Who defends the defenders?

I'm curious about governor's who adamantly insist they DO NOT want federal mercenary forces in their states. I assume many of us are aware that each state has a national guard that is answerable to their state government. If a state is being invaded by a foreign and violent force, why are the national guard not there to protect its citizens from violent outsider attack? Is this a reasonable question?

Trump's 'beautiful' failures

How the US president's salesmanship trumps his statesmanship.

Marwan Bishara by Marwan Bishara 

21 Jul 2020

US President Donald Trump speaks about efforts to curb federal regulations during a South Lawn event at the White House in Washington on July 16, 2020 [Reuters/Jonathan Ernst]

US President Donald Trump speaks about efforts to curb federal regulations during a South Lawn event at the White House in Washington on July 16, 2020 [Reuters/Jonathan Ernst] 

Listening to US President Donald Trump tell Fox News on Sunday that "We won two world wars, beautiful world wars, that were vicious and horrible," one does not know whether to laugh or cry.

It is certainly a shocking statement, but the fact that it is no longer surprising to hear such crudity from the American president is, in itself, disturbing.

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The president boasts of having an Ivy League education and knowing the "best words", but his poor and slurred speech and repetitive use of a very few words like "tremendous", "amazing" and "beautiful", tell a different story.

The use of "beautiful" in this context of world war may be another slip of the tongue, caused by dementia - something psychologists have claimed he may have.

But this is different from "Belgium is a beautiful city" which slipped Trump's tongue in 2016.

It signals something more sinister.

Regardless of whether Trump meant it or not, the record shows his use of "beautiful" may rather be associated with his long history of salesmanship. Well, "used-cars"-style salesmanship to be precise. 

In other words, it is linked to deception.

Trump has boasted of reviving "beautiful clean coal" and called the environmentally controversial Dakota Access oil pipeline "beautiful" as well. He has lamented the taking down of "beautiful" Confederate statues that are associated with the dark past of fighting to maintain slavery in the South, and bragged about his appointment of "brand new, beautiful conservative judges".

Trump has spoken of a "beautiful" healthcare bill to replace Obamacare, although it is yet to materialise as the administration continues its assault on what is left of the much-needed programme amid a pandemic.

Trump has also committed to building a real, high and "beautiful" wall along the border with Mexico, which Congress and most Americans have opposed, prompting the president to declare a national emergency for the sole purpose of paying for it.

Trump has justified his extraordinary decision to build his "beautiful wall" on the grounds of ending undocumented immigration, stopping drugs from coming into the US, and making Mexico pay for it. He has even warned of threats to national security.

In reality, the construction of the border wall has not curbed border crossings, which have recently increased. It is also unlikely to have much effect on drug trafficking, as drugs are mostly smuggled through legal ports of entry. And, last but not least, Mexico is a trade partner, not an enemy - it has not and will not pay for the wall.

Nowhere is the use of "beautiful" more disturbing than in association with weapons and the Middle East.

During his first foreign trip in 2017, Trump boasted in Riyadh of his eagerness to sell "beautiful weapons" worth tens of billions of dollars to Qatar and other rich Gulf countries to create more American jobs and better Gulf security.

But a few days later, Trump sided with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain when they imposed a blockade on Qatar based on false pretexts and fabricated pretences.

Trump soon reversed his position, but has not been able to pressure his Gulf allies to end their siege on Qatar and cease the unnecessary divisions and instability.

Instead, the Trump administration has inflamed regional instability by walking away from the Iran nuclear deal and, along with Israel, escalated tensions with Tehran.

After the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Al Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Trump boasted of spending $2 trillion on arms and threatened to target Iran with "brand new beautiful" weapons.

Trump bragged about these and other Middle East policies to the Israeli American Council, which is subsidised mainly by his own "patron-in-chief", casino owner Sheldon Adelson.

There, he sang the praise of a "beautiful and mighty" Israel and ridiculed Arab and other leaders, who appealed to him not to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or recognise its annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights.

And to top it all off and take it to a whole new level of absurdity, Trump later described the happy reaction of his once personal lawyer and present US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, as that of a "wonderful, beautiful baby".

The preposterousness of the image is matched only by the farcicality of the story behind the decision on the Golan Heights. As Trump tells it, he asked for a "quickie" explanation about the Heights, then "I went Bing! - it was done".

This has all been part of the "big, big beautiful difference" between his and his predecessor's commitment to Israel - one which comes at the expense of its Palestinian and Arab neighbours, and which ended up torpedoing decades of US Middle East diplomacy.

Trump's beautiful policy failures in the Middle East are only matched by his failures in East Asia.

Trump praised and mused about his "love" relationship with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, who apparently sent him "beautiful letters". After their 2018 summit, he declared that Americans can "sleep well at night" knowing that North Korea was prepared to give up its nuclear weapons.

The following year, Trump praised Kim's "great and beautiful vision" for his country which, as anyone who knows anything about the totalitarian regime knows, is a big lie, a political heresy, an utter humbug.

And soon enough, it turned out his buddy Kim has been using their bromance to perfect his vision of North Korea as a nuclear power with long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

For the record, Trump also said he received "beautiful" letters from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.

Need I say more?

Trump even got a "beautiful birthday card" from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the latter cracked down on royal family members, journalists and human rights advocates.

And so the president with the "beautiful temperament" and "beautiful [some say small] hands" promises to continue to work for a "bright and beautiful" future for the new generations across the Middle East and beyond.

A beautiful man indeed.

The question is: Would you buy a beautiful used car from him?

America, your time is soon

• I, as an American citizen deserve some consideration in policy implementation

• as a former Marine, honorably discharged, I believe I deserve some consideration in policy implementation

• as a former public servant I believe I deserve some consideration in policy consideration

As someone who has been denied these basic considerations and more I am left with one perception only  one conclusion:

America doesn't give a fuck about me or anyone else

And those who perpetuate these lies; fuck you all too.

Living on a prayer

Since I moved back home to redneck ally 20 years ago I have had my life threatened at least every other year by people who I don't know nor know me. They merely know who I am by word of mouth and that I am HIV+. 

With the rise of the dick tater, the orange turd, they have been emboldened in their hate and the attacks have become more frequent, more vicious, and if the GPS on their devices are correct they are coming closer to my remote home.

I was told by a doctor 30 years ago that I probably had 6 months or less to live. I sincerely wish he had been correct. There isn't much left on this plane of existence that I am interested in staying for. Certainly nothing here gives me any level of happiness.

But regrettably I cannot do anything to hasten my departure from this shit hole. I can only hope that at least a pair of these redneck cretins actually do find me here. That way I can have the pleasure of taking at least one of them with me. And since it will all be on security cameras and audio, anyone left standing will receive whatever they have coming.

These "New Patriot Bone Spur Brigade" assholes don't have a clue what patriotism is nor what it feels like to be forced into defending honor. It doesn't feel the way one thinks it might. There is no pleasure in it (unless you're a sociopath), there is only the honor of performing one's duty. And even that doesn't feel good.

So, if anything should happen to me anytime soon just know that it came to me and I finished it...with regret. Not regret for the kids of my own life, but the regret of leaving this world full of suffering.

Bowling for Assholes

New nonviolent game to help reduce your need to punch a rascist in the face:

Bowling.

One back ball against ten white pins with red rings around their neck.

Enjoy!

CNN: Cooper shakes head at Trump remark: 'That is just nonsense'

As Covid-19 cases continue to surge in the US, CNN's Anderson Cooper says President Trump's only plan to fight the pandemic is to gaslight the American people.

See his comments on video at CNN here:

CNN: Cooper shakes head at Trump remark: 'That is just nonsense'. 

Whistleblower says what?

From the desk of Thomas Drake:

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The past several months are certainly surreal times we live in -- locally, regionally, nationally and globally.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a lot of unpleasantness about how people treat each other, and the degree to which blame is thrown around, along with three-second sound bites. But of course, if you are in power you never want to let a good crisis (even a pandemic) go to waste.

Everything is so hyper-polarized and divided these days politically with massive disinformation and propaganda campaigns going on. Or as I prefer to call them -- mistruths or missed truths.

And the baser side of the human condition definitely turns my stomach over more these days, than it has in the past. I am also frankly challenged not to grow too cynical in the face of so much discord and division across the social, civil and political spectrum.

I just don’t think that enough people TRULY appreciate (let alone really understand) what we are losing these past few years (and have lost since 9/11), when it comes to democracy and freedom and speaking out against abuse of power of all kinds from all sides, as well as the steady and alarming erosion of our precious rights and liberties.

Given all the instability and conflict and rancor we hear and see all around us, history does bear eyewitness. And even if history does not always exactly repeat, it certain appears to rhyme!

One example is President Trump withdrawing the U.S. from the Treaty on Open Skies (an arms control treaty) due to alleged violations by Russia. I am well aware of this treaty coming out of the Cold War as a former military service and aircrew member in the Air Force. I had several former military colleagues with whom I served, directly supporting this treaty on specially designated aerial overflights of the former Soviet Union designed to reduce the chance of a terrible accident or misfire -- especially when it involves nuclear arms.

The myopic decision by Trump for unilateral withdrawal out of this treaty for trumped up reasons (pun is definitely intended), risks abandoning arms control and turning it into a free-for-all arms bazaar and race to the bottom. Withdrawing from this treaty actually undermines our national security and the security of the world for self-serving purposes, and also prevents other countries from monitoring the U.S. -- which I think is the larger purpose here behind Trump’s withdrawal as well as his open desire to sell more arms to the highest bidders.

The Open Skies Treaty is an agreement between 35 nations to date that permits each country to fly over the land of the others. Fundamentally this treaty was expressly designed to promote transparency and mutual observation of military developments and not create situations that escalate into actual conflict due to misunderstandings or missed signals.

This is the third time Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from an arms control agreement and each time creates greater instability in his quest to make America “great again” and go it alone.

The other example is even closer to home for me, given my own whistleblowing on the abuse of national security power violating the privacy rights of people through warrantless surveillance post-9/11 for the sake of just getting the data.

This example is centered on the current attempts to reauthorize certain expiring sections of the FISA Amendments Act (based on certain sunset provisions), which simply codified what was already taking place in secret post-9/11 over a number of years when the original FISA was simply tossed aside.

The FISA Amendments Act would not have happened absent the public-interest outing of the over four-year state secret mass surveillance regime approved by Bush/Cheney. The outing came with the blockbuster front page New York Times article in December 2005 that ultimately led the government to target me and others early in 2006.

That multi-year, multimillion-dollar criminal “leak” investigation, launched due to the revelations made by the New York Times, led to the signature Espionage Act case dropped on me in 2010 via a very publicly announced 10-count indictment by the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice.

The original FISA Amendments Act was signed into law in 2008 (and yes, then-Senator Obama voted for it) and has been reauthorized ever since.

The current modest reform bill that was under consideration for the FISA Amendments Act would end the so-called “call detail records” (CDR) program that was kept in a watered-down form under the USA Freedom Act of 2015. It still had the government collecting hundreds of millions of these records every year from providers based on just a handful of orders -- that were really just general warrants of a blanket nature that also still violated the Constitution.

There are also some changes to the business records provision, also known as Section 215 (where a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy because the data is “owned” by a business entity) and the government can just get it, if deemed “relevant” to a national security investigation. The bar for such an order is not probable cause, as is required under even a normal FISA warrant, so this becomes a backdoor loophole to get any information that simply meets the very low bar of satisfying any investigative purpose including location-based information. Location-based information was determined by the Supreme Court (5-4 decision) as having 4th Amendment protection in the Carpenter v. United States case from 2018. These orders also don’t even require that the individual picked up in such an order have any connections to the declared target of an investigation, either!

Whether or not any of this survives or is changed, including restrictions on web-based information, remains up for grabs. Even provisions for improved friend of the court briefs, to provide independent oppositional perspective to the government’s case for such orders, remain up for grabs given the political climate.

In essence, a whole lot of surveillance shell games are getting played out (as the public gets played) to keep the surveillance wheel going, with little concern for even the rights and protections afforded “the people” under the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

Do find myself worrying more about our own future -- even though I am quite hopeful over the long term circumscribed by the moral arc of the universe, that does bend eventually toward justice, and as I like to add, mercy.

Regards to all. Thanks for your continuing support and please take care of yourselves and each other during these trying and uncertain times.

-- Thomas Drake
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