We are fortunate indeed to have real world results that we can look at for how well or how poorly governing philosophies and agendas work. America’s major cities have been dominated by the Democratic Party for decades, and the results are in.
All but 3 of America’s largest cities are run by Democratic mayors. The 3 largest cities – New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, are losing population every year.
Several of the most violent cities in America, including Albuquerque, Memphis, Detroit, Chicago and Washington, DC are run by Democrats.
States that are bleeding population every year due to high taxation, over-regulation, decaying cities and failing public services including New York, Connecticut, California and others are all run by Democrats.
States that have low to no income taxes, are right-to-work and favor energy development do better economically than high tax, forced union and energy unfriendly states. According to the annual economic outlook rankings published by the American Legislative Exchange Council Center for State Fiscal Reform, in 2019 the bottom ten states were all run by Democrats and the top 10 states except two were run by Republicans.
Needless to say, the top 10 states all have higher GDP, better quality public services, and are experiencing net in-migration. Nevada is an outlier in that it recently flipped blue. However, they have no personal income taxes, a low corporate income tax and they are a right to work state.
Finally, all of the bottom ten states have net out-migration, high tax burdens, and lower quality of life.
The evidence couldn’t be more clear. Democrats are incapable of governing well, or in some cases, such as Seattle or Chicago, governing at all. Every single city that has problems with decaying infrastructure, gentrification, crime, violence, homelessness and other social pathologies are governed by Democrats. They promise a boundless cornucopia of “free” (i.e. taxpayer-funded) services and programs to meet every demand of the creeping socialism we’re seeing in America, at the cost of trampling people’s constitutional rights including property rights.
Critics assailing the Department of Homeland Security for “over-stepping their bounds” in Portland have it 100 percent wrong. The department is in the right.
Further, its actions thus far should just be the first step in disrupting the organized violence aimed at intimidating public officials, injuring law enforcement officers, destroying public and private property and making our streets less safe.
Let’s be clear. We are not talking about “peaceful protests.” What is going on in Portland, as well as Seattle and some other is an array of criminal activity: rioting, looting, arson, assaulting law enforcement officers and more. This is flat out criminal activity.
And it is not all spontaneous. This is organized criminal activity.
For starters, the rioters are targeting cities where public officials have created a more permissive environment. They have restricted the actions of local and state law enforcement. When rioters are arrested, they release them quickly, refusing to prosecute.
Moreover, these officials refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement. In sum, they have turned their cities into “soft targets” for criminals.
Violence has spiked in cities nationwide following weeks-long anti-police protests over the death of George Floyd, according to government statistics and media reports.
Residents in Minneapolis have created patrol groups to protect themselves after the city’s crime spike, and shootings in Atlanta rose 265% compared to last year during an almost month-long period. Seattle’s “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) led to a 525% increase in crime, including the death of two teenagers.
As crime rates rose, activists have called to abolish the police, an idea that’s gained traction among liberals. Former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, singer John Legend and women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe have all supported dismantling the police, and protesters have touted the idea during demonstrations.
The Minneapolis City Council unanimously voted to dismantle their police department next May, and a school board in Oakland, California, voted to ban the police from its schools.
Saturday’s protest activity was billed as the biggest yet, at least in part due to the shooting of Garrett Foster. Foster was the man who apparently pointed his AK-47 rifle at the car window of driver Daniel Perry while protesters surrounded and pounded on his car during an unpermitted protest and illegal taking of the public street just before 10 p.m. on July 25. Perry, an Army sergeant and licensed handgun carrier, fired his weapon after Foster had used his rifle to order Perry to roll his car window down. Pointing a gun at someone can, obviously, be read as hostile action. Texas’s castle law covers drivers in vehicles defending themselves, including the use of deadly force.
APD and the Texas Department of Public Safety were ready for Saturday’s action, making this post short.
Law enforcement officers were deployed and ready downtown. According to a source familiar with Saturday’s events, no officers were injured. Little force was used in shutting down the protest — which illegally blocked streets and was intended to bring violence to Austin. No property was damaged despite the protesters’ plan. They did take roads illegally, briefly including Interstate 35, the main highway that runs through downtown Austin. Protesters harassed innocent diners and others downtown.
These assholes, and the decision to let Austin become bumsville, is why so many downtown restaurants are in danger of closing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The Democratic National Committee released a platform 180 degrees off from the spin. It’s so pro-Iran that the National Iranian-American Council, the de facto Iranian regime lobby in Washington, immediately “applauded” the DNC “for its forward-leaning platform commitments on issues of importance to the Iranian-American community.” It demonstrates that President Obama’s curious preference for the supremacists running the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than our traditional regional allies, has become mainstream Democratic ideology.
Trump administration policies have brought the bloody Islamic Republic to its knees. The Democrats seek to restore its vitality by ending sanctions and re-entering President Obama’s odious Iran deal. Every faction across Israel’s notoriously fractious political spectrum agreed that this deal was an existential threat. Biden and the 2020 Democrats take the opposing view: Regime change is wrong; diplomacy and economic engagement can restrain the mullahs.
Next up, the Gulf Arabs: A new generation of leaders have recently expanded women’s rights, confronted Islamism, acted to curb terrorism, deepened ties to the U.S. and moved towards ending the Arab/Israeli conflict. Biden and the 2020 Democrats prefer to “reset” those warm relations in order to keep America’s traditional Gulf allies at arms length.
“Five GOP lawmakers filed a lawsuit against Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott (R) over a contact-tracing contract signed with MTX Group in May. The Frisco-based private company agreed to a $295.3 million dollar deal after defeating several well-known corporations. But lawmakers argue that the bidding process bypassed constitutional requirements and voice concerns about the ability of MTX to mitigate privacy concerns.” The Republicans suing are State Reps Mike Lang, Kyle Biederman, William Zedler and Steve Toth, and state Senator Bob Hall. And the MTX contract does stink.
The mainstream media as a whole – especially the political news media in and around the DC/NYC/Beltway area – has two options: They can straighten up their acts and stop insulting the intelligence of their audiences or they can continue to show their (mostly left-wing) partisan stripes and turn audiences off.
If recent history is any indication, however, they’ll be going with option two – because they’ve shown over and over again that when it comes to demonstrating a commitment to objective reporting versus pushing biased political angles that help Democrats, they will choose those biased political angles nearly every time.
Nima “Rolex” Fazeli, a 22-year-old from Orlando, Fla., was charged in a criminal complaint in Northern California with aiding and abetting intentional access to a protected computer.
Mason “Chaewon” Sheppard, a 19-year-old from Bognor Regis, U.K., also was charged in California with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and unauthorized access to a computer.
A U.S. Justice Department statement on the matter does not name the third defendant charged in the case, saying juvenile proceedings in federal court are sealed to protect the identity of the youth. But an NBC News affiliate in Tampa reported today that authorities had arrested 17-year-old Graham Clark as the alleged mastermind of the hack.
Wfla.com said Clark was hit with 30 felony charges, including organized fraud, communications fraud, one count of fraudulent use of personal information with over $100,000 or 30 or more victims, 10 counts of fraudulent use of personal information and one count of access to a computer or electronic device without authority. Clark’s arrest report is available here (PDF). A statement from prosecutors in Florida says Clark will be charged as an adult.
Social Justice Warrior Akilah Hughes sues Sargon of Akkad over his fair use of one of her videos, despite the judge telling her that was a bad idea, promptly gets her ass handed to her, and is ordered to pay $38,000 in attorney’s fees. Showing the same level of self-awareness that got her where she is, she attacks the judge and labels Sargon a “white supremacist.”
Sometimes you do calculations and get a result that you know must be wrong, and you report them anyway so others can spot your errors. Reports had the explosion shattering windows 10 kilometers away, and doing damage to the Beirut airport, so I set out to calculate the explosive yield using the Nukemap, based on shattering windows at the airport (the 1 psi overpressure ring) and ignoring radiation effects. (The nukemap interface is far more user friendly than the “Nuclear bomb Effects Computer” at the back of Samuel Glasstone’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.)
Here’s the map with the resulting 1 psi ring just reaching the airport:
That’s a blast effect map for a 300 kiloton blast.
That has to be wrong, since the devastation is nowhere near that immense, and I can’t fathom even having enough space to store that much ANFO or PETN in one location. (And it was obviously a non-nuclear blast, due to lack of radiation and the color of the blast itself.)
So let’s look at some comparable explosions:
The 2015 Tianjin blast, consisting of about 800 tons of ammonium nitrate:
It’s reported that the port is under unofficial Hazbollah control, and wide-spread rumor is that it was a Hezbollah munitions or rocket factory that went up, but I haven’t seen any confirmation of this.
In the fire before the big explosion, fireworks or munitions are clearly seen going off.
The speed of the blast makes me think it was not TNT or a BLEVE. That explosion went up fast, and all at once. Here’s a Tweeter that suggests it was ammonia nitrate:
CHEMISTRY FACT: Explosives have characteristic "detonation velocities" at which shockwaves expand. Smartphone video records at 30 FPS, so the adjacent frames here suggest the front expands at ~100 m/(1/30 sec), or 3,000 m/sec. Consistent with ammonium nitrate, not black powder. pic.twitter.com/DDoVJxY3gP
And indeed that’s what the government has come out to say it is:
BREAKING: Lebanese Prime Minister says #Beirut explosions caused by an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate left unsecured for 6 years in a warehouse. He vows to punish officials responsible. 50+ dead, 3,000 injured, hospitals overwhelmed.
But how do you abandon 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate? I know Lebanon is not exactly run on western efficiency, but that much exploding stuff just lying around for six years does rather strain credibility.
But to return to the title question: ammonium nitrate is roughly 42% as effective as TNT. Which means the explosion would have been about 1.155 kilotons, or less than 1/15th the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Assuming that’s correct, here’s the revised nukemap blast:
Somehow that blast radius seems too small, as the damage and overpressure wave seemed to travel much farther than shown here. But you wouldn’t want to stand next to it.
I wrote Lebanon expert Michael Totten to ask about the blast, and he said he heard that the Lebanese Army has been storing confiscated high explosives there since 2014. If we assume that it’s ANFO rather than straight ammonium nitrate, that’s about 72% as effective as TNT, and with just under twice the detonation velocity of ammonium nitrate. That yields a blast of 1.98 kilotons. The nukemap for that:
That seems to accord a bit better with blast observations.
“Rebecca Long Bailey and Lisa Nandy have backed a 12-point plan put forward by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights group that calls for sex-based rights campaigners to be expelled from Labour. Angela Rayner and Dawn Butler, who are in the running for deputy leader, also backed the group’s pledges. The trans rights group is calling for long debated changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow people to formally self identify as the opposite sex without paying for a certificate or demonstrating that they have accessed transitioning services. It also vows to ‘organise and fight against transphobic organisations such as Woman’s Place UK, LGB Alliance, and other trans exclusionist hate groups.’”
People were then asked whether they agreed with the pledge. Then they also answered the question about how likely they were to vote Labour.
The results show that being exposed to even this small snippet of news about the pledge seems to reduce support for Labour. As figure one reveals, the share of survey respondents who said they would likely vote Labour was 42.6 percent among those who read nothing and just 32.7 percent among those who read the paragraph about the Labour trans pledge.
One reason for the drop was the limited popularity of the trans pledge among many survey respondents. For instance, less than a third of this mainly left-leaning sample who read about the pledge agreed with it. Among Labour voters, agreement rose to 40 percent, with 18 percent opposed and the rest undecided. However, Green, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party (SNP) voters split fairly evenly between opposing and supporting the pledge, with many undecided.
It seems that most opposed the pledge or were undecided. Among the 40 people who agreed with the pledge, 70 percent said they planned to vote Labour. Among the 99 who either disagreed or were unsure about the pledge, just 20 percent planned to do so.
A Hawaii councilman pleaded not guilty Friday to multiple charges accusing him of leading a methamphetamine-trafficking ring, supplying weapons and conspiring with a gang leader while serving as an elected official, investigators said.
Arthur Brun, 48, operated the major drug-trafficking conspiracy involving 11 other defendants since at least June 2019, while serving as an elected member of the Kauai County Council and vice chairman of its Public Safety and Human Services Committee, the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged in a news release.
First there is the yeomanry or the traditional middle class, which consists of small business owners, minor landowners, craftspeople, and artisans, or what we would define historically as the bourgeoisie, or the old French Third Estate, deeply embedded in the private economy. The other middle class, now in ascendency, is the clerisy, a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.
Snip.
The yeomanry’s distress can be seen in everything from falling rates of business formation as well as declining homeownership, particularly among the young, most notably in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Even in the United States, a country that never experienced feudalism, the proportion of land owned by the nation’s 100 largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017.
Land ownership in Europe is also increasingly concentrated in smaller hands; in Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the continent, farmland is increasingly concentrated while urban real estate has fallen into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy.
Growing corporate concentration, in both the US and Europe, has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy. In Silicon Valley, the renowned garage culture is being supplanted by a gargantua of giant firms that have achieved market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 – 90 percent of their key niches like search, social media, cellular, and computer operating systems. One online publisher uses a Star Trek analogy to describe his firm’s status with Google: “It’s a bit like being assimilated by the Borg. You get cool new powers. But having been assimilated, if your implants were ever removed, you’d certainly die. That basically captures our relationship to Google.”
The decline of the yeomanry threatens the future of democracy as we have known it. Faced with growing assaults on their businesses, and in some cases, their communities, they have begun to fight back against many of the policies, notably climate policy, that are widely supported by the oligarchs and the clerisy. A policy to force the rapid replacement of fossil fuels with heavily subsidized renewables requires the development of the kind of largely unaccountable bureaucracies that both employ and empower the clerisy while providing the oligarchs both in the US and Europe with a unique opportunity to cash in on energy “transitions.”
In contrast, for large parts of the yeomanry, a call for a rapid, radical shift towards renewables imposes much higher energy prices. It also threatens to diminish industries in which many of them work and undercut the sustenance to the Main Street merchants in smaller cities and the countryside. Already attempts to impose such policies have led to yeoman rebellions in a number of countries.
Math is hard:
Now you can understand why NYT editors and MSNBC hosts were such fans of Warren’s plans and believe the math works on M4A. https://t.co/yU7HVIpT2D
This, right here, is why so many left-leaning Americans think that “the billionaires” can pay for everything. It’s why Elizabeth Warren was enthusiastically boosted by the media despite her ridiculous pretense that she could pay for a series of gargantuan initiatives without raising taxes on anyone but the extremely rich. It’s why Democrat after Democrat promises not to raise “middle class taxes” while promising programs that require the raising of middle class taxes. How did this bad tweet make it onto TV to be endorsed? Why did Mara Gay agree with it? Why didn’t Brian Williams notice? Because the people involved in this clip thought it was true. This is how they see the world.
But it’s not true. Not even close. Forget the million for a moment and make it Andrew Yang’s thousand instead. Would that be possible? Nope! If Michael Bloomberg were to try to achieve what Andrew Yang promised ($1,000 per American per month, forever), he would be able to give every American about $183 in the first month before he’d have $0 left. To make it through a single month, he would have to be five times richer than he is. And, after that single month, even at five times his current wealth, his fortune would be completely and permanently depleted. Elizabeth Warren’s unconstitutional wealth tax topped out at six percent. Filter Bloomberg’s money through that tax and you get $11 per American per year.
There is still no such thing as a free lunch. If Americans want expanded services — or a monthly stipend — they are going to have to pay for them themselves. There is no billionaire out there who can do it for them.
Are we so “desperate” for more bodies to “fuel economic growth?” Let’s recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of 330 million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million immigrants are currently living, working and going to school here illegally. One million new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An estimated 600,000 temporary worker visas are issued annually, including the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and H-4 programs. That doesn’t include spousal visas or the more than half a million foreign “students” now working through the stealth guest worker plan known as the Optional Practical Training program, which allows foreign students to work with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to demonstrate labor market shortages.
“We” ordinary Americans don’t need more immigrants. Corporations (and their trusty house organ, the Wall Street Journal) want higher profits, lower wages, and endless pipelines of cheap foreign labor. They’ve been cooking up manufactured worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation’s Erich Bloch hyped a STEM shortage based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.
I don’t agree 100%; I think it behooves us to get the very best in some fields, people with PhDs in science and technology, and masters of various arts. But that’s a far cry from “Hey, my cousin Sanjay knows Sharepoint. Let’s write an H1B rec so we can get him over here.”
A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a “sizable” stake in Twitter and “plans to push” to oust CEO Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports, raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of the social media platform that conservatives have long accused of overt left-wing political bias.
Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. has already nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, Bloomberg News reported, citing several sources familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn’t have voting control over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock; and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter’s struggling user growth numbers and stock performance.
Singer, who opposed President Trump’s campaign in 2016, has since changed his tune, raising the prospect that some of the changes to Twitter could make the platform a friendlier place for pro-Trump users. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Singer donated $24 million to Republican and right-leaning groups in the 2016 election.
Defense contractor accused of passing classified human intelligence information to a Hezbollah-connected lover. “Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, formerly of Rochester, Minn., was arrested by FBI agents on Feb. 27.” Other reports have noted she herself was born in Lebanon. Who gave a foreign born contractor Top Secret clearance?
The Justice Department charged four Chinese intelligence officers on Monday with a 2017 hack of credit-reporting giant Equifax, which compromised the personal data of nearly 150 million Americans.
“This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,” Attorney General William Barr said in a press conference on the announcement.
Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei, members of the People’s Liberation Army’s 54th Research Institute, are charged with three counts of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit economic espionage, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, as well as two counts of unauthorized access and intentional damage to a protected computer, one count of economic espionage, and three counts of wire fraud.
The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in Atlanta last week, alleges that the soldiers used a vulnerability in Equifax’s online dispute portal to access its secure servers over several weeks. The group ran approximately 9,000 queries while routing traffic through 34 servers to secretly obtain names, birth dates, and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens, before compressing and exporting the data.
“There were 11 bodies pulled from the wreckage,” said one official privy to the panicked conversations that swirled through the corridors of power that morning. “We are talking about the entire inner sanctum of the Quds Force. This wasn’t just Hajj Qassem [Suleimani] and Abu Mahdi [al-Muhandis]. This was everyone who mattered to them in Iraq and beyond.”
Another source, a western intelligence agency, was more circumspect, suggesting that those killed may have been less decisive in the Iranian nexus than the Iraqis believed. “However, the [assassinations] may have significant repercussions for the relationship between the [Quds Force] and Iran-aligned groups in Iraq in the near term,” an official said.
In the 40-day mourning period to mark the Iranian general’s death, which ended last Thursday, the fallout in Iraq has barely subsided. If anything, its impact has become more acute there, as well as in Suleimani’s homeland of Iran, and elsewhere in a region he had come to dominate like no other figure.
From the bunkers of south Beirut to the battlefields of northern Syria and the combustible streets of Iraq, the loss of Suleimani and his entourage has derailed much of Iran’s momentum in the region and exposed to rare vulnerability the opaque Quds Force it has used to project its influence over two decades.
The assassination has also shone a light on the complicated relationship between the Iranian leadership and the Iraqi government, senior members of which have scrambled ever since to resurrect Suleimani’s core regional projects located as far away as the Lebanese capital and Damascus. The reckoning started as soon as the dead were buried.
Plus attempts by Iran to get Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to help fill the void.
In interviews, three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed preparations for the Feb. 22 election, including insufficient training for a newly-adopted electronic vote-tally system and confusing instructions on how to administer the caucuses. There are also unanswered questions about the security of Internet connections at some 2,000 precinct sites that will transmit results to a central “war room” set up by the Nevada Democratic Party.
In a major speech about the future of Europe, delivered in Bruges on September 20th, 1988, she “began with a grand historical sweep, taking in the Romans, Magna Carta, the Glorious revolution and much more, all designed to show that Britain was part of European civilization.” Thatcher also made it clear that “Britain wanted no ‘cosy, isolated existence’ on the fringes: ‘Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’”
What Thatcher did oppose was the project of “ever-closer union,” and the resulting weakening of the influence of nation states. She believed that Europe should not be a centralizing power that incubated supranational institutions—particularly as this model of centralization was just then in the throes of spectacular failure within the Soviet Union. Instead, as she outlined in a speech at The Hague on May 15th, 1992, she favored a looser form of European co-operation, by which states retained their sovereign freedoms—including control of their borders. This, she believed, would accommodate the political and cultural diversity of Europe, including the eastern European countries that, she hoped, would be offered full EC membership. As Moore notes, in fact, she was one of the few prominent European politicians of the 1980s who had recognized that cities such as Warsaw, Prague and Budapest were very much European cities that had been cut off from their historical and cultural roots.
In her speech at The Hague, as Moore summarizes it, “she prophesied that large-scale immigration caused by free movement would cause ‘ethnic conflict,’ and bring about the rise of extremist parties, that there would be ‘national resentment’ because of one-size-fits-all financial and economic policies under a single currency, and that a more centralized EC would not be able to work with the influx of new member states from the former Eastern Bloc.”
ICE said in a statement that California’s law doesn’t supersede federal law and “will not govern the conduct of federal officers acting pursuant to duly enacted laws passed by Congress that provide the authority to make administrative arrests of removable aliens inside the United States.”
“Our officers will not have their hands tied by sanctuary rules when enforcing immigration laws to remove criminal aliens from our communities,” David Jennings, ICE’s field office director in San Francisco, said in the statement.
Clayton Williams, RIP. He was that close to beating Ann Richards for Texas governor in 1990 before he shot his mouth off, not realizing that you can never trusts journalists to keep something that hurts a Republican quiet. Had he won, it’s extremely doubtful that George W. Bush gets elected governor in 1994, and the modern history of America turns out very differently…
“The 25-year-old man accused of fatally stabbing a library security officer to death had been released without bail after being accused of trying to rape a woman at Montefiore Nyack Hospital in November.” Thanks to Democratic “reforms,” attempting to rape a woman in a hospital in New York is now effectively a misdemeanor.
“Ilhan Omar DID marry her brother, reveals Somali community leader, who says both she and her husband told him Ahmed Elmi was her sibling and she would do what she had to do to get him ‘papers’ to keep him in US.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Speaking of pointing and laughing: How #NeverTrumpers are the waterboys of the D.C. elite. “All of their predictions are based on the conventional wisdom and assumptions of an insulted and excluded D.C. intelligentsia, and all are wrong.”
This was Rusty. For 10 years he comforted patients and staff at St. Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg. Yesterday, one day after his eighteenth birthday, Rusty passed away. Flowers and a pair of his trademark glasses were left on his favorite chair. He is our fifteenth 15/10 ❤️ pic.twitter.com/LylNq0tCSu
I heard a little more barking than normal from the puppy corral, so I went to check it out. It was Rocky, letting me know that his brother Ryman… might need a little help. pic.twitter.com/iu605vulW7
Over an intense half-hour before dawn on Wednesday, Iran bombed targets in Iraq, striking in and around two large military bases that house thousands of Iraqi and American servicemen and women.
But when the barrage of 22 missiles was over, the damage appeared to be to the bases’ infrastructure, not to people.
In a short statement released on Wednesday morning, the Joint Command in Baghdad, which includes both Iraqi and international representatives, said that neither coalition nor Iraqi forces had “recorded any losses.”
Of the 22 missiles, the majority were aimed at Al-Asad, an air base in the desert of western Anbar, an entirely Sunni Muslim area. Of the 17 missiles aimed at the base, two fell outside it near the city of Hit, but did not explode, officials said.
Five of the missiles were aimed at an air base in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and hit the headquarters building. Damage assessments were ongoing on Wednesday.
Iran announced that the missile strike had “concluded proportionate measures” against the United States in response for the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani by an American drone strike on Friday.
So we take out their combination of Erwin Rommel and Che Guevara, plus a Random Jihadi Assortment Pack, while they blow up some local concrete and promptly announced “OK, we’re done?” And 22 missiles suggests that Iran’s military has all the staying power of an 80-year old man whose Viagra prescription has run out.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced on Tuesday that reconnaissance of the state’s computer networks by foreign operatives has surged in the last two days to 10,000 attempts per minute.
While it’s not uncommon for adversaries to attempt attacks on an hourly basis, Texas has detected increased activity from “outside the United States, including Iran,” according to the Texas Department of Information Resources.
There have been warnings of Iranian cyber attacks in the wake of the killing of an Iranian general in a U.S. airstrike last week.
The Texas agency emphasized that it has successfully blocked every attempt to gain entry, but declined to explain exactly where hackers have tried to gain access.
The agency “constantly detects and blocks malicious traffic on the networks of the multiple state agencies it services,” according to a statement issued by the state after Abbott met with his domestic terrorism taskforce. “As global threats to cybersecurity increase, we urge Texans to be vigilant and use heightened awareness as they conduct Internet activity.”
A few relevant pieces about just how badly Iran has screwed up:
Iran has not developed its capabilities and regional strength in order to prevail in a conventional 21st century conflict. It has rather focused on pumping money and military hardware into regional allies, proxies and militias with the aim of spreading political prosperity and enabling them to project power in the region and beyond…
Given the extent of its regional activities, how much money is it actually pumping into its neighbors? The Soufan Center’s research shows where Iranian money is flowing in the Middle East and where Iranian-backed proxies and militant groups are active. Syria receives an estimated $6 billion annually of economic aid, subsidized oil, commodity transfers and military aid. Iraq receives up to $1 billion, some of which ends up in the hands of militia organizations. Lebanon, which is of course home to Hezbollah, sees around $700 million of financial support, practically all of which goes to the militant group.
It is hard to understand Iran supreme leader Khamenei’s blunder in attacking the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. He either believed that Trump was weakened by his impeachment, as Western liberal media breathlessly and continuously reported, or might have been misled by John Kerry’s incompetent advice (apparently, Kerry met again with Khamenei’s emissaries in Paris just few weeks ago). Whatever the reasons, his goal of triggering a limited war with America to rally his people around the regime has failed miserably.
Iran desperately wanted a war — drone attacks on Saudi Arabia’s heart of oil production, false-flag hits on oil tankers, unrest in Yemen — all aimed at this goal. Trump restraint in responding to these provocations must have been disappointing. But as Tehran resorted to attack the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, it must have realized that it had overplayed its hand when the reaction was surgical, devastating, and unexpected: the elimination of the mass murderer Qassem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, Khamenei’s right-hand man and chief executioner.
Channeling Lenin, Khamenei must be asking himself: What is to be done? Contrary to doomsayers’ forecasts, his options are limited.
His first reaction in fact was to declare: “Iran will stop abiding to the terms of the 2015 Nuclear Deal,” by which it had never abided (inadvertently revealing that his fatwa against nuclear weapons was false). As face-saving measures go, it verges on pathetic.
Any way you look at it, we are here because Obama and Europe forgot or preferred to ignore that Iran is an apocalyptic messianic regime bent on exporting terrorism and Shi’itism to intimidate its enemies and should never be allowed to develop or possess nuclear weapons.
Iran has some difficult decisions. They and their proxies, such as Hezbollah, promise revenge, but they have to decide if Trump has changed.
At the beginning of the Trump Administration, the Iranians feared the American president would challenge the regime. The Iranians have always been afraid of a direct conflict with the United States, and they were careful to farm out their strikes against Washington, D.C. and its allies to their proxies, from Hezbollah to Islamic Jihad. Trump wanted a deal, and for a while he was swayed by the likes of Rand Paul, who advised the president to pursue an agreement with the mullahs.
The effort failed. Ayatollah Khamenei did not, and does not want a deal with the Americans. Khamenei was stalling for time, hoping that the 2020 elections would result in a Trump defeat, and hence a more Obama-ish president. Meanwhile, attacks against us continued apace, reaching their apex with the killing of an American contractor in Iraq.
Trump had changed his mind; he saw the Iranian position accurately, and unleashed the American military against Iranians in Iraq. To the astonishment of the Iranian regime, it was not a case of tit-for-tat. Trump approved a full response, from drone attacks to air assaults, to the use of special forces and a rapid reinforcement of American strength on the ground. Soleimani and his buddies were killed. The Iraqi Parliament declined to throw out American forces, and, in polling results, 67% of Iraqis said they were in favor of maintaining security agreements with the U.S.
There is a lot going on, and a lot of confusion, much of it revolving around the notion that “war” between Iran and the United States has become more likely.
That is misguided. As Eli Lake tweeted, it’s misleading to say that the killing of Soleimani is the opening of a new war…It’s more accurate to say that it opens a new chapter in an ongoing war, a war that Iran declared immediately following the revolution of 1979. The new chapter is reminiscent of the older ones. An intermediary from Oman was told by the Tehran regime that Iran is not interested in having the Omanis mediate disagreements with America. The Iranian leaders said they would only seek revenge for the death of Soleimani.
One of the keenest observers of the situation, Omar Taheri, recently tweeted that all the Iranian bluster about the Soleimani killing should not distract us from reality:
Soleimani was a cog, OK a big cog, in an infernal machine that remains operational & must be broken. We must remain focused on our real goal: the dissolution of the Islamic Republic.
I do wonder how we’re supposed to take Ali Khamenei seriously when he’s channeling Curly from the Three Stooges:
This was the current Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khemenei, during Soleimani’s funeral.
Lebanon is burning over the ruling coalition’s decision to impose higher taxes.
Nationwide protests paralyzed Lebanon on Friday as demonstrators blocked major roads in a second day of rallies against the government’s handling of a severe economic crisis and the entire country’s political class.
The protests were the largest since 2015, and could further destabilize a country already on the verge of collapse and with one of the highest debt loads in the world.
The protests could plunge Lebanon into a political crisis with unpredictable repercussions for the economy, which has been in steady decline for the past few years. Some of the protesters said they would stay in the streets until the government resigns.
Time and again, the protesters shouted “Revolution!” and “The people want to bring down the regime,” echoing a refrain chanted by demonstrators during Arab Spring uprisings that swept the region in 2011.
“We are here today to ask for our rights. The country is corrupt, the garbage is all over the streets and we are fed up with all this,” said Loris Obeid, a protester in downtown Beirut.
Entire Des Moines Register-sponsored charity bike rideresigns over their handling of Carson King story. That’s the “hey, this guy just raised millions for charity, let’s destroy his life over an eight year old Tweet because we can, then refuse to admit we did anything wrong” story.
Chinese develop helicopter flying saucer? Color me skeptical that it actually works. And if it does work, it’s less a helicopter than a flying turbofan.
If you think Wayne Messam’s longshot presidential campaign is embarrassing, it’s a veritable juggernaut next to Republican congressman Mark Sanford’s longshot presidential campaign launch. One person showed up: the story’s reporter. And if Sanford’s name rings a faint bell: “It’s been more a decade since Sanford, now 59, faced potential impeachment, was censured by his own legislature, and got slapped with dozens of ethics violations after that infamous rendezvous in Buenos Aires. While the then-married governor was out of the office, his staff initially said he was just out ‘hiking the Appalachian Trail,’ a phrase that became the 2009 version of a meme and was used as a euphemism for anything related to politics and sexual escapades.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Like most Democrats, I reacted to the stunning 2016 election of Donald Trump with a combination of confusion and dread. After all, Hillary Clinton was the favorite and, to Democrats like me, a Trump victory seemed to portend certain economic disaster, nuclear war, and pretty much the end of America as we knew it.
But now nearly two years into his administration, Trump has presided over a “winning streak” that includes a booming economy and stock market, an unemployment level at a nearly 50-year low, two Supreme Court appointments, no new foreign wars or domestic terrorist attacks emanating from abroad, a significant degree of progress on trade relations with Canada and Mexico, a “needed reset” on the China relationship, and the prospect of peace on the Korean Peninsula.
Perhaps it is time that even his opponents reconsider Trump. Does Trump have a strategy that we can describe? Is Trump a return of Richard Nixon, of Ronald Reagan, or of something else entirely? After several months of watching the news without gaining any answers, I finally canceled my cable subscription and sought out other sources. I found some insights in unexpected places.
Trump’s presidency marks a return to realpolitik and great power politics.
Snip.
A third insight was from the unlikeliest place: the critically acclaimed animated show, “Rick and Morty.” During Trump’s campaign, his supporters frequently talked about how funny the candidate was. This humor was lost on most of my left-leaning peers. But “Rick and Morty” showed me what I have may been missing. Here is a popular TV show about a mad scientist Rick, an amoral, sociopathic man who considers himself the smartest man in the universe and tells dirty jokes in front of his grandson Morty. The slapstick, low-brow, and nihilistic insults and dirty humor of “Rick and Morty” — much like Trump — resemble some of the comedic greats from the decades prior to the 1990s: “The Honeymooners,” “Benny Hill,” “Abbott and Costello,” “The Three Stooges,” and “I Love Lucy.” These comedic devices can be traced back hundreds of years to Asian and European theater, which used slapstick, puns, insults, and innuendo.
Compare that oeuvre to the 1990s-2000s, during which comedy was more satirical, knowing, self-referential, meta, and smug. This idea is far from perfect, but examples of satire that use slapstick as well include “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “South Park,” “Team America: World Police”, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s parodies. American society today seems to be witnessing a return of what columnist Noah Smith calls “goofy” humor and a decline of “knowingly sarcastic” humor. Even The New Yorker complained that the 2018 Emmys were too smug and later described Trump’s rallies unfavorably as a “vaudeville routine.” Perhaps our shift toward a reversion in history also means we are seeing a cultural reversion as well. Smugness has become politically tone deaf.
Snip.
The Trump Doctrine takes previous policy assumptions and turns them on their head. Trump’s “America First” approach is a reversion to the idea of realpolitik and great power competition. It is better suited to a moment in which American power is much less dominant. The president takes each state-to-state relationship on its own terms. That’s why he’s often antagonistic with allies and friendly with threatening dictators. The consequences of insulting friendly countries, such as Canada, might be hurt feelings in exchange for better trade terms, while souring relations with an antagonistic one, such as North Korea, could result in serious security threats. He pursues the optimal outcome in a utilitarian sense rather than follow previous rules about diplomatic etiquette. Trump keeps his enemies even closer than his friends, while previous presidents did the opposite. Niccolo Machiavelli might have been familiar with these tactics.
Trump’s diplomatic method can be reduced to the four “B’s”: bullying, bargaining, burden-sharing, and bragging. He starts an interaction by bullying the subject — usually on Twitter, seeks a chance to sit down with the target to bargain as hard as possible toward what Trump may see as a more reciprocal relationship of burden-sharing, and then finally brags about whatever the results are. Trump treats all relationships as transactional, deploying tit-for-tat tactics toward achieving his goal of “reciprocity.” His message is that he wants to make America great again but does not spend much time lecturing or moralizing to foreigners. Finally, his use of insults, jokes, and slapstick, physical humor creates an image of honesty and authenticity with his supporters. Overall, these techniques and worldviews are becoming increasingly common around the world, including with the leaders of countries as diverse as Turkey, the Philippines, Russia, Israel, Mexico — and potentially Brazil.
Trump described his realpolitik-with-no-sacred-cows approach during the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September: “America’s policy of principled realism means we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies, and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again. This is true not only in matters of peace, but in matters of prosperity.”
Overall, Trump’s approach represents a reversion to a style of statecraft that flips previous approaches. Technocracy, meritocracy, and bureaucratic approaches are giving way to establishing top-level personal rapport, trust, and loyalty. Free trade ideology is giving way to trade as a means to enrichment. Building institutions gives way to questioning the utility of each institution. Moral diplomacy gives way to talking to anyone who will bargain. Careful speeches give way to saying anything that gets results. Saving sacred cows gives way to killing them or threatening to do so. Open markets give way to using U.S. markets, military, and migration as bargaining chips. Every relationship is subject to maximum leverage of what is possible.
West is nothing if not independent. He doesn’t need the approval of the Democratic establishment or the usual suspects among the liberal Hollywood elite. He is untethered from the traditional liberal gatekeepers in the same way Trump was untethered from the Republican establishment as a presidential candidate. There is a reason that the Democrats and their allies in the media insult, marginalize, ridicule and try to “Uncle Tom” West. It is obvious they are afraid of him and the discussion he might start.
“Beto O’Rourke Raised Record Breaking $38 Million in 3Q.” And he’s still losing. Just imagine if Democrats had used that money to protect endangered incumbent senators instead…
O’Rourke’s “extraordinary political success” is illusionary. His national popularity is contingent on aesthetics and mass of coverage. It is merely that Beto looks and acts like the type of guy producers at most cable news networks and talk shows think—or more precisely, wish—a senator would look and act like. Unlike, say, Cruz (nearly two years older than Beto), who is always blathering about the Constitution or whatnot.
It’s not as if O’Rourke is a special talent by any measure. His speeches and talking points are just as vacuous and predictable as those of any other middling politician. His positions on guns and abortion—and a multitude of other issues—are in lockstep with his party, not the state. O’Rourke has never offered any substantively impressive policy ideas. He’s not led on any notable issues in the House. He’s remarkably unremarkable.
The son of a onetime Republican county judge and a longtime furniture store owner, the Democratic congressman from El Paso married into the family of one of his hometown’s most prominent developers and has assembled real estate investments worth millions.
Congress is rife with rich people, but O’Rourke had a 2015 net worth of about $9 million, ranking 51st out of 435 House members, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s more than double the $3.8 million worth of his Republican opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz, who ranked 41st of 100 senators.
Think Progress alum thinly disguised as a journalist does 50 Shades of Beto. Ick.
The hits keep coming:
The lies flow easily from 'Beto':
Beto O'Rourke's Mother, Who He Says Is A 'Lifelong Republican,' Donated To Obama, Voted In 15 Of 17 Democratic Primaries https://t.co/I5QC9SEjlF
The Russian government kills journalists, among others. I do not recall the Washington Post protesting on this basis the Obama administration’s “reset” of relations with Putin’s government or Obama’s promise to be more “flexible” with Russia after his reelection. Nor, as far as I remember, did the Post cite Russia’s murderous ways as a reason not to farm out to Putin enforcement of the “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Cuba’s treatment of journalists and others has been atrocious. Yet, the mainstream media supported the Obama administration when it radically reset U.S. relations with Cuba without insisting on any change in the regime’s treatment of dissidents.
What are the differences between Russia/Cuba and Saudi Arabia? I see two. First, Russia and Cuba are adversaries of America. Saudi Arabia is an ally.
For the sane, this difference would, if anything, cut in favor of the Saudis. For the left, it cuts against them.
Second, the Trump administration has very visibly allied itself with Saudi Arabia as a means of countering Iran and achieving other American objectives in the Middle East. Thus, the Khashoggi slaying provides the mainstream media with the opportunity to do what it does best — hammer President Trump.
In my view, the Khashoggi slaying should not cause America substantially to alter its foreign policy. Our relatively close relationship with Saudi Arabia is predicated, as it should be, on mutual interests and mutual adversaries. Either the geo-political predicate justifies the relationship or it doesn’t.
1. Vilification (Alt-right, racist…) 2. Guilt by association ("Did the *Koch brothers* fund this?") 3. Misrepresentation ("So basically, you think trans ppl should just *die*…") 4. Reduction to privilege anxiety ("White fragility!") https://t.co/tOPJGl0zWp
Florida man does it again. Not only is he a registered sex offender who hired a federal informant for a mad-bombing spree aimed at target stores, he did it all for…making money off shorting the stock?
Somebody hit a Syrian airbase near Homs last night; we’re denying it was us, and both Syria and Russia are pointing the finger at Israel:
The Syrian government and its ally Russia have blamed Israel for a deadly attack on a Syrian military airport.
Monday’s attack hit the Tiyas airbase, known as T4, near the city of Homs. Observers say 14 people were killed.
Israel, which has previously hit Syrian targets, has not commented. Syria initially blamed the US for the strike.
The incident comes amid international alarm over an alleged chemical attack on a Syrian rebel-held town. The US and France had threatened to respond.
US President Donald Trump said there would be a “big price to pay” for the alleged chemical attack in Douma, in the Eastern Ghouta region, near the capital Damascus. He branded Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad an “animal”.
Snip.
Syrian state news agency Sana, quoting a military source, reported that air defences had repelled an Israeli missile attack on T4, saying the missiles were fired by Israeli F15 jets in Lebanese airspace.
Russia’s defence ministry said that, of eight missiles, five were shot down and three reached the western part of the aerodrome.
I would take any sort of Russian claims about Israel missiles being shot down with several grains of salt. Maybe they were, and maybe they weren’t. Either way, Russian air defense systems have not exactly covered themselves in glory in the Syrian conflict.
Israel rarely acknowledges carrying out strikes, but has admitted attacking targets in Syria dozens of times since 2012. Its heaviest air strike on Syria, in February this year, included targeting the T4 air base.
That followed an incursion by an Iranian drone into Israel and the shooting down by Syrian air defences of an Israeli F16 fighter jet.
Israel has said it will not allow Iran, its arch-foe, to set up bases in Syria or operate from there, something Israel considers a major threat.
The Israeli military said Iran and its Revolutionary Guards had long been active in the T4 base, and were using it to transfer weapons, including to Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah, an enemy of Israel.
One interesting aspect to the strike was that all the major new services seemed asleep at the switch while reports of the strike from sources on the ground in Lebanon and Syria went out in real time. So if you want to launch a military strike in the Middle East, Sunday night seems to be the time to do it…
This should take still more of the shine off Obama’s plastic halo:
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.
They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.
But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.
The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.
How high did drug trafficking evidence go?
As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments — all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials.
The network was extensive:
For decades, Hezbollah — in close cooperation with Iranian intelligence and Revolutionary Guard — had worked with supporters in Lebanese communities around the world to create a web of businesses that were long suspected of being fronts for black-market trading. Along the same routes that carried frozen chicken and consumer electronics, these businesses moved weapons, laundered money and even procured parts for Iran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
As they pursued their investigations, the DEA agents found that Hezbollah was redoubling all of these efforts, working urgently to raise cash, and lots of it, to rebuild its south Lebanon stronghold after a 2006 war with Israel had reduced it to rubble.
Dating back to its inception in the early 1980s, Hezbollah, which translates to “Party of God,” had also engaged in “narcoterrorism,” collecting a tariff from drug dealers and other black-market suppliers who operated in territory it controlled in Lebanon and elsewhere. Now, based on the DEA’s extensive network of informants, undercover operatives and wiretaps, it looked like Hezbollah had shifted tactics, and gotten directly involved in the global cocaine trade, according to interviews and documents, including a confidential DEA assessment.
“It was like they flipped a switch,” Kelly told POLITICO. “All of a sudden, they reversed the flow of all of the black-market activity they had been taxing for years, and took control of the operation.”
Operating like an organized crime family, Hezbollah operatives would identify businesses that might be profitable and useful as covers for cocaine trafficking and buy financial stakes in them, Kelly and others said. “And if the business was successful and suited their current needs,” Kelly said, “they went from partial owners to majority owners to full partnership or takeover.”
Hezbollah even created a special financial unit that, translated into English, means “Business Affairs Component,” to oversee the sprawling criminal operation, and it was run by the world’s most wanted terrorist after Osama bin Laden, a notoriously vicious Hezbollah military commander named Imad Mughniyeh
Imad MughniyehA Hezbollah mastermind who oversaw its international operations and, the DEA says, its drug trafficking, as head of its military wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization.
, according to DEA interviews and documents.
Mughniyeh had for decades been the public face of terrorism for Americans, orchestrating the infamous attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in 1983 in their barracks in Lebanon, and dozens more Americans in attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that year and an annex the year after. When President Ronald Reagan responded to the attacks by withdrawing peacekeeping troops from Lebanon, Hezbollah claimed a major victory and vaulted to the forefront of the Islamist resistance movement against the West.
Over the next 25 years, Iran’s financial and military support for Hezbollah enabled it to amass an army with tens of thousands of foot soldiers, more heavy armaments than most nation-states and approximately 120,000 rockets and ballistic missiles that could strike Israel and U.S. interests in the region with devastating precision.
Socialist “hero” Hugo Chavez was also involved in the operation up to his ears:
In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez was personally working with then-Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hezbollah on drug trafficking and other activities aimed at undermining U.S. influence in the region, according to interviews and documents.
Within a few years, Venezuelan cocaine exports skyrocketed from 50 tons a year to 250, much of it bound for American cities, United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime statistics show.
And beginning in 2007, DEA agents watched as a commercial jetliner from Venezuela’s state-run Conviasa airline flew from Caracas to Tehran via Damascus, Syria, every week with a cargo-hold full of drugs and cash. They nicknamed it “Aeroterror,” they said, because the return flight often carried weapons and was packed with Hezbollah and Iranian operatives whom the Venezuelan government would provide with fake identities and travel documents on their arrival.
From there, the operatives spread throughout the subcontinent and set up shop in the many recently opened Iranian consulates, businesses and mosques, former Project Cassandra agents said.
So what was the result of all this painstaking case-building?
Senior Obama administration officials appeared to be alarmed by how far Project Cassandra’s investigations had reached into the leadership of Hezbollah and Iran, and wary of the possible political repercussions.
As a result, task force members claim, Project Cassandra was increasingly viewed as a threat to the administration’s efforts to secure a nuclear deal, and the top-secret prisoner swap that was about to be negotiated.
Snip.
In addition, the briefings for top White House and Justice Department officials that had been requested by Holder never materialized, task force agents said. (Holder did not respond to requests for comment.) Also, a top intelligence official blocked the inclusion of Project Cassandra’s memo on the Hezbollah drug threat from being included in Obama’s daily threat briefing, they said. And Kelly, Asher and other agents said they stopped getting invitations to interagency meetings, including those of a top Obama transnational crime working group.
That may have been because Obama officials dropped Hezbollah from the formal list of groups targeted by a special White House initiative into transnational organized crime, which in turn effectively eliminated DEA’s broad authority to investigate it overseas, task force members said.
Snip.
“When it looked like the [nuclear] agreement might actually happen, it became clear that there was no interest in dealing with anything about Iran or Hezbollah on the ground that it may be negative, that it might scare off the Iranians.”
Hey, what are the lives of some black kids hooked on crack compared to the glory of Obama’s Iran deal?
Remember the fantasy floated by liberals in the 1980s that the CIA was secretly behind the Central American cocaine trade? Obama actually did that, letting Hezbollah off the hook despite an iron-clad case of narcoterrorism, in order to do the Iran deal.
This is a long, detailed piece in a mainstream media outlet. Read the whole thing.
The Syrian army and its allies took complete control over Albu Kamal, Islamic State’s last significant town in Syria, a military news service run by Hezbollah said on Sunday.
The army had declared victory over Islamic State in Albu Kamal earlier this month but the jihadists then staged a counter-attack using sleeper cells hidden in the town.
Saudi Arabia and its allies are meeting in Cairo to talk about what to do about Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah. “The emergency Arab foreign ministers meeting was convened at the request of Saudi Arabia with support from the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait to discuss means of confronting Iranian intervention, Egypt’s state news agency MENA said.”
No link, but suddenly the entire Washington MSM seems to be wringing their hands about the Saudi blockage of Yemen in precisely the way they weren’t when Iran was destabilizing the country with a proxy war the last three years.
Confused? You probably will be, even after this week’s episode of Soap…
