. Special Forces into Mexico to combat the drug cartels, deploying the U.S. military to stop the invasion, and authorizing deadly force against cartel drug smugglers breaking into our country," a spokesperson for the Florida Republican's presidential campaign told Fox News. DeSantis, the only candidate who has served in the military, has also supported the use of drone strikes against the criminal groups. Other candidates, such as former President Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley have similarly said that, if they were elected to the Oval Office, they too would deploy U.S. special forces to combat the cartels. WATCH THE TOP STORIES FROM FOX NEWS DIGITAL ORIGINALS: WATCH MORE FOX NEWS DIGITAL ORIGINALS HERE Trump said he would "inflict maximum damage" on cartel operations, he told Fox News in June, adding that he would seek the death penalty for convicted drug dealers and human traffickers. A spokesperson for Haley's presidential campaign provided a comment echoing the candidate's previous remarks accusing China and the cartels of working together to smuggle fentanyl into the U.S. "Treat those cartels for the terrorists that they are," Haley said at a town hall in May. "We send in our special operation units, and we take them out just like we took out Al Qaeda and you stop all of that manufacturing that's happening there on the side of Mexico." Former President Trump said he would deploy military assets to fight cartel operations in order to combat the fentanyl crisis. (Julie Bennett/Getty Images) The two most formidable criminal organizations in Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Cartel have 26,000 and nearly 19,000 members, respectively, according to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief Anne Milgram. Those cartels, she said, are "responsible for flooding fentanyl into our communities." HOMELAND SECURITY REVEALS NEW 'INTELLIGENCE-DRIVEN APPROACH' TO COMBAT OPIOID CRISIS "The Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels pose the greatest criminal drug threat the United States has ever faced," the DEA administrator told the House Judiciary Committee in July. "These ruthless, violent, criminal organizations have associates, facilitators and brokers in all 50 states in the United States, as well as in more than 100 countries around the world." Suspected Mexican drug cartel members armed with rifles were arrested on the Texas side of the southern border in June. (Texas DPS) The new research puts the cartel issue into perspective, Rafael Prieto-Curiel, the lead author of the study, told the Los Angeles Times. "It’s very important to understand the size of the problem," he said. Cartels across Mexico are recruiting between 350 and 370 people a week to make up for members who die or are imprisoned, the research found. But GOP candidates aren't alone in wanting to take military action against the cartels. Ovidio Guzman Lopez, a key member of the Sinaloa Cartel, was arrested in 2019 by Mexican authorities. He was recently extradited to the U.S. to face federal drug charges. (CEPROPIE via AP File) CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP About half of Americans support sending military forces into Mexico to fight drug cartels, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Another 26% opposed the idea and the remainder were unsure. Ovidio Guzman Lopez, a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel and son of imprisoned kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, was arraigned on Monday in Chicago on federal drug charges. He was charged with conspiring to distribute in the U.S. cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana from Mexico and elsewhere. The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment. Jon Michael Raasch is an associate producer/writer with Fox News Digital Originals. Read the full article

[cavenewstimes]

Where Presidential Candidate Asa Hutchinson Stands On Marijuana Kyle Jaeger

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R)—who previously served as the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official and in Congress—is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. At each stage of his career, Hutchinson has proudly and unyieldingly embraced the war on drugs and opposed marijuana legalization. Of particular…

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[homelanddefense5486-blog]

When my dad died.. things are changing presidential in the community of Blair county PA.. he died he was 86 years old.. his Last Name Was Bush or Cheney.. or Mr Wealth.. he wanted people to get off drugs stop killings.. He Was Above The President 1954 -2009

#pennsylvania commonwealth #us department of government homeland defense #blair county pa #homeland security #u.s president #national security united states of america #u.s presidential police #presidential u.s. congress #u.s. department of state #u.s. supreme court #u.s. senate #wrongful burial wrongful death u.s. united states #u.s presidential dea

[ffleischmann21ahsgov]

Election 2020 Presidential Candidates Assessment

Howie Hawkins/Angela Nicole Walker, Green :

Federal Investigations of Local Police Misconduct

Community Control of the Police

The Green party candidates wants to reform the police in a way that would include federal investigations into local police misconduct as a way to make sure that corruption or misuse of power is investigated in local police forces. They also want the people to have a say in how the police operate in their communities. I wholeheartedly agree with their ideas and think that they are both good points for what should be done for a start. I think there is more that would need to be done, but these are good ideas. 

There are no conflicts between this and blog 3 but it does say more than the party website itself did, which I appreciate. 

Donald J. Trump/Michael R. Pence, Republican :

• The Department of Justice announced more than $98 million in grant funding through the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services COPS Hiring Program to allow 802 additional full-time law enforcement officers.

• The Trump Administration expanded Project Safe Neighborhoods to encourage U.S. Attorney’s to work with communities to develop customized crime reduction strategies.

The Republican party candidates do not say much about reforming the police, but by looking at their “accomplishments” it is clear that they are against defunding the police and, in fact, have provided much more funding to the police to allow for many more jobs. I do not agree with this solution because I see this as a try for quantity over quality, when I believe that it is our quality of police enforcement that is the direct and indirect cause of many problems nowadays. This also directly juxtaposes the party website, which is pro defunding of police and defunding of federal police. 

Gloria La Riva/Sunil Freeman, Peace and Freedom

Dear Gloria La Riva, The issue I am concerned about is police funding and reform.  I am concerned about this issue because I believe that police are necessary for public safety but also require reform.  I am currently a senior at Acalanes High School and I am researching this issue for my senior Government class.  Please clarify your stance on this issue.  Thank you so much for your time and good luck.

Sincerely, Fox Fleischmann [email protected]

Roque De La Fuente "Rocky" Guerra/Kanye Omari West, American Independent

Dear Roque De La Fuente, The issue I am concerned about is police funding and reform.  I am concerned about this issue because I believe that police are necessary for public safety but also require reform.  I am currently a senior at Acalanes High School and I am researching this issue for my senior Government class.  Please clarify your stance on this issue.  Thank you so much for your time and good luck.

Sincerely, Fox Fleischmann [email protected]

Jo Jorgensen/Jeremy "Spike" Cohen, Libertarian :

• As your President, I will defund federal involvement in policing. I will defund the DEA and keep federal agencies out of local police matters unless called upon by state authorities.

Jo Jorgenson aligns completely with her party’s statement as she calls for defunding of federal police. She also promotes the complete legalization of objects to be owned by whomever may want to own such objects including drugs, firearms, and other destructive devices. I agree with her stance on complete legalization, as I believe that if given the right tools, the people of America can defend themselves, and this would be the only situation in which de funding of police would be preferred. I also believe that crimes must have a victim, and there is no point to having a law on drugs when someone could just as easily go to a store and drink a bottle of whiskey and die from alcohol poisoning. 

Joseph R. Biden/Kamala D. Harris, Democratic :

Expand federal funding for mental health and substance use disorder services and research.

The Democratic candidates are pushing for a reform in the criminal justice system, and would like to support the mental health of the officers in the criminal justice system. I agree with this stance and think that their objectives align with my own in the fact that I believe that the criminal justice system needs to be reformed to fit the instabilities that lie within the justice system. These points align with those on the democratic website. 

[thevividgreenmoss]

The NBC/MSNBC reporter, William Arkin, is a longtime prominent war and military reporter, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010, co-reported with two-time Pulitzer winner Dana Priest, on how sprawling, unaccountable, and omnipotent the national security state has become in the post-9/11 era. When that three-part investigative series, titled “Top Secret America,” was published, I hailed it as one of the most important pieces of reporting of the war on terror, because while “we chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, this is the Real U.S. Government:  functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.”

...Some of the most beloved and frequently featured MSNBC commentators are the most bloodthirsty pro-war militarists from the war on terror: David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, Ralph Peters, and Bill Kristol (who was just giddily and affectionately celebrated with a playful nickname bestowed on him: “Lil Bill”). In early 2018, NBC hired former CIA chief John Brennan to serve as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst,” where the rendition and torture advocate joined — as Politico’s Jack Shafer noted — a long litany of former security state officials at the network, including “Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush.”

As Shafer noted, filling your news and analyst slots with former security state officials as MSNBC and NBC have done is tantamount to becoming state TV, since “their first loyalty — and this is no slam — is to the agency from which they hail.” As he put it: “Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.”

All of this led Arkin to publish a remarkable denunciation of NBC and MSNBC in the form of an email he sent to various outlets, including The Intercept. Its key passages are scathing and unflinching in their depiction of those networks as pro-war propaganda outlets that exist to do little more than amplify and serve the security state agencies most devoted to opposing Trump, including their mindless opposition to Trump’s attempts (with whatever motives) to roll back some of the excesses of imperialism, aggression, and U.S. involvement in endless war, as well as to sacrifice all journalistic standards and skepticism about generals and the U.S war machine if doing so advances their monomaniacal mission of denouncing Trump. As Arkin wrote (emphasis added):

My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus. …

To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous. …

Windrem again convinced me to return to NBC to join the new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.

I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars. …

In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think – like everyone else does – that we miss so much. People who don’t understand the medium, or the pressures, loudly opine that it’s corporate control or even worse, that it’s partisan. Sometimes I quip in response to friends on the outside (and to government sources) that if they mean by the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they are right.

For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump’s various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI.  Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula?  Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?

That an entire generation of Democrats paying attention to politics for the first time is being instilled with formerly right-wing Cold Warrior values of jingoism, über-patriotism, reverence for security state agencies and prosecutors, a reckless use of the “traitor” accusation to smear one’s enemies, and a belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and foreign policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing. These toxins will endure far beyond Trump, particularly given the now full-scale unity between the Democratic establishment and neocons.

#glenn go off always #essays #*

[randrange]

Opinion: Honduras, the narco-state that illustrates U.S. contradictions

Carlos Dada is the founder and director of the news site El Faro in El Salvador.

Wherever you walk in Honduras, you are most likely in drug trafficking territory. For half a century, this country has been the Central American base for drug trafficking. Organized crime has infiltrated all institutions. If a Honduran comes across any authority — police, mayor, congressman — chances are that figure has commitments to organized crime. However, the Honduran drug trade has moved in step with the United States’ interests. The recent New York trials against Honduran drug traffickers allow us to measure the extent of the infiltration by organized crime: military and police chiefs, politicians, businessmen, mayors and even three presidents have been linked to cocaine trafficking or accused of receiving funds from trafficking.

Lee este artículo en español

But the trials have a subplot that the scandalous testimonies of criminals have buried: the clash of agendas between the different U.S. agencies involved in Central America. The CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department have rarely acted in unison.

Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, brother of President Juan Orlando Hernández, was found guilty of smuggling 185 tons of cocaine into the United States and sentenced to life in prison. “Here, the [drug] trafficking was indeed state-sponsored,” U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel said in the sentence. The jury concluded that Tony Hernández used the Honduran army and police for his criminal activities. From these earnings, he contributed large sums of money to the political campaigns of his brother and then-President Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

An American jury concluded that the brother of the Honduran president used the army and police for his criminal activities. The case against him was the product of years of investigation by the DEA and the Justice Department into the criminal activities of the Hernández family. While the anti-drug agents followed the trail of the drug trafficker, the Honduran president received support from the State Department, which even endorsed his fraudulent 2017 reelection because the opposition leader, former president Manuel Zelaya, aligned himself with the Venezuelan regime. The DEA’s priority is to hunt down narcos. In Honduras, the State Department’s priority is to weaken the Bolivarian government of Venezuela, even if that means endorsing the fraudulent reelection of the head of the Hernández family.

Fabio Lobo, son of the former president Lobo, and banker Yani Rosenthal, son of one of the richest men in Honduras, were previously convicted in the same New York court. Rosenthal was found guilty of laundering money in their banks for the Los Cachiros cartel. He served a three-year prison sentence and returned to Honduras, where he’s currently the opposition’s presidential nominee. In Honduras, one of the most violent countries in the world, 60 percent of deaths are attributed to organized crime. There are 37 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, and all 18 provinces are within the criminal groups’ grip. However, this isn’t something new. Large-scale drug trafficking in Honduras dates back to the 1970s. Ramón Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran born in poverty, took advantage of the geographical benefits of his country and established himself as a link between the Medellín Cartel (led by Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar) and the Guadalajara Cartel (led by Mexican drug lord Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo). He operated with the protection and collaboration of the Honduran Armed Forces, politicians and police, and became one of the wealthiest and most powerful Central Americans.

Matta set up an airline that had two clients: the Escobar cartel and the CIA. The flights went north from Colombia to the United States loaded with cocaine and emeralds and returned south to Nicaragua with weapons and ammunition for the counterrevolutionaries. Amid the Cold War, the CIA’s goal was to end the revolutionary government that the Sandinistas had installed in Nicaragua, even though the United States had already declared war on drugs.

To achieve this, the CIA needed not only Matta’s airline but the involvement of the Honduran army, which protected Matta. Years later, the Kerry committee report on support operations to the Nicaraguan Contras confirmed Matta’s involvement with the drug trafficking and the transportation of combat supplies. It also questioned the fact that DEA operations in Honduras were shut in 1983, despite evidence of military involvement and knowledge of Matta’s activities. The DEA’s anti-drug agenda collided with the anti-communist strategy of the CIA and the White House. But the anti-narcotics agents investigated Matta’s associates in Mexico. The Honduran caporegime kept sending drugs and receiving weapons. He amassed such a fortune that he offered to pay the whole foreign debt of Honduras. His luck changed in 1985 when he visited his Mexican associates and got involved in the torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena.

Almost 40 years later, Matta is still in a Pennsylvania prison, and the U.S. agencies keep clashing in Honduras, a narco-state in which the United States still has the main military base of the region.

The Biden administration — committed to regaining the prestige squandered by President Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump — faces an enormous challenge. The U.S. agenda on Honduras doesn’t typically prioritize democratic consolidation and an anti-corruption stance. But if Washington is bent on a principled foreign policy, it will have to look under the stones to find legitimate players in a country plagued by organized crime.

It’s challenging to find a politician, military chief, police officer or prominent businessman who isn’t linked to drug trafficking or corruption in Honduras. Everyone knows it, but saying it out loud is dangerous. In November 2011, on a national television program, Honduran analyst Alfredo Landaverde claimed that 14 businessmen were laundering money for the cartels and that the political parties were just fronts for organized crime. At that point, drug trafficking was already so widespread that it affected all Hondurans in one way or another. The surprising thing was that this man dared to say it out loud on national television.

Five weeks later, Landaverde was assassinated.

[opedguy]

Australia Calls Out Macron

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Nov. 3, 2021.--When the United States announced a nuclear submarine deal with Australia Sept. 16, it meant the end of a $60 billion deal with France for diesel-electric-fired submarines.  Announcing a new partnership with the U.S., 53-year-old Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the French diesel-electric-powered subs didn’t have the range needed to meet the demand of long-range patrols going from Australia to the South China Sea.  After told that the U.S. and Australia “stabbed France in the back,” 43-year-old Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron insisted he was blindsided by Australia, without any advance notice.  Morrison said he discussed with Marcon at a state visit in June that the sub deal no longer met Australia’s needs.  Macron was so embarrassed, so humiliated, so disgraced that he called back the U.S. and Australian ambassadors in an unprecedented step for historic allies.    

         Macron lied to his Cabinet and the French people, insisting he was given no advance notice before Morrison told him the submarine deal was dead.  Facing a bitter reelection fight next years, the Australian submarine deal cancellation humiliated Macron, making him look unfit to manage France’s affairs-of-state. French Amb. to Australia Jean-Pierre Thebault slammed Morrison’s government for canceling the sub deal to the Australian National Press Club, insisting Macron received no advance notice.  Morrison said emphatically that he informed Macron back in June that Australia was canceling the diesel-electric submarine deal.  Macron finds himself the butt of jokes for Morrison canceling the nuclear sub deal, prompting the 43-year-old French leader to continue denying that he was informed in advance.  Morrison heard enough of Macron playing ElectionYear politics and went public.  

           Morrison released a private email from Macron inquiring about the submarine dea.  “Should I expect good or bad news for our joint submarine ambitions,” asked Macron in an email to Morrison.  Macron said that Morrison never notified him at a state dinner in Paris in June that the deal was in jeopardy.  Since announcing the U.S.-Australian nuclear submarine partnership Sept. 16, Marcon has face withering domestic criticism for failing to inform his Cabinet and the French people about the end of the submarine deal.  Macron’s 53-year-old chief rival National Rally Party leader Marine Le Pen said Macron’s failed deal showed he wasn’t fit for office.  “This is an unprecedented new low, in terms of how to proceed and also in term of truth and trust,” Thebault said, turning the situation upside down.  It was Macron that lied to his Cabinet and the French people about the failed sub deal.    

         France exposes for all to see the cutthroat politics in France where there’s a murky line with facts-and-reality.  Morrison had no motive to lie about his meeting with Macron in June where he told the French president that the nuclear sub deal was in peril.  “Doing so . . . sends a very worrying signal for all heads of state:  Beware, in Australia there will be leaks and what you say in confidence to your partners will be eventually used and weaponized against you,” Thebault said.  Thebault knows the one weaponizing the truth against Morrison is Macron, so save his sinking approval ratings, making him vulnerable in next year’s presidential election.  Thebault won’t admit that Macron’s incapable of telling the truth when it comes to making him look bad.  Morrison had no choice but to slap Macron back for painting him as an untrustworthy liar in doing business with the French Republic. 

            France continues to slam Morrison, insisting that Macron was not informed that Australia would back out of the submarine deal.  “The deceit was intentional,” Thebault said.  “The way it was handled was plainly as stab in the back,” continuing the ultimate deceit that Macron was not informed back in June.  Macron must continue his lies to the French people, blaming the debacle on Australia.  “Maybe there’s a difference between misleading and lying,” Thebault said.  “But, you know, among heads of states and governments, when you mislead a friend and an ally, you lie to him,” Thebault said.  Thebault pretends that Macron was telling the truth, when he didn’t want to expose publicly that the Australian sub deal was dead.  France showed how desperate it is for lucrative defense contracts, slamming traditional allies when it suits Macron politically in an Election Year.  

           When it comes to credibility, there’s no reason to doubt Morrison saying that diesel-electric-fired submarines no longer met the Australian mission of patrolling the Pacific Rim and South China Sea to help contain China’s expanding influence.  France was embarrassed by the Australia’s cancellation because it showed that they lack the nuclear technology necessary to meet Australia’s needs.  France was thoroughly embarrassed because they sell themselves as a state-of-the-art defense contractor, when, in fact, they lack the technology needed for long-range missions.  Instead of graciously accepting Australia’s cancellation, Macron turned it into a global scandal, punishing the U.S. and Australia.  French voters now see that Macron tells any tale to preserve his approval ratings.  But, truth be told, he couldn’t tell the truth about the cancelled sub deal without lasting political fallout. 

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

[patriotsnet]

What Year Did The Democrats And Republicans Switch

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-year-did-the-democrats-and-republicans-switch/

What Year Did The Democrats And Republicans Switch

An Introduction To The Different Types Of Democrats And Republicans: This Is A Story Of Factions Switching And Parties Changing

I can’t stress this enough, a major thing that changes in history is the Southern Social Conservative one-party voting bloc .

This is the easy thing to explain given the conservative South’s historically documented support of figures like Calhoun, John Breckenridge and his Socially Conservative Confederates of the Southern Democratic Party, , the other Byrd who ran for President, Thurmond, C. Wallace, Goldwater , and later conservative figures like Reagan, Bush, and Trump .

The problem isn’t showing the changes related to this, or showing the progressive southerners like LBJ, the Gores, and Bill Clinton aren’t of “the same exact” breed as the socially conservative south, the problem is that the party loyalty of the conservative south is hardly the only thing that changes, nor is it the only thing going on in American history .

Not only that, but here we have to note that the north and south have its own factions, Democrats and Republicans have their own factions, and each region and state has its own factions… and that gives us many different “types” of Democrats and Republicans.

Consider, Lindsey Graham essentially inherited Strom Thurmond’s seat, becoming the next generation of solid south South Carolina conservative, now solidly in the Republican party.

Birmingham was all about a Democrat spraying a firehose at a Democrats, while the Democrats sent in the national guard to stop the protestors, while a Democrat told the guard to stand down.

A Summary Of The Party Switching By Looking At The Presidents: From The Founding Fathers To Civil War To Civil Rights To Today

In the introduction we provided a chronological summary of the parties by looking at the Party Systems, this section expands upon the story by focusing on the Presidents.

As noted in the introduction, to prove the parties switched platforms clearly, we need to consider at least four political types , not just liberal and conservative. We also need to think about the single issue“third parties” like the Free Soil Party, the People’s Party, and the American Independent Party, and the difference between collectivism and individualism. This is necessary as collective rights vs. individual rights is the issue at the heart of the debate.

Although the political ideologies are best applied to each issue, some issues don’t arise until the late 19th or even 20th century. The parties have been factionalized throughout history. We can describe the parties, using modern language, as Social Liberal , Conservative , Populist/Socialist , and Libertarian/Classic Liberal .

Hamilton, who roughly favors Northern interests and a strong government, was a hands-on Federalist . Jefferson, who roughly favors Southern interests and less government, was a hands-off anti-Federalist . In terms of England and France, Hamilton is Whig-like and Jefferson is a Jacobin supporting admirer of the French Revolution .

John Quincy Adams | 60-Second Presidents | PBS. Adams, Clay, and Jackson’s stories intertwine to describe the end of the First Party and start of the Second Party system.

Other Factors Of Note Regarding Switching Platforms Progressivism The Red Scare Immigration Religion And Civil Rights In 54

Other key factors involve the Red Scare , the effect of immigration, unions, and “the Catholic vote” on the parties.

The Republican party changed after losing to Wilson and moved away from progressivism and toward classical liberal values under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. In this time they also became increasingly “anti-Communist” following WWI . While both parties were anti-Communist and pro-Capitalist, Wilson’s brand of progressive southern bourbon liberalism and his New Freedom plan and then FDR’s brand of progressive liberalism and his New Deal were opposed by Republicans like Hoover due to their use of the state to ensure social justice. Then after WWII, the Second Red Scare reignited the conversation, further dividing factions and parties.

Another important thing to note is that the Democratic party has historically been pro-immigrant . Over time this attracted new immigrant groups like Northern Catholics  and earned them the support of Unions . Big City Machines like Tammany Hall also play a role in this aspect of the story as well. The immigrant vote is one of the key factors in changing the Democratic party over time in terms of progressivism, unions, religion, and geolocation , and it is well suited to be its own subject.

Despite these general truisms, the parties themselves have typically been factionalized over complex factors relating to left-right ideology, single issues, and the general meaning of liberty.

James A Haught Says Teddy Roosevelt Was The Last Republican Liberal And Was Shifting By The Time His Democratic Nephew

Strangely, over a century, America’s two major political parties gradually reversed identities, like the magnetic poles of Planet Earth switching direction.

When the Republican Party was formed in 1856, it was fiercely liberal, opposing the expansion of slavery, calling for more spending on public education, seeking more open immigration and the like. Compassionate Abraham Lincoln suited the new party’s progressive agenda.

In that era, Democrats were conservatives, partly dominated by the slave-holding South. Those old-style Democrats generally opposed any government action to create jobs or help underdogs.

Through the latter half of the 19th century, the pattern of Republicans as liberals, Democrats as conservatives, generally held true. In 1888, the GOP elected President Benjamin Harrison on a liberal platform seeking more social services.

Then in 1896, a reversal began when Democrats nominated populist firebrand William Jennings Bryan , “the Great Commoner.”

“He was the first liberal to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination,” political scholar Rich Rubino wrote. “This represented a radical departure from the conservative roots of the Democratic Party.”

The Progressive platform attacked big-money influence in politics, vowing “to destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics.”

Here’s how to submit letters and op-eds to the Chronicle

Understanding The Basics: How The Parties Changed General Us Party History And Why The Big Switch Isnt A Myth

Above we did an introduction, this next section takes a very general look at how the major parties changed and how factions changed parties.

To sum things up before we get started discussing specific switches, both major U.S. parties used to have notable progressive socially liberal left-wing and socially conservative right-wing factions, and now they don’t.

Originally, like today, one party was for “big government” and one party was for “small government” .

However, unlike today, party lines were originally drawn over elitism and populism  and preferred government type more than by the left-right social issues that define the parties today, as the namesake of the parties themselves imply .

In those days both parties had progressive and conservative wings, but the Southern Anti-Federalist, Democratic-Republican, and then Democratic Party was populist and favored “small government”, and the Northern Federalist, Whig, and then Republican Party was elite and favored bigger central government.

However, from the lines drawn during the Civil War, to Bryan in the Gilded Age, to Teddy Roosevelt leaving the Republican Party to form the Progressive Party in 1912, to FDR’s New Deal, to LBJ’s Civil Rights, to the Clinton and Bush era, the above became less and less true.

Instead, today the parties are polarized by left-right social issues, and each party has a notable populist and elitist wing.

With The Help Of Liberal Educators And The Liberal Media Democrats Have Been Rewriting History For Decades

Our public schools as well as our colleges and universities have either stopped teaching U.S. Civil Rights History entirely or they teach a revised version in which they chronologically report the good and the bad without attribution. For example, they may report the horrors of the KKK but will not mention that it was the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party or that the KKK often hung Blacks and Republicans together of which many were Black Republicans. Our history books may cover the history of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which freed the slaves, without revealing the party associations of those who voted for and against it. In other words, they fail to teach their students the truth.

And the media? In MSNBC’s coverage of the 50th anniversary of Democratic Governor and segregationist George Wallace’s attempt to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, the network identified Wallace as “R., Alabama.” Yes, they really are that dishonest.

The Democrat lies just keep on coming

Racism and the Democratic Party share an ugly past. Now, the accusation of racism and the Democratic Party share an ugly present.

A Summary Of Party Systems Realigning Elections And Switching Factions In The Major Us Political Parties

Now that we have the essential basics down, let’s do an overview of all the changes .

Historians refer to the eras the changes resulted in as “party systems“.

Each party system is defined by realigning elections or otherwise important elections like the elections of 1800, 1828, 1860, 1876, 1892, 1896, 1912, 1928, 1932, 1948, 1964, 1968, 1980, 1992, and 2000, key voter issues of the day like states’ rights, workers’ rights, social welfare, equal rights, central banking, and currency debates, and which factions were in which parties at the time like the New Deal Coalition and Conservative Coalition .

Or, in a very general sentence, Solid South States’ Rights and Tea party-esquePopulist Conservatives in the Democratic Party and elite Social Liberal Progressives in the Republican Party essentially switched parties from roughly 1900 to 2000, which resulted in red and blue states flipping from north to south .

That said, to complicate things, the Federalist line was historically anti-immigrant and nationalist and gave birth to the first Tea Party-like entities the Know-Nothings in the North and Anti-Masons in the North.

Despite this truism however, the Civil War forced factions to choose sides over slavery and expansion. Consequently, the Whig-allied nativist populist factions disbanded, the New Republican Party formed, and ultimately the first Republican President Lincoln was “no Know-Nothing“.

An Overview Of The Platform Switching By Party System And President From The Founders To Eisenhower

The First and Second Party Systems included some important changes and debates. Examples included the argument over the Federalist favored Constitution, and the Anti-Federalist favored Articles of Confederation and Bill of Rights and debates over slavery, modernization, and banking. Major changes began at the end of the Second Party System.

The Second Party system ended with the Whig Party dissolving in 1854. They were critically divided by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the related debate over manifest destiny and popular sovereignty . The heated battle over whether Kansas should be a slave state, and the debate over whether the south could keep expanding southward creating slave states, resulted in the country being split. This had happened in the Mexican-American war. One faction became the Northern Republicans and their allies the Union, who wanted to hold together the Union under a strong central government. The other became the Southern ex-Democrats and their allies the Confederacy, who wanted independence and wanted to expand southward, to for instance Cuba, creating new slave states. By the time Lincoln took office in 1861, the division was inescapable

FACT: The tension was so great the Democratic party ceased to exist from 1861 – 1865 as the Confederacy rejected the concept of party systems; which is why we refer to them ex-Democrats above.

Dinesh Dsouza Gives An Inaccurate Reading Of The Big Switch Myth: His Version Of History Is A Myth

Dinesh D’Souza decided to make a movie about how the Democrats didn’t change and how Northern ghettoes are proof of modern slavery .

This argument shows a lack of an understanding of American history .

Northern ghettoes are a problem because “lots and lots of reasons” . Their problems stem from things like: the nature of capitalism and classism, a push-back against busing and integration, the great migration, immigrant rather than a history of slavery, and even less heartwarming truths of obstructionist factions in both parties .

Northern Ghettoes like South Side Chicago aren’t a product of the Confederate ideology, they are a product of economic inequality. It isn’t “because Socially Liberal Progressives and Neoliberals are racist and have racist policies”, it is because “aristocracy + oligrachy + capitalism + the welfare state = economic inequality for economic minorities ”.

This is very different than Southern Slavery where the “less-thans” were known by skin color rather than pocketbook size.

This is to say:

The party with the outwardly hurtful policies is generally the party with the Social Conservatives in it .

The party with the policies that are economically hurtful… is typically the business wing of both parties, always. Not all factions of a given party, but generally the dominate establishment factions; as those are always the factions with the most money and thus the one’s least likely to create policies that don’t help their class first.

The Claim: The Democratic Party Started The Civil War To Preserve Slavery And Later The Kkk

As America marks a month of protests against systemic racism and many people draw comparisons between current events and the Civil Rights Movement, an oversimplified trope about the Democratic Party’s racist past has been resurrected online.

“Friendly reminder that if you support the Democrat Party, you support the party that founded the KKK and start a civil war to keep their slaves,” claims an image of a tweet Instagram user @snowflake.tears shared June 19.

Many Instagram users read between the lines for the tweet’s implication about the modern Democratic and Republican parties. Some argued this past action discredited current liberal policies, while others said it did not matter.

“Everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln fought to free the slaves, but he also created the Republican Party, and was the leader of it to help fight to free the slaves, yet it’s said that most black people still vote for Democrats who fought to keep the slaves,” user @shrukenshmuck commented.

“I’m a conservative but I find this argument pretty stupid because clearly that’s not what they support anymore, values change overtime,” user @james.dubee wrote.

Historians agree that although factions of the Democratic Party did majorly contribute to the Civil War’s start and the KKK’s founding, it is inaccurate to say the party is responsible for either.

Instagram user @snowflake.tears has not returned USA TODAY’s request for comment.

Neither Party Nets An Overall Advantage From The 9% Of Voters Who Have Switched Since 2018

Pew Research Center conducted this study to track how individuals’ partisan identities have shifted in recent years. For this analysis, we combined responses to eleven different waves of the American Trends Panel conducted between September 2018 and July 2020. Overall, 11,077 registered voters were included in this analysis. Because not all individuals responded to all 11 waves, we used a method called multiple imputation to fill in missing responses. Multiple imputation allows researchers to account for the uncertainty inherent in applying estimation techniques to missing data. See the methodology statement for more details.

Overwhelming majorities of both Republican and Democratic voters have retained their party affiliation over the past two years, a tumultuous period marked by a global pandemic, mass protests against racial injustice and a presidential impeachment.

Since 2018, comparably small shares of registered voters in both parties have changed parties. About one-in-ten voters who affiliated with the Republican Party or leaned Republican in September 2018 now identify as Democrats or lean Democratic. An identical share of voters who two years ago identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic now align with the GOP.

A new study, conducted on Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel, is based on interviews with the same set of 11,077 registered voters on five occasions over the past two years, from September 2018 to July 2020.

The Tension Between Rural Regions And City Regions Is As Old As The Federalists And Anti

With the above covered, there is a reason the Northern Coasts and Cities are in one party and the Rural South and Mid-West are in the other party in almost any era , with this being true even when the parties switch.

This is because a major divide is between the political, economic, and social interests of rural regions and citied regions .

Learn more about How the Tension Between City Interests and Rural Interests Affects Politics, not just on a national level, but on a state and regional level too .

The better you understand this tension, the better you’ll understand that age-old Federalists / Anti-Federalist, Republican / Democrat, or North / South split in any era .

We are all Democrats, we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists, and we all love liberty.

We are all Americans.

We simply disagree on specifics , and thus we form factions and voting blocs around those differences .

The changing factions responding to newly arising voter issues is the main thing that “changed” the parties.

Still, not everything changed . That is explained in excessive detail below.

Now that you know about the rural vs. city split, and the big changes like those of Lincoln’s time, those of Teddy’s time, and the shifting Solid South , take a look at the time-lapse video below which shows the U.S. Presidential election results map, both by state and by county, from 1789 to 2016.

Why Did Southern Conservatives Switch From Democrats To Republicans In Mid20thcentury

#1

to this day Republicans are the party of traditional American values, the dems the party of political correctness and new morality.

When exactly between 1932 and 1960 did most conservative white southerners switch from being Democrats to Republicans?

Why did the ideology of the Democratic and Republican Parties flip-flop in between 1932 and 1960?

Did the ideologies of the Democratic and Republican Parties flip-flop because of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support of the New Deal and other welfare programs for the poor?

#7

Republican Elites Try To Back Immigration Reform But Get Backlash From Their Voters

After the 2012 election, Republican leaders began to view the demographic changes in the country as a political crisis for their party. When Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency, he got blown out among Hispanic voters — exit polls showed that 71 percent of them backed Barack Obama.

With Hispanic voters becoming a larger share of the electorate every year, GOP elites feared their chances of winning back the presidency would plummet. Their party looked like a party for white voters in an increasingly nonwhite country.

So they came up with a plan. The party would change its tone on immigration, adopting more tolerant rhetoric, and it would also embrace immigration reform. In the Senate in 2013, old hands like John McCain and rising stars like Marco Rubio collaborated with Democrats on a bill that would give unauthorized immigrants a path to legal status.

The final Senate roll call vote was 68-32 — with all 32 no votes, plus 14 yes votes, coming from Republicans. But a huge backlash from the Republican Party’s predominantly white base, which views the bill as “amnesty” for people who broke the rules, ensued. As a result, the bill died in the House of Representatives, never even being brought for a vote.

The Complexities Of Changing Parties Changing Factions And Changing Party Platforms

Look at the images above, your eyes do not deceive you, the voter map of the Historical Presidential Elections tells a quick visual story of that which we will explain below, “that the political factions that formed around key voter issues in any era have switched parties over time as the major parties and their platforms changed, and this in turn changed the major parties and their platforms”.

The result of this is what we call “the Party Systems” .

The result is also, more specifically, that the major parties no longer reflect their original platforms or namesakes and that in many cases we are left with a full “switch” of underlying ideology

The main problem we have in arguing over Lincoln, Byrd, oddly never Teddy, and Strom Thurmond and whether or not “the parties switched” is that American history is complex and summarizing can take longer than reasonable human attention spans allow.

In other words, it isn’t that nothing changed, it is that it is harder to tell an accurate story than it is to perpetuate simple myths . Meaning, I can’t make my full argument quick enough to sway the casual skeptic, but I promise those of you who want to dig deeper: ours is the most accurate answer you’ll find outside of the history books.

A Quick Summary Of How The Major Parties Changed And Switched With Some Visuals

Above was an overview of the main points, below is a more detailed summary of points that will help one understand “the party switches of the different party systems.” After the summary are some images and videos which help tell the main points of the story:

Also consider the following general notes about the party platforms in any era:

Northern “City” Interests : Federalists, Whigs, Third Party Republicans, Fourth Party Progressive era Republicans , Fifth Party Democrats , Modern Democrats.

Southern “Rural” Interests : Anti-Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Third Party Democrats, Fourth Party Progressive Era Democrats , Fifth Party Republicans , Modern Republicans.

NOTE: Saying there is way too much ground to cover to say it all in a consumable bite is an understatement, so if you are looking for specifics use “command find” or our site search.

TIP: The Confederates wanted free-trade and states rights, meanwhile the northern Republicans wanted a debt-based economy with modernization and protectionist trade. Things have changed considerably, but not every plank changed. What happened was complex.

Below some images that might help tell the story without me even having to say another word:

A map showing realigning elections and Presidents who represent major changes in the U.S. parties. We can see something happened, that is empirically undeniable, but what?

How The Democrats Became Liberals And How The Republicans Became Conservatives

February 14, 2016

Once upon a time, the Democratic Party was America’s staunch defender of conservatism, and the Republican Party was the upstart champion of liberalism. And then, one day, they switched.

Seriously.

1860 Presidential Election Results

For the first half of the 19th century, the American political process revolved around the Democratic-Republican and Whig parties, with the Federalists, Know-Nothings and other groups playing smaller roles.  The dominant political issue throughout this entire period was of course slavery, and by 1853 most Americans were polarized into the pro- and anti-slavery camps.

In 1824, the Democratic Party was born out of the more conservative elements of the Democratic-Republican Party. Three decades later, the Republic Party was established, with its membership largely made up of former Whigs and the more liberal members of the Democratic-Republic party in the North.  The Democrats, especially in the South, became the primary haven of the pro-slavery elements of society, and by extension the state’s rights party when the federal government became increasingly likely to abolish slavery.  The Republicans became the haven of the abolitionists, and by extension the party of strong central government.

2012 Presidential Election Results

Presto-chango, the transformation was complete.

Filed Under: Random Ramblings

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How Republicans Made Common Cause With Southern Democrats On Economic Matters

Map: Vox. Data: Barry Hirsch, David Macpherson, Wayne Vroman, “Estimates of Union Density by State.”

Roosevelt’s reforms also brought tensions in the Democratic coalition to the surface, as the solidly Democratic South wasn’t too thrilled with the expansion of unions or federal power generally. As the years went on, Southern Democrats increasingly made common cause with the Republican Party to try to block any further significant expansions of government or worker power.

“In 1947, confirming a new alliance that would recast American politics for the next two generations, Taft men began to work with wealthy southern Democrats who hated the New Deal’s civil rights legislation and taxes,” Cox Richardson writes. This new alliance was cemented with the Taft-Hartley bill, which permitted states to pass right-to-work laws preventing mandatory union membership among employees — and many did.

Taft-Hartley “stopped labor dead in its tracks at a point where unions were large, growing, and confident in their economic and political power,” Rich Yeselson has written. You can see the eventual effects above — pro-Democratic unions were effectively blocked from gaining a foothold in the South and interior West, and the absence of their power made those regions more promising for Republicans’ electoral prospects.

We Should Perhaps Not Assume The Collapse Of The Institutional Gop Just Yet

For many non-Republicans, the events of the past month have felt unresolved. A mob of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol three weeks ago, leaving a police officer and four others dead and putting at risk the transfer of presidential power. Scores of rioters have been arrested in the attempted insurrection, but none of those responsible for inspiring and encouraging it — including Trump — have paid much of a price.

arrow-right

So rumors that the Republican Party broadly is paying a price for the violence have a specific sort of appeal, a sense of justice aligning itself as expected. It leads to things such as this, from former U.S. senator from Arizona Jeff Flake — recently censured by his party for failing to support Trump last year.

The implication is obvious: Thousands of Republicans are fleeing the party, so it better straighten out. It had better change its behavior soon or risk collapse!

Eh, not really.

Data from the Arizona secretary of state provided to The Washington Post confirmed that about 9,300 Republicans left the party between Jan. 6 and Jan. 24. In politics, people rarely switch from one party to the other, just as they rarely flip from supporting one politician to supporting their opponent. Instead, people go through a middle ground of uncertainty before reaching a new pole — and so it is with most of those Arizona Republicans. Fewer than 1,000 became Democrats; most joined third parties or became independents.

The Fifth Party System And The The New Deal And Conservative Coalitions

Now that we have clearly illustrated the above factions and ideologies, we can move on to the last round of changes which happened from roughly the 1930s, to WWII, to the 1960s, to the 1990s as the FDR supporting Progressive Social Liberal New Deal Coalition faced off against the Socially Conservative anti-New Deal Conservative Coalition .

From the 1930s to the 1990s, from Hoover to Goldwater, to Nixon, to Reagan, to Bush, the “Conservative Coalition” drew southern “solid south”“Dixiecrat” conservative Democrats out of the Democratic Party via their “southern strategy.” By the 1990s, this resulted in the modern American “social conservative” and “sometimes classical liberal” Republican party. Likewise, the New Deal coalition, which opposed the conservative coalition, drew progressives into the Democratic Party and out of the Republican party under FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society program, and Clinton’s New Democrats. This resulted in the modern American “social” liberal, and thus necessarily traditionally “classically conservative in terms of authority” party during the same time.

Although the tension between these two factions starts in the 1930s with the New Deal, it comes to a boiling point over issues like States’ Rights, the Second Red Scare, and Brown v. the Board of Education following WWII in the late 40s and 50s.

“We have undertaken a new order of things; yet we progress to it under the framework and in the spirit and intent of the American Constitution”. – FDR

Third Party System: Republicans Versus Democrats The Battle Begins 1854

The Democrats of this era were against “big government” telling states whether or not they can own slaves, and they don’t want big banks. See the Democratic Party Platform of 1856. The Democrats still saw themselves as the Liberal party of Jefferson and Jackson, the small business farm owning “libertarians.” Meanwhile, the Republicans were a new iteration of the parties of Hamilton and Clay, but with different factions supporting them then when they were Whigs.

The Republicans are for modernization. They are against slavery, for central banks, and for bigger industrialized business. They embrace ideas of taxes, credits, and debts in the interest of prosperity and social justice. They embrace many of the economic policies of the Whigs, such as national banks, railroads, high tariffs, homesteads, and aid to land grant colleges .

The Republicans also become known as a “pro-business” party at the time . The Republican coalition consisted of businesspeople, shop owners, skilled craftsmen, clerks, and professionals who were attracted to the party’s modernization policies.

Meanwhile, the race issue pulled the great majority of white southerners into the Democratic Party as “Redeemers.” The Republicans want a more northern style of commerce and banks, and Democrats want a smaller farmer-based economy, with less government and no central bank. See the Republican Party Platform of 1856 here

The “Switch” that Starts With Civil War

Fourth Party System: The Progressive Era Mckinley And Teddy 1896 1932

The election between Theodore Roosevelt William McKinley was pretty heated over social issues, but the parties stay the same. Republican Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt is arguably the last of the “left wing” Republicans. Roosevelt is a very progressive president, and he even started his own “progressive party” after breaking away from the Republicans. The parties are more or less still the same as they were since the split over reconstruction, but the lines are much less clear due to the changing tides of the time.

A Reconstituted Early 20th Century Kkk Attracts Members From Both Sides

After Reconstruction, and as the Jim Crow period set in during the 1870s, the Klan became obsolete. Through violence, intimidation and systematic oppression, the KKK had served its purpose to help whites retake Southern governments.

In 1915, Cornell William J. Simmons restarted the KKK. This second KKK was made up of Republicans and Democrats, although Democrats were more widely involved.

“The idea that these things overlap in a Venn diagram, the way they did with the first Klan, just isn’t as tight with the second Klan,” Grinspan said.

[mariacallous]

Last week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made waves by flying to the United States to meet with Donald Trump—but not with sitting president Joe Biden. It was, at a minimum, a severe breach of diplomatic protocol, and one that threatens to unravel Budapest’s strained relations with Washington even further. Even Biden himself commented on the meeting, saying that Orbán—an authoritarian who has effectively unwound Hungarian democracy—was “looking for dictatorship.”

But there was one other meeting that Orbán took while in the U.S. that hasn’t received enough attention—and points directly to how Orbán has cultivated American conservatives to his cause and created a beachhead for Hungarian influence in Washington. On Friday, he spoke at a closed-door meeting at the Heritage Foundation’s headquarters in the nation’s capital. Joined by Heritage president Kevin Roberts and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Orbán spoke, according to a readout, in front of an audience that “included renowned U.S. right-wing politicians, analysts and public personalities.”

The event was, on paper, a somewhat dull affair, with Orbán covering matters ranging from Hungary’s “conservative family and economic policies” to the state of the war in Ukraine. Pulling back, however, the talk was nothing short of shocking. Instead of meeting with the White House, Orbán traveled to Washington to sit with the leadership of a think tank, using them as a platform to access and influence conservative Americans about both foreign and domestic policy.

All of which leads to one question: How, and why, did the Heritage Foundation become the go-to vehicle for Budapest’s budding autocracy to target Americans?

The answer follows several different tracks. On the one hand, Hungary has been shedding lobbying outfits for the past few years, dropping a range of P.R. shops and Twitter influencers to focus solely on Heritage. On the other hand, internal transformations at Heritage—and a willingness to shred its reputation as a bastion of Reaganite, and even democratic, credentials—led the think tank’s leadership directly into Orbán’s lap, allowing it to become little more than a mouthpiece for a strongman and a leading proponent for Orbán-style rule in the U.S. 

During the Trump era, Orbán’s government ran one of the most prominent lobbying campaigns in the U.S., almost all of which focused on forging stronger links between Washington and Budapest. This was to some degree understandable: With Trump ensconced in the White House, Hungary became America’s preferred partner in Europe—not least for the authoritarian model Orbán set for Trump. (As Trump said of Orbán last week, “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic.… He’s a great leader.”) According to the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, database, Budapest inked deals with eight separate American law or communications firms during Trump’s presidency—an unprecedented burst of activity.

Not that all of these lobbying efforts were traditional, or even successful. In one contract, Budapest signed a firm called Strategic Improvisation, Inc. As part of the arrangement, the firm’s president, a Twitter reactionary named David Reaboi, began pumping pro-Orbán content on social media. While Reaboi made tens of thousands of dollars from working as a foreign agent, it’s unclear what, if any, impact his tweets actually had. (Reaboi did, however, produce arguably the most unintentionally hilarious filing FARA has ever seen, revealing that a tweet in which he said he supported Hungary and was “not in this for the money” was, in fact, paid for by Budapest.)

But with Biden’s election, Hungary’s lobbying efforts collapsed. Some of the contracts ended after only a few months, while others—including the deal with Reaboi’s firm—were canceled the day before Biden entered the White House. As of this week, Hungary is one of the few nations without a single active firm represented in the FARA database.

But that doesn’t mean Hungarian influence has waned. If anything, it’s simply shifted—using loopholes and workarounds to dodge disclosure requirements, while nonetheless wooing conservative Americans and staking its ties in Washington almost wholly on a Trump victory this November.

Enter the Heritage Foundation. While Heritage grew to prominence in the 1980s as a font of Reaganite policy, in recent years the organization has undergone a monumental shift in terms of both policy and priorities. Rather than persist in its stolid dedication to conservative values, Heritage has swung in a far more reactionary—and far more authoritarian—direction in recent years. Across the policy landscape, Heritage has become little more than an intellectual breeding ground for Trumpist ideas.

While much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the cost. 

Much of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.

Part of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things, has said he doesn’t think Joe Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor” to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage, in an atypical move, finalized a formal partnership last year with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s government.

The Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric. 

The Danube Institute claims it is dedicated to “advocat[ing] conservative and national values and thinking,” which almost always ends up with the institute praising Orbán’s pronouncements. It has become, according to Hungarian journalists at Atlatszo, “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad”—and one of the “main vehicles” to “building a political network in the United States.”

Such focus makes sense in terms of the Danube Institute’s personnel. For instance, the institute identifies arch-reactionary Rod Dreher as the “director of [its] Network Project.” The Southern Poverty Law Center obtained Dreher’s contract, which described him as an “agent” who would connect with a “circle of Christian-conservative contacts” on the institute’s behalf, while also writing publicly in praise of the Danube Institute’s “achievement[s].” Along the way, the Danube Institute began doling out significant grants to a range of other American conservatives, such as provocateur Christopher Rufo, who received tens of thousands of dollars, as well as a number of writers published in The American Conservative. 

Most important, however, is the man currently running the Danube Institute: John O’Sullivan, a British conservative who once served as the director of studies at—you guessed it—the Heritage Foundation. “With his extensive connections in the conservative universe, [O’Sullivan] became Orbán’s conduit to the American Right,” Heilbrunn noted.

Unsurprisingly, the key to O’Sullivan’s and the Danube Institute’s outreach to American conservatives has been the Heritage Foundation. A post in early 2023 from the Hungarian Conservative noted that the Danube Institute and the Heritage Foundation had “signed a landmark cooperation agreement, deepening Hungary’s transatlantic relations.” While the formal cooperation agreement hasn’t yet been published, the summary noted that “each year four researchers from the Heritage Foundation will visit Budapest and work with the Danube Institute as visiting researchers” and that Heritage “will also organize more joint events” with the Danube Institute in the future.

The two have already begun operating closely, co-hosting the Danube Geopolitical Summit last September. Featuring both Heritage and Danube Institute leadership, as well as a number of Hungarian officials, the conference centered on many of the aforementioned themes Orbán routinely highlights, railing against so-called “wokeness” in Western democracies. At the conference, James Carafano, Roberts’s key adviser at Heritage, “stressed the importance of building transatlantic connectivity,” saying he was “so proud to be associated with the Danube Institute.”

While the arrangements with Americans like Dreher appear to contravene America’s foreign lobbying laws, the relationship between Heritage and the Danube Institute unfortunately appears to fall outside of the purview of things like FARA. All of which means that we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation—and what this “landmark cooperation agreement” between Heritage and the Danube Institute actually entails.

But we’ve already seen what the arrangement looks like in practice. While the entire relationship between Heritage and the Danube Institute—and between Budapest and American conservatives writ large—can seem like an overwrought, overly complicated series of agreements and associations, zooming out, the links become clear.

In Hungary, a state-funded organization that serves as little more than a propaganda arm for Orbánist policies—and which has already directly funded a number of American conservative writers—has formally partnered with an American think tank that’s collapsed into little more than a bastion of Trumpism. Both have thus provided platforms for one another, reinforcing each other’s efforts and reaching mutual audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. All the while, they’ve done so in a manner that hasn’t required any transparency about finances or expectations and that skirts America’s current foreign lobbying laws—keeping both Americans and Hungarians in the dark about the relationship.

It is, in many ways, unprecedented. While American think tanks have seen a range of dodgy funding streams in recent years, we’ve never seen anything like the partnership unfolding between Heritage and the Danube Institute. All of which makes Orbán’s equally unprecedented trip—when he visited the former president, as well as a pro-Trump think tank, but not the current White House itself—last week that much less surprising. As Orbán himself said an interview with Hungarian media after his talk in Washington, when it comes to the Heritage Foundation, “Hungary has an honored place.”  

[skyanfeeds]

Suspects in Haitian President’s Killing Met to Plan a Future Without Him  The New York Times

Haitian American suspect in assassination worked on and off as DEA informant  CBS This Morning

Head of security at Haiti's presidential residence in police custody  CNN

If U.S. continues to back Haiti’s compromised politicians, nothing will improve after Moïse | Opinion  Miami Herald

Opinion | Haiti shows why toxic leaders often end up ruling in dangerous places  The Washington Post

View Full Coverage on Google News

#GlobalNews #GoogleTop

[differentnutpeace]

Brazil Tops 4,000 Daily COVID-19 Deaths, Nears U.S. Peak

A new surge of COVID-19 in Brazil is filling hospitals and morgues, as the country's record daily dea th toll from the disease is nearing even the grim U.S. peak in January. หวย บอล เกมส์ กีฬา คาสิโนออนไลน์

With less than two-thirds the population of the U.S., Brazil logged nearly 4,200 deaths on Tuesday. That is close to the peak U.S. daily death toll of 4,476 recorded on Jan. 12, according to data maintained by Johns Hopkins University.

Brazil is fighting a more easily-spread variant of the virus that has reportedly swept the nation in recent months.

Brazil's federal government has left it to the states to control the virus, but the country's right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been openly hostile to restrictions, which he says have damaged the economy. His supporters have also taken to the streets to protest quarantine measures.

Supporters of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro protest the start of a 10-day period of increased restrictions, which includes Holy Week, to help curb the spread of COVID-19, on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last month.

Silvia Izquierdo/AP

One local mayor told NPR last month that she has received death threats for instituting a partial lockdown in her city.

Article continues after sponsor message

GOATS AND SODA

Brazil Is Looking Like The Worst Place On Earth For COVID-19

Intensive care units across the country have been operating at near capacity for weeks, and officials are warning that the pandemic is quickly overwhelming health care infrastructure. A bulletin issued by the Brazilian medical research institution Fiocruz on Tuesday said that the lethality of coronavirus has more than doubled to 4.2% from around 2% at the end of 2020. Fiocruz attributes the increased death rate to the inability to quickly and correctly diagnose serious cases of COVID-19 and to overloaded hospitals. It warns of the "collapse of the health care system."

Bolsonaro, much like former U.S. President Donald Trump, has long downplayed the pandemic and promoted discredited treatments, namely the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which scientists have said is useless in preventing or treating coronavirus. Also like Trump, the Brazilian president was himself once infected with the virus.

Bolsonaro, a retired army captain, marked his 66th birthday last month by appearing outside the presidential palace to greet supporters. Before a cheering crowd, he yanked off his face mask and laid into governors and mayors for imposing quarantine measures.

"Some little tyrants, or tyrants, hinder the freedom of many of you," Bolsonaro told the crowd.

On Tuesday, Bolsonaro again criticized lockdowns, suggesting without evidence that they caused obesity and depression, the BBC reported.

Meanwhile, Brazil's government has been slow to acquire lifesaving vaccines as Bolsonaro has been accused of politicizing the vaccine process.

Brazil lags behind many other countries in the percentage of its citizens inoculated against coronavirus, with less than 3% fully vaccinated, according to Bloomberg.

Although several South American countries have similarly low rates of inoculation thus far, Chile stands in marked contrast, with 21.5% of its population fully vaccinated.

[homelanddefense5486-blog]

What heroin is made out of..if you're caught in a presidential area or under a federal Emergency like we are September 9-11 2001 act you can be Charged Double Under Federal Emergency law.. Under presidential DEA

Cheney

#pennsylvania commonwealth #us department of government homeland defense #missing persons pennsylvania #u.s president #national security united states of america #wanted america's most wanted #u.s presidential police #presidential u.s. congress #sergio america's most wanted #u.s. department of state #mass destruction of the world trade center #u.s. supreme court #u.s. senate #u.s. politics #federal presidential police #u.s presidential dea

[newstfionline]

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Mass Transit Faces Huge Service Cuts Across U.S. (NYT) In Boston, transit officials warned of ending weekend service on the commuter rail and shutting down the city’s ferries. In Washington, weekend and late-night metro service would be eliminated and 19 of the system’s 91 stations would close. In Atlanta, 70 of the city’s 110 bus routes have already been suspended, a move that could become permanent. And in New York City, home to the largest mass transportation system in North America, transit officials have unveiled a plan that could slash subway service by 40 percent and cut commuter rail service in half. Across the United States, public transportation systems are confronting an extraordinary financial crisis set off by the pandemic, which has starved transit agencies of huge amounts of revenue and threatens to cripple service for years. The financial collapse of transportation agencies would especially hurt minority and low-income riders who tend to be among the biggest users of subways and buses.

Some Colleges Plan to Bring Back More Students in the Spring (NYT) It was a tough fall semester for many American colleges and universities, with declining enrollment, canceled classes and sporting events, widespread Zoom fatigue and enough coronavirus-infected students nationwide to fill three and a half Rose Bowls. But many university officials say that lessons from the fall will allow them to do something many experts considered unthinkable a few months ago: bring even more students back onto campus in January and February, when classes resume for the spring. The University of California, San Diego, for instance, is making room for more than 11,000 students in campus housing—about 1,000 more than it housed in the fall. The University of Florida is planning to offer more face-to-face classes than it did before the pandemic. And Princeton University, which let only a few hundred students live on campus last semester, has offered space to thousands of undergraduates. The determination to bring back more students, even as the pandemic is surging in many states, partly reflects the financial imperative to have more students paying room and board, as well as the desire to provide something resembling a college experience. But there is also an emerging confidence among at least some college administrators that they have learned much about managing the pandemic on their campuses.

Schools confront ‘off the rails’ numbers of failing grades (AP) The first report cards of the school year are arriving with many more Fs than usual in a dismal sign of the struggles students are experiencing with distance learning. School districts from coast to coast have reported the number of students failing classes has risen by as many as two or three times—with English language learners and disabled and disadvantaged students suffering the most. “It was completely off the rails from what is normal for us, and that was obviously very alarming,” said Erik Jespersen, principal of Oregon’s McNary High School, where 38% of grades in late October were failing, compared with 8% in normal times. Educators see a number of factors at play: Students learning from home skip assignments—or school altogether. Internet access is limited or inconsistent, making it difficult to complete and upload assignments. And teachers who don’t see their students in person have fewer ways to pick up on who is falling behind, especially with many keeping their cameras off during Zoom sessions.

Congressional crunch time (Foreign Policy) The U.S. Congress heads into what Politico has described as “hell week” as lawmakers attempt to pass a coronavirus relief act, defense bill, and reach a government funding agreement before a Dec. 11 deadline. A $908 billion coronavirus relief bill, negotiated over the weekend by a bipartisan group, will include a $300 weekly federal unemployment benefit, but stops short of reissuing $1,200 checks, last seen in May. Congress is expected to pass a defense spending bill on Tuesday. However, since it does not repeal Section 230 of the Communications Act as President Trump has demanded, it may face a presidential veto.

Mexican president wants to restrict US agents in Mexico (AP) Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has tossed another hot potato to U.S. President-elect Joe Biden with a proposal that would restrict U.S. agents in Mexico and remove their diplomatic immunity. The proposal submitted quietly this week by López Obrador would require Drug Enforcement Administration agents to hand over all information they collect to the Mexican government, and require any Mexican officials they contact to submit a full report to Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department. “The proposal is that foreign agents will not have any immunity,” according to a summary of the president’s proposal to the Mexican Senate published Friday. In most countries, the chief DEA agent in the country often has full diplomatic immunity and other agents have some form of limited or technical immunity. “The proposal requires that foreign agents give Mexican authorities the information they gather,” according the proposed changes. Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations, said of the handover of all information, “That is not going to happen.”

Should a coronavirus vaccine be mandatory? In Brazil’s most populous state, it will be. (Washington Post) The words couldn’t have been any clearer. In the most populous state in Brazil, anchored by the largest city in the Americas, getting vaccinated against the coronavirus won’t be a question of personal volition. It will be mandatory. “I’ve guaranteed that the 45 million Brazilians here in São Paulo will be vaccinated, and the vaccine will be obligatory,” Gov. João Doria told reporters in a slow, deliberate cadence. “We will take legal measures if there are any setbacks in this regard.” As countries race to approve the first round of coronavirus vaccines—including Britain on Wednesday authorizing the Pfizer vaccine—governments, businesses and civil institutions are grappling with an increasingly urgent question: Should it be required? The prospect of forcing people to take it has proved to be a delicate matter, pitting individual rights against collective need, personal inclination against social responsibility. Some public health officials argue that mandatory vaccination is the only way to vanquish the coronavirus and—compared with lockdowns and travel restrictions—far less burdensome. Other experts—and the majority of government leaders—say the opposite: The vaccine can’t be mandatory. People need to make their own decisions.

EU weighs up sanctions against Turkey in east Med gas dispute (Reuters) European Union foreign ministers evaluated grounds on Monday for sanctions against Turkey over a Mediterranean gas dispute before the bloc’s leaders decide at a summit on Dec. 10-11 whether to make good on their threat to impose punitive measures. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said his country would not “bow down to threats and blackmail” but repeated his call for negotiations over the conflicting claims to continental shelves and rights to potential energy resources. Tensions flared in August when Turkey—a NATO ally and candidate for EU membership—sent a survey vessel to map out energy drilling prospects in waters also claimed by Greece. EU leaders told Turkey in October to stop exploring in the disputed eastern Mediterranean waters or face consequences. France and the European Parliament, which formally called for sanctions on Nov. 26, say it is time to punish Turkey, which is seen in Brussels as fuelling the dispute for domestic political reasons.

Pope: ‘No pandemic can turn off the light of Christmas’ (Vatican News) There is no pandemic or crisis that can turn off the light of Christmas, Pope Francis affirmed, as he greeted the faithful present in St. Peter’s Square and following through the media during the Sunday Angelus. Noting that the Vatican’s Christmas tree has been erected in the Square and that the Nativity Scene will soon be unveiled, the Pope said that in many homes “these symbols of Christmas are being set up to the delight of children,” and also to the delight of those who no longer are children. “They are symbols, or signs of hope, especially during this difficult time,” he said, and he invited Christians not to stop at the symbols, but to go beyond and understand their meaning: “Jesus, the love of God, who was revealed to us to reach that goodness which has been poured out on the world.” And assuring us all that no pandemic or crisis can “turn off that light,” Pope Francis said: “Let us allow it to enter into our hearts and reach out toward those who are most in need.” Thus, he concluded: “God will once again be born in us and in our midst.”

India’s farming strike (Foreign Policy) Farmers in India called for a nationwide strike starting Tuesday, vowing to intensify protests against controversial new agriculture laws. The government argues that the new laws passed in September would allow farmers to sell produce directly to corporations, but farmers—the majority of whom are smallholders—fear that it will remove safeguards from exploitation. Protesting farmers blocked roads and railways in India’s north before converging on New Delhi last month. With some 60 percent of the Indian population dependent on agriculture, the backlash poses a real test for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Talks aimed at resolving the standoff failed on Saturday, as protest leaders have rejected the government’s offer to amend the laws, calling instead for a complete repeal of the legislation.

Rules of engagement (Foreign Policy) A new report by Brown University’s Costs of War Project finds that a 2017 U.S. Department of Defense relaxation of rules of engagement in Afghanistan coincided with a 95 percent increase in the number of civilian deaths caused by U.S. and allied airstrikes compared to the previous ten years. The report also found that 700 Afghan civilians were killed by airstrikes in 2019, the most killed in any year since the war began in 2001.

New roads pave way for massive growth of Israeli settlements (AP) In the coming years, Israelis will be able to commute into Jerusalem and Tel Aviv from settlements deep inside the West Bank via highways, tunnels and overpasses that cut a wide berth around Palestinian towns. Rights groups say the new roads will set the stage for explosive settlement growth, even if the incoming U.S. administration somehow convinces Israel to curb housing construction. The costly infrastructure projects signal that Israel intends to keep large swaths of the occupied territory in any peace deal and would make it even harder to establish a viable Palestinian state. “This is not another hundred housing units there or here,” said Yehuda Shaul, an Israeli activist who has spent months researching and mapping out the new projects. “This is de facto annexation on steroids.”

Facing War, Virus and Locusts, Ethiopia’s Once-Golden Economy Loses Its Luster (WSJ) For the past decade Ethiopia has boasted of one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, welcoming billions of dollars in foreign direct investment from the U.S. and China and lifting more than 20 million people out of poverty. Now, a monthlong civil war, coronavirus lockdowns and historic locust infestations have left the once-golden economy stumbling, as it grapples with one of Africa’s most perilous debt loads, soaring inflation and the risk of a protracted insurgency. Fighting between government forces and the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front has paralyzed much of northern Ethiopia, shaking a nation of 110 million people long seen as a symbol of stability in a volatile region.

Earth just notched its warmest November, as 2020 closes in on record for hottest year (Washington Post) The planet just had its hottest November on record, and 2020 may end up beating 2016 for the ignominious title of the warmest calendar year. The numbers come from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a program of the European Commission, which is the first of several temperature tracking agencies to report temperature data for November and the first 11 months of the year. According to Copernicus scientists, global average temperatures during November were 1.4 degrees (0.77 Celsius) above 1981-2010 levels, beating the previous warmest November by a large margin. Australia had its hottest November, which featured multiple severe heat waves, and persistently above-average temperatures continued in Siberia and the Arctic. Meanwhile, Norway, Sweden and England set national records for their hottest November. Cooler-than-average temperatures were seen in parts of Africa, Kazakhstan, Canada, West Antarctica and parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean, where a La Niña event is underway. The presence of La Niña tends to put a damper on global average surface temperatures, and the fact 2020 is headed toward a record or near-record finish anyway can be viewed as an indication of global warming’s increasingly overt influence.

#headlines #news