Donald Trump: establishment trojan horse?

Politics, History, & 'Conspiracy'
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Megaterio Llamas
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Re: Donald Trump: establishment trojan horse?

Postby Megaterio Llamas » Sat Apr 08, 2017 9:34 pm

el rey del mambo

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Redneck
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Postby Redneck » Sun Apr 09, 2017 3:08 am

It really is a wag the dog moment. I call it his G.W Bush moment.

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Daglord
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Postby Daglord » Mon Apr 10, 2017 3:05 pm

Megaterio Llamas wrote:Trump’s ‘Wag the Dog’ Moment

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/07/t ... og-moment/


this is a great read, Tulsi Gabbard just shared it this morning in fact. good call.

Redneck wrote:It really is a wag the dog moment. I call it his G.W Bush moment.


yep, also his Bubba Clinton moment, who (not) coincidentally dropped bombs on Iraq the day his impeachment hearings began.

seems like a good bombing is SOP for distraction.

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Daglord
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Postby Daglord » Mon Apr 10, 2017 3:15 pm

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Ron Paul gives a press conference on the day Clinton deflected media attention away from his looming impeachment by launching a bombing campaign on Iraq for alleged non-compliance with UN inspections. Dr Paul dismisses the Lewinsky fiasco as nothing but a sideshow to the REAL reasons Clinton should be impeached, namely his criminal bombing of innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan.

In the end, Ron Paul essentially warns of future terrorist acts to come as a result of the current foreign policy. His message has been on point for decades.


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Postby Daglord » Mon Apr 10, 2017 4:55 pm

Jeff Sessions is ordering the Justice Department to review its policy on marijuana
http://www.businessinsider.com/justice-department-task-force-will-review-weed-enforcement-policy-2017-4

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions has directed the Justice Department to evaluate marijuana 'enforcement policy' as part of a new task force designed to reduce violent crime, according to a memo issued Wednesday to 94 US attorneys.

The memo specifically outlined the creation of a subcommittee of the new Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety designed to review existing policies to ensure "consistency with the Department's overall strategy on reducing violent crime."

The memo is likely referring to the Cole Memorandum, a 2013 directive from the Obama era which stipulates that the Justice Department place "low priority" on enforcing marijuana laws against businesses and organizations that comply with state law.

Marijuana is illegal at the federal level, though a number of states have voted to legalize and regulate the recreational market in recent years.

However, Sessions has previously said that he's not a fan of the "expanded use" of marijuana, and the Trump administration has hinted at a crackdown on state-legal marijuana enterprises.

A group of governors from states that have recreational marijuana laws on the books wrote a letter urging Sessions to keep marijuana legal on Tuesday.

Reducing violent crime is a priority for Sessions' Justice Department, to combat what he says is a dangerous national trend of rising crime associated with the opioid epidemic. And, he's made efforts to link marijuana to violent crime, saying there's "more violence around marijuana" at a speech to state attorneys general in February.

Violent crime rates are at a historic low, though rates rose 3% between 2014 and 2015, according to the FBI.

Trump himself hasn't yet laid out a specific policy towards marijuana legalization.


but wait, there's more...

DEA OKs synthetic marijuana for pharma company that spent $500,000 to keep pot illegal
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-dea-pharma-synthetic-marijuana-20170325-story.html

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Insys Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company that was one of the chief financial backers of the opposition to marijuana legalization in Arizona last year, received preliminary approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration this week for Syndros, a synthetic marijuana drug.

Insys gave $500,000 last summer to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, the group opposing marijuana legalization in Arizona. The donation amounted to roughly 10 percent of all money raised by the group in an ultimately successful campaign against legalization. Insys was the only pharmaceutical company known to be giving money to oppose legalization last year, according to a Washington Post analysis of campaign finance records.


How Jeff Sessions Wants To Bring Back the War on Drugs
http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/10/how-jeff-sessions-wants-to-bring-back-th

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Is the Trump administration going war crazy? Last week, the president launched a missile strike on a Syrian air base as retaliation for the Assad regime reportedly gassing its own people.

And now, The Washington Post reports, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is adamantly against marijuana legalization, is ready to escalate the war on drugs by pulling former federal prosecutor Steven H. Cook into his inner circle.




For his part, Sessions has explicitly called for a return to "Just Say No" policies that included mandatory minimums and all sorts of sentencing enhancements that swelled prison populations. Calling pot "only slightly less awful" than heroin, he has also signaled that he will continue to pursue legal action against marijuana users even in states where it has been made legal for medical and recreational use.

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Postby Daglord » Mon Apr 10, 2017 6:45 pm

WTF is this? is this what to expect under Trump/Sessions' new 'War on Drugs' ?

holy shit I hope this is a parody of some kind.

something (or someone) seems to have caused the police to become severely emboldened.



Published on Apr 7, 2017 - A message from the Lake County Sheriff's Office Community Engagement Unit.


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Postby Daglord » Mon Apr 10, 2017 7:15 pm

about that conflict of interest...

Trump owns shares in company firing missiles into Syria, making $1.5b in one day for Raytheon
http://www.hangthebankers.com/trump-owns-shares-company-syria-raytheon/

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Each one of the 59 Tomahawk missiles fired by the US Navy, by order of Trump, at the Syrian air base in Homs cost somewhere between $800,000 and $1.4 million — per missile. This obviously expensive surge in US military spending subsequently sent the manufacturer’s stock soaring.

It also sent the Free Thought Project on an investigation into the types of stocks in which President Trump invests. What we found is shocking, but sadly, typical. Tomahawk missiles are manufactured by a company, with whom most people are familiar, Raytheon.


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According to Raytheon’s website: “Today’s Tomahawk Block IV cruise missile can circle for hours, shift course instantly on command and beam a picture of its target to controllers halfway around the world before striking with pinpoint accuracy. Tomahawk can be launched from a ship or submarine and can fly into heavily defended airspace more than 1,000 miles away to conduct precise strikes on high-value targets with minimal collateral damage. Launching the weapon from such a long distance helps to keep sailors out of harm’s way.”

However, some may not be familiar with the fact that according to the President’s most recent FEC disclosure, the Trumps actual own or have owned stock in Raytheon. That’s right, the 59 missiles, that Trump hurled at Syria — which cost taxpayers somewhere between $47 million and $82 million — could’ve actually turned a profit for the president.

The report showed that Trump also owns or has owned stock in many well-known companies including Apple, Nike, Whole Foods, Google, Philip Morris, McDonald’s, Facebook, and Morgan Stanley, among many others — including many other defense contractors who stand to make billions off Trump’s aggression.

It is important to note that in December of 2016, Trump spokesman, Jason Miller told The Post that Trump liquidated all of his assets. However, we’ve yet to see any proof of this and will not see any proof until at least 2018.

“We need to know, has he put them in conflict free assets … or has he bought other stocks or assets that would create new conflicts?” Norm Eisen, who served as ethics counselor to President Obama asked. “It’s all the more reason that we need a prompt and full financial disclosure. If he did liquidate all his stocks, what did he do with the money? What bank is the money in? What did he buy? It’s a lot of money.”


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According to Business Insider, shares of Raytheon gained 3.54 points, a roughly 2.3 percent increase, in pre-market trading following Thursday night’s strike.

Of course, 2.3 percent doesn’t sound like a whole lot, however, if we take into account the effect it has on Raytheon’s total market value, it is definitely significant. On Thursday, Raytheon closed at $150.75 and on Friday morning, it opened at $154.62. This shot the company’s market value up from $44.1 billion to $45.4 billion — nearly one and a half billion — in a day.

Lockheed Martin and Boeing saw similar gains.

Also, according to Open Secrets, Trump wasn’t just giving to Raytheon but they were also giving to him.

According to Trump’s most recent Financial Disclosure Report, his stock holdings were held in accounts with Barclays, Oppenheimer, JPMorgan, and Deutsche Bank. However, the way that the disclosure from the FEC is structured only requires presidential candidates to list their holdings in broad ranges. So, we don’t know how large of a stake he had in these companies.

Trump’s situation, however shocking, is nothing new. Consequently, the last time there was talk of military action in Syria, in 2013, Raytheon’s stock soared to an all-time high.

According to US officials, arms manufacturers have added shifts and hired workers, but they warn that this may not be enough to keep up with the world’s demand for weapons of mass destruction.

As the US sends tens of thousands of warheads to Saudi Arabia so they can bomb schools and hospitals in Yemen, they are dropping hundreds of bombs in Iraq and Syria.

Instead of realizing that the bombs and US foreign policy are the actual sources of terrorism, war monger politicians like Bush, Obama, and now Trump use fear to steal your tax dollars to feed this machine.

Thanks to the invasive and murderous US foreign policy, there is no shortage of ‘Islamic Extremism’ to attack in the Middle East. Not only is Saudi Arabia receiving US arms, but so are many of the other Gulf states as well as Syrian ‘rebels.’

After his retirement from the Marine Corps, Major General Smedley D. Butler made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech “War is a Racket,” which sums this scenario up quite well.

What separates Butler from other historical military figures is that he is one of only 19 people in history to win the Medal of Honor, twice. So, when a highly decorated, two-star general takes to the stage to assert that war is a racket, people listen — most people, anyway.

In one of his speeches, Butler decried war and pointed out how so many people died just to benefit a very small ‘inside’ group.

The speech read in part:

“WAR IS A RACKET. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN.

IT IS POSSIBLY THE OLDEST, EASILY THE MOST PROFITABLE, SURELY THE MOST VICIOUS. IT IS THE ONLY ONE INTERNATIONAL IN SCOPE. IT IS THE ONLY ONE IN WHICH THE PROFITS ARE RECKONED IN DOLLARS AND THE LOSSES IN LIVES.”


Sadly, very few people inside this detached and brutal government ever come to realize the true nature of war.

As the threat of World War III looms across the planet, the American taxpayers are being fleeced to build the weapons with which this world war will be carried out — all the while, the commander and chief is reaping the benefits.


"Lockheed Martin and Boeing saw similar gains"



Published on Aug 18, 2016
Donald Trump has attempted to maintain a "non-interventionist" facade throughout the duration of his campaign by vocalizing his opposition to the Iraq war and Libyan intervention. The problem, however, is that he has held meetings with defense contractors and has hired very hawkish foreign policy advisors that are directly in the pockets of defense contractors. Don't let him fool you into thinking he's going to be anti-war.


...whoops!...


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Postby Daglord » Mon Apr 10, 2017 8:45 pm

The Syrian airstrikes have ramped up the neocon vs. libertarian foreign policy battle within the Republican Party
http://rare.us/rare-politics/rare-liberty/conservatism-today/the-syrian-airstrikes-have-ramped-up-the-neocon-vs-libertarian-foreign-policy-battle-within-the-republican-party/

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The ongoing debate over the U.S. airstrikes on Syria last week has brought to the forefront a foreign policy battle that had been raging within the Republican Party for many years before the rise of Donald Trump. It is one of the most important debates happening within the party, potentially determining how the president approaches foreign policy going forward.

During the George W. Bush years, Republicans were almost uniformly hawkish. The Iraq War became Bush’s primary legacy, and most conservatives of that era supported and defended what many now consider one of the worst foreign policy mistakes in U.S. history. Yet during the Obama years, it was often conservative Republicans who were the loudest voices against U.S. intervention abroad, including America’s role in ousting Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and wide rightwing opposition to President Obama’s plan to strike Syria in 2013.

This foreign policy sea change—due in no small part to the politicking of a few libertarian-leaning Republicans who came out of the tea party and Ron Paul-inspired liberty movements—created new dividing lines within the GOP.

On the hawk and dove sides, both camps had planned to duke it out in the 2016 election with the victor getting to define Republican foreign policy. Two of the top names floated as possible 2016 GOP nominees were Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Both were young and came from the tea party movement, but more significantly were stark opposites on foreign policy.

Rubio was the hawks’ champion, an unrepentant Bush-Cheney Republican whose ideological supporters hoped his good looks and soaring rhetoric about American greatness might salvage the neoconservative brand that had been badly damaged in the aftermath of Iraq. Rubio Republicans saw Obama as a weak president who was too hesitant to flex U.S. military muscle, despite Obama’s interventions in Libya and many other global hotspots.

The opposite of Rubio, Paul represented a new emerging libertarian Republican faction that opposed “shoot first, ask questions later” foreign interventions by the U.S. and insisted that America could not afford to be the world’s policeman. Many more traditional conservatives had lined up with this libertarian view of foreign policy during the Obama years than would have ever been imaginable in the 2003 GOP. Paul-friendly Republicans saw Obama as a president who had stumbled into his own Iraq-style regime change in Libya and who was arming the allies of al-Qaeda by delivering arms and aid to Syria’s rebels. This more dovish faction also insisted that President Obama had carried out a largely unconstitutional foreign policy by not consulting Congress on military actions.

In this foreign policy showdown, Rubio and Paul ended up doing little in their presidential campaigns—2016 would become the year of Trump.

Trump was the middle ground between the two camps, blasting nation building and the Iraq War in one breath, and then claiming to be the “most militaristic” in another. Most of the old Bush-style neoconservatives remained generally opposed to Trump precisely because they believed he really would hit the foreign policy reset button and take Republicans away from being a generally pro-war, any war party.

Then, last week, President Trump attacked Syria. Neocons beamed.

Right now the hawks’ top pitchmen—Rubio, Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton—are praising Trump’s actions, but also insisting this strike is only the beginning. These hawks have some support among grassroots Trump partisans and fellow Republicans in Congress.

Countering the hawks are the most libertarian members of Congress—Paul, and longtime allies Reps. Justin Amash and Thomas Massie—who are condemning the Syria strike as unconstitutional and not in U.S. interests. These libertarians do not have a lot of congressional support, but have a groundswell among the conservative base, with even pro-Trump pundits like Ann Coulter agreeing with them on Syrian intervention.

Much of how this is viewed on the right is framed in establishment and anti-establishment terms: Hawks were glad to see Trump bend to Washington’s interventionist foreign policy consensus (a President Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio would have ordered the strike with probably less hesitancy than Trump), and talk radio conservatives disappointed by the president’s actions see it as the “swamp” draining Trump.

Whether Trump ends up having a heavily interventionist presidency of hawks’ dreams or something far more restrained remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: The president has set the table for a very different foreign policy debate than anything Republicans would have experienced during the last GOP administration.

And the war within the GOP goes on.


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Postby Daglord » Tue Apr 11, 2017 5:35 pm

Daglord wrote:
Megaterio Llamas wrote:'The senator from Kentucky is now working for Putin': John McCain slams Rand Paul for blocking Montenegro from joining NATO




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The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted in favor of the treaty with Montenegro on Jan. 11. The panel's chairman, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), predicts at least 98 senators will vote in favor. “We’re trying to figure out how to make it happen," Corker told POLITICO. "It will pass 98-2 or 99-1, but getting it on the floor right now is difficult.”

Russia hawks like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) worry “a great deal” that Russia will try to destabilize Montenegro before it becomes a full NATO member and has become one of the loudest voices pushing for a full Senate vote as soon as possible.

"We’re doing everything we can to get that up, I promise you.” he said. “I want to send a clear signal to our friends in Montenegro and to the Russians about how we feel, so I hope we can vote quickly,” added Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “The sooner the better.”

Advocates for delay include Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has raised concerns about the United States committing to defend another country in which Russia has a strong interest. He blocked a Senate attempt to vote on the treaty in December.

“I think that many are referring to this as a provocation to Russia, and also, I think NATO is too big already," Paul told POLITICO. "I think we should think long and hard if whether or not we are willing to go to war if Montenegro has a skirmish with somebody that surrounds them. Ultimately, joining NATO is not necessarily a benign thing.



remember this Mega? wasn't Trump supposed to reevaluate our role in NATO?

Trump approves Montenegro's NATO membership
https://www.rt.com/usa/384360-trump-montenegro-nato-ratification/

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President Donald Trump has signed the US approval for Montenegro to join NATO, following the majority vote in the Senate to ratify the small Balkan state’s accession to the trans-Atlantic alliance in March.

NATO is “central to ensuring peace and security on the European continent,” the White House said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that Montenegro’s membership will signal to other aspirants that the “door to membership in the Euro-Atlantic community of nations remains open.”

Countries in the Western Balkans are “free to choose their own future and select their own partners without outside interference or intimidation,” the statement added, using Obama-era language to refer to what used to be Yugoslavia and sidestepping the fact that Montenegro’s neighbors Croatia and Albania are already NATO members, and that the alliance bombed the country back 1999 during the campaign to occupy Kosovo.

“President Trump congratulates the Montenegrin people for their resilience and their demonstrated commitment to NATO’s democratic values,” the White House said.

More than half of Montenegro’s 620,000 inhabitants are opposed to NATO membership, according to recent polls. The ruling Democratic Party of Socialists has recently cracked down on the opposition and accused it of plotting a coup with Russian assistance.

DPS leader Milo Djukanovic, a former Communist official who reinvented himself as a pro-Western liberal democrat, has governed the former Yugoslav republic since 1997, and organized the controversial independence referendum in 2006.

The US Senate voted 97-2 to approve Montenegro’s NATO membership on March 28. The two dissenters were Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who said the decision would "add another country to the welfare wagon of NATO."


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Donald Trump Is Such a Skeptic of NATO He Just Approved Montenegro Joining the Alliance
http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/11/donald-trump-is-such-a-skeptic-of-nato-h

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President Trump approved the accession of Montenegro into NATO today after the Senate voted 97-2 last motnh to ratify Montenegro's membership, further solidifying the Trump administration's commitment to a status quo where the U.S. subsidizes the defense and military aspirations of the rest of the West, a sharp departure from Trump's pre-presidency rhetoric.

The only no votes in the Senate came from Republicans Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.). A 2016 poll of Macedonians found that support for joining NATO had "risen" to 47.3 percent.

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump's flippant remarks about the U.S. relationship to NATO were interpreted by many observers as a signal that, at best, Trump would support long overdue NATO reform or, at worse, that he'd pull the U.S. out of the alliance, perhaps even during an invasion of a Baltic state by Russia.

Respectful and diplomatic efforts by Defense Secretary James Mattis to relay to European NATO members the importance of increasing their contributions rather than relying on profligate U.S. spending were outright dismissed by European leaders. And why shouldn't they be? President Trump's opening offer of a massive increase in U.S. military spending certainly offered European leaders little incentive to push for an increase in their own military spending.

Then last week, Trump ordered missile strikes on Syria after blaming the Syrian government on a chemical weapons attack on civilians, acting as the police wing of the Office for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), entirely of his own volition. Trump spent much of the campaign insisting U.S. allies should pay for the defense the U.S. provides—yet the first military engagement he can call his own involved enforcing international law unilaterally and out-of-pocket.

It's hard to look at these developments and not conclude that the Europeans have totally clowned Trump—in exchange for refusing to seriously consider increasing their defense spending they have been rewarded not just with Trump's support for NATO expansion despite any clear commitment to reform, but also with Trump's willingness to commit the U.S. to act unilaterally as an enforcer of international law. Trump the candidate would've probably demanded the U.S. be paid for such enforcement. As president, he hasn't even questioned the assumptions underlying such a U.S. role.

Trump is scheduled to attend the NATO summit in Brussels next month—by then he will almost certainly be largely indistinguishable in form, if not in style, from his predecessors. On foreign policy, he is becoming largely indistinguishable from his campaign rival Hillary Clinton.


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Megaterio Llamas
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Postby Megaterio Llamas » Fri Apr 14, 2017 6:05 am

Justin Raimondo on NPR: Trump Supporters Abandoning Him Over Syria Strike

Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo on NPR’s “Here and Now” this morning about Trump supporters abandoning him over last week’s US missile attack on Syria.

Listen here:
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/04/ ... rump-syria
el rey del mambo


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