leonid wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2016 at 3:22pm:

A man of wealth and questionable taste

Edith Grove wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2016 at 8:10pm:


No sir. WWIII is what will happen if Trump wins.

Ain't happening. 

Some Guy wrote on Aug 23^rd, 2016 at 7:13am:


You will rue the day, drone! It's coming hard and fast.

leonid wrote on Aug 23^rd, 2016 at 12:19pm:




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******** {  " SIGH !!!!  "  }  *****************

leonid wrote on Aug 23^rd, 2016 at 1:04pm:



http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-dictators-club-1471908089


" The New Dictators’ Club "

" An echo of the 1930s in the budding alliance of Russia, Iran, Turkey and China.  "


By BRET STEPHENS



" In the fall of 1940 the governments of Japan, Italy and Germany—bitter enemies in World War I—signed the Tripartite Pact, pledging mutual support to “establish and maintain a new order of things” in Europe and Asia. Within five years, 70 million people would be killed in the effort to build, and then destroy, that new order.

The Pact was the culminating act in a series of nonaggression, friendship and neutrality treaties signed by the dictatorships of the day, sometimes to deceive anxious democracies but more often to divvy up the anticipated spoils of conquest. So it’s worth noting our new era of cooperation between dictatorships—and to think about where it could lead.

The era began in July 2015, when Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani paid a visit to Moscow to propose a plan to save Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria from collapse. Iran and Russia are not natural allies, even if they have a common client in Damascus. Iranians have bitter memories of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Kremlin has never been fond of Islamists, even of the Shiite variety.

But what tipped the scales in favor of a joint operation was a shared desire to humiliate the U.S. and kick it out of the Middle East. “America’s long-term scheme for the region is detrimental to all nations and countries, particularly Iran and Russia, and it should be thwarted through vigilance and closer interaction,” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told Vladimir Putin during the Russian’s visit to Tehran last November.

Since then, Tehran has agreed to purchase $8 billion in top-shelf Russian weapons and is seeking Moscow’s help to build another 10 nuclear reactors—useful reminders of how the mullahs are spending their sanctions-relief windfall. The two countries have also conducted joint naval exercises in the Caspian Sea. Just last week Russia used Iranian air bases (a little too publicly for Tehran’s taste) to conduct bombing raids on Syria.


All this is happening as the nuclear deal was supposed to be nudging Iran in a more pro-American direction. It’s also happening as Moscow and Ankara are moving toward rapprochement and even a possible alliance, less than a year after the Turks shot down a Russian jet. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim allowed last week that Mr. Assad will remain in power for the foreseeable future, and Russian media outlets are touting the possibility that Russian jets might use the air base at Incirlik to bomb targets in Syria. That all but presumes U.S. withdrawal.

Would Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan forfeit a U.S. alliance for the sake of a condominium with Russia, his country’s historic enemy? The real marvel is that it hasn’t happened already. Washington first proved useless to Ankara by failing to depose Mr. Assad. It’s again proving useless by failing to destroy Islamic State.

Barack Obama went out of his way to court Mr. Erdogan in his first term, but strongmen always have an instinctive contempt for feckless moralists. There’s a reason Turkish newspapers—all of them organs of the state—are whipping Turks into an anti-American frenzy with allegations that retired American generals were behind July’s failed coup. Mr. Erdogan is rapidly Iranianizing his regime on the Khomeini model. Turning the U.S. into a Great Satan is a necessary part of the process.

Then there’s China. On Monday, a Russian military spokesman announced that his country’s Pacific fleet would conduct joint operations with the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. This follows an apparently coordinated effort by the two navies in June to encroach Japanese territorial waters near the disputed Senkaku islands.

Mr. Putin’s relations with Beijing haven’t always been smooth—China is as adept at stealing Russian military technology as it is at hacking U.S. secrets, and the Russians don’t appreciate being treated as junior partners. But the drills in the South China Sea are another reminder that the Kremlin’s overriding foreign policy goal is to hobble and diminish the U.S. It’s a goal Beijing appears to share.

And why not? President Obama and his advisers continue to insist that the world has never been a better, safer, happier place than under their benign stewardship, meaning they no longer even register the continuous embarrassments of their foreign policy. The administration has become the Black Knight from “ Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” comically indifferent to his own dismemberment. Arms and legs all hacked off? “Tis but a scratch!”


Perhaps it’s in every strongman’s nature to seek and admire his political reflection wherever he finds it, whether it’s in a czar, an ayatollah, a sultan or a general secretary. Then again, what mainly unites the leaders of the new dictators’ club is the shared perception that they stand to lose very little in working against a country they detest and a president they contemn.

That’s a perception that is unlikely to change with the next U.S. administration. Readers searching for historical analogies with the present would be wrong to reach for the Tripartite Pact. But the ingredients from which that foul soup was made have now been laid on the table.  "

(Look for a mural of David Bowie!)

Some Guy wrote on Aug 24^th, 2016 at 8:15am:


Which Jordan are we talking about?

Edith Grove wrote on Aug 24^th, 2016 at 3:56pm:



Concur .


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" I LOVE YOU ALL !!!! "

Those who do not learn from history.......

Gosh, I love Alice Cooper: http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/19/us/alice-cooper-ashleigh-banfield-president-cnn-le...

<  ------------ Edith  .... ?!


http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-department-of-clinton-1472167746



" The U.S. Department of Clinton  "

" The latest emails show that State and the foundation were one seamless entity.  "



By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL




" This is the week that the steady drip, drip, drip of details about Hillary Clinton’s server turned into a waterfall. This is the week that we finally learned why Mrs. Clinton used a private communications setup, and what it hid. This is the week, in short, that we found out that the infamous server was designed to hide that Mrs. Clinton for three years served as the U.S. Secretary of the Clinton Foundation.

In March this column argued that while Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information was important, it missed the bigger point. The Democratic nominee obviously didn’t set up her server with the express purpose of exposing national secrets—that was incidental. She set up the server to keep secret the details of the Clintons’ private life—a life built around an elaborate and sweeping money-raising and self-promoting entity known as the Clinton Foundation.

Had Secretary Clinton kept the foundation at arm’s length while in office—as obvious ethical standards would have dictated—there would never have been any need for a private server, or even private email. The vast majority of her electronic communications would have related to her job at the State Department, with maybe that occasional yoga schedule. And those Freedom of Information Act officers would have had little difficulty—when later going through a state.gov email—screening out the clearly “personal” before making her records public. This is how it works for everybody else.

Mrs. Clinton’s problem—as we now know from this week’s release of emails from Huma Abedin’s private Clinton-server account—was that there was no divide between public and private. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department and her family foundation were one seamless entity—employing the same people, comparing schedules, mixing foundation donors with State supplicants. This is why she maintained a secret server, and why she deleted 15,000 emails that should have been turned over to the government.


Most of the focus on this week’s Abedin emails has centered on the disturbing examples of Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band negotiating State favors for foundation donors. But equally instructive in the 725 pages released by Judicial Watch is the frequency and banality of most of the email interaction. Mr. Band asks if Hillary’s doing this conference, or having that meeting, and when she’s going to Brazil. Ms. Abedin responds that she’s working on it, or will get this or that answer. These aren’t the emails of mere casual acquaintances; they don’t even bother with salutations or signoffs. These are the emails of two people engaged in the same purpose—serving the State-Clinton Foundation nexus.


The other undernoted but important revelation is that the media has been looking in the wrong place. The focus is on Mrs. Clinton’s missing emails, and no doubt those 15,000 FBI-recovered texts contain nuggets. Then again, Mrs. Clinton was a busy woman, and most of the details of her daily State/foundation life would have been handled by trusted aides. This is why they, too, had private email. Top marks to Judicial Watch for pursuing Ms. Abedin’s file from the start. A new urgency needs to go into seeing similar emails of former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills.
Mostly, we learned this week that Mrs. Clinton’s foundation issue goes far beyond the “appearance” of a conflict of interest. This is straight-up pay to play. When Mr. Band sends an email demanding a Hillary meeting with the crown prince of Bahrain and notes that he’s a “good friend of ours,” what Mr. Band means is that the crown prince had contributed millions to a Clinton Global Initiative scholarship program, and therefore has bought face time. It doesn’t get more clear-cut, folks.

That’s highlighted by the Associated Press’s extraordinary finding this week that of the 154 outside people Mrs. Clinton met with in the first years of her tenure, more than half were Clinton Foundation donors. Clinton apologists, like Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, are claiming that statistic is overblown, because the 154 doesn’t include thousands of meetings held with foreign diplomats and U.S. officials.

Nice try. As the nation’s top diplomat, Mrs. Clinton was obliged to meet with diplomats and officials—not with others. Only a blessed few outsiders scored meetings with the harried secretary of state and, surprise, most of the blessed were Clinton Foundation donors.

Mrs. Clinton’s only whisper of grace is that it remains (as it always does in potential cases of corruption) hard to connect the dots. There are “quids” (foundation donations) and “quos” (Bahrain arms deals) all over the place, but no precise evidence of “pros.” Count on the Clinton menagerie to dwell in that sliver of a refuge.

But does it even matter? What we discovered this week is that one of the nation’s top officials created a private server that housed proof that she continued a secret, ongoing entwinement with her family foundation—despite ethics agreements—and that she destroyed public records. If that alone doesn’t disqualify her for the presidency, it’s hard to know what would.  "