Is America becoming a rogue state?

The State Department stopped using the term years ago to describe the likes of Iran and North Korea, figuring it was needlessly provocative. But it would seem the incoming Trump administration plans to handle its affairs — domestic and foreign — in a manner that meets the dictionary definition of a “rogue state” as one “that conducts its policy in a dangerously unpredictable way.”

Even before Donald Trump threw Sino-American relations into a new round of turmoil by speaking with the Taiwanese leader and by trolling a nation of 1.4 billion people on Twitter, Trump and his team set off new chaos between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, with Trump praising the repressive regime of the latter and pledging to visit, while a member of his transition team told the former that Trump supports designating Pakistan a terrorist haven.

Trump snubbed our closest ally, Britain, by having post-election calls with nine foreign leaders before granting British Prime Minister Theresa May the honor. He shattered protocol by suggesting Britain name Nigel Farage, the Brexit leader, ambassador to the United States. Meanwhile, NATO leaders meeting in Brussels this week were on edge about Trump’s coziness with Russia and his dismissive words about the alliance.
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Boeing’s current contract to provide the next generation of the presidential plane is for $170 million, but the Air Force plans to ask the Seattle giant to heavily modify the two 747-8 jets it has on order. The current budget for the Presidential Aircraft Recapitalization program puts the price tag at $2.9 billion—a shocking figure, since Boeing lists the standard 747-8 for $357 million. And that only takes the program to 2021, the standard ‘five years out’. The planes aren’t due to enter service until 2023 or 2024, so costs will rise.

“The $4 billion figure looks reasonable,” says Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who previously oversaw Department of Defense acquisitions at the White House Office of Management and Budget. OK, “reasonable” may not seem right to anyone unfamiliar with American military budgets, but that doesn’t mean Trump’s right to say “costs are out of control.”

“Given the extraordinary capabilities that they want in this aircraft, that’s not an unreasonable cost for two,” Cancian says.

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That means packing these planes with electrical upgrades, with backup power units, secure communications systems, and military spec flight and navigation controls. For the two 747-200s the president uses now, that means multi-frequency radios capable of air-to-air, air-to-ground, and satellite communications. It takes years of serious spending to develop and integrate all that into a new plane (the 747-8 entered service in 2011). Especially since you’ve got to harden every bit of it to shrug off the electromagnetic waves that can result from nuclear explosions and tend to fry electronics.
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Shaken by weeks of death threats and online attacks fueled by a bizarre conspiracy theory, the independent business owners on this block of Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington gathered at Terasol restaurant just after Thanksgiving to discuss what to do. Though they had repeatedly reported the harassment to District police and the FBI, the abuse had only intensified.

Terasol’s co-owner, Sabrina Ousmaal, who had begged authorities for help, worried that the worst was yet to come.

“It only takes one crazy with a gun,” she recalled saying at the meeting.

On Sunday, police say, a North Carolina man with an assault rifle walked into Comet Ping Pong, the pizzeria across the street that had become the subject of a widely shared fake news story linking Hillary Clinton to a child sex ring. He fired his gun at least twice before pointing it at an employee.
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Really? The Affordable Care Act has been “killing jobs”? Let’s take a closer look to see if Pence has any idea what he’s talking about.

As regular readers may recall, in 2014, the first full year of ACA implementation, job growth reached a 15-year high. In fact, the first two years of ACA implementation were the best back-to-back yearsfor job creation since the 1990s.

But we can go a little further with this. Forbes’ Dan Diamond made a great observation, which inspired the above chart, noting private-sector employment in the United States over the last eight years. The red line shows the final two years of the Bush/Cheney era, as the private sector shed jobs; the light blue line shows the first year of the Obama era, when the Great Recession started to end; and the hard blue line shows March 2010 through the present.

As Diamond added a while back, “Obamacare was signed into law in March 2010. The private sector hasn’t lost jobs since.”

As things stand, the U.S. economy is on track to create over 2 million jobs in 2016, which will be the sixth consecutive year in which we’ve crossed this threshold. The last time Americans saw a six-year stretch like this was also the late 1990s.
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Throughout his time in public life, Donald Trump has never been truth-oriented, but last week the president-elect told a rather specific lie: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” This was a demonstrable falsehood, and neither Trump nor any of his allies have been able to bolster the bogus claim with evidence.

So instead, Team Trump has apparently embraced a post-modern debate about the inherent value and meaning of truth.

One pro-Trump pundit argued last week, for example, that there’s “no such thing” as facts anymore. Corey Lewandowski added that American voters “understood that sometimes, when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar, you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

Outgoing RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who’ll soon become the White House chief of staff, was asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” yesterday about Trump lying about voter fraud. Priebus, without proof, said it’s “possible” that millions of illegal ballots were cast. When host John Dickerson noted that there is no evidence to support such a claim, Priebus responded, “I think the president-elect is someone who has pushed the envelope and caused people to think in this country.”
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The future top Democrat in the Senate has called for a congressional investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who will succeed the retiring Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as the Senate minority leader in the Congress that convenes in January, has signed on to the demand for a congressional inquiry into the Russian hacking of political targets—including the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign—during the 2016 campaign. "Foreign interference in our elections is a serious issue, and deserves a vigorous investigation," Schumer tells Mother Jones.

Two weeks ago, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the senior Democrat on the House oversight committee, sent a letter to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the committee's chairman, asking that Chaffetz launch an investigation of Russian intervention in the election. This request came two days after the chief of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, said a "nation-state"—meaning Russia—had messed in the 2016 elections "to achieve a specific effect." Rogers was referring to the hacking of Democratic targets and the release of the pilfered information via WikiLeaks. Cummings noted in his letter that Chaffetz had told him that he was "open to considering such an investigation." But Chaffetz has yet to respond to Cummings, according to a Cummings spokesperson. And a spokeswoman for Chaffetz did not respond to a request for comment.

Talking to reporters earlier this month, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the top House Democrat, said Democrats would demand such a probe: "Something is not right with this picture and I think the American people deserve an investigation into how a foreign government had an impact on our election." And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who was harshly critical of Trump during the campaign, proposed that Congress hold hearings on "Russia's misadventures throughout the world," including the DNC hack. "Were they involved in cyberattacks that had a political component to it in our elections?" Graham recently asked.
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It is a literal crying shame that the mainstream media failed to scream bloody murder over a national security story this week that deserves the highest priority: confirmed Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Little, if anything, was reported that on Tuesday last, the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Admiral Michael Rogers, was queried about the release of hacked information during the American general election and Donald Trump’s campaign. Admiral Rogers said;

“This was a conscious effort by a nation-state [Russia] to attempt to achieve a specific effect. This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily.”

It is nearly impossible to imagine a more stunning statement and damning indictment coming from the head of the primary United States security agency. Of course, it should not be a revelation; Admiral Rogers’ statement echoed similar remarks from many other senior American officials that are not connected to the newest arm of the Republican Party and Donald J. Trump, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

What Admiral Rogers said on the most fundamental level was that an adversarial foreign government, Russia, “directly intervened in the US election to obtain a desired end:” to undermine Americans’ confidence in the American electoral process or to install the Russian oligarchs’ candidate Donald Trump. It was likely to achieve both of Vladimir Putin’s “desired ends.” In fact, it is no exaggeration to claim with confidence that Admiral Rogers clearly accused Vladimir Putin of meddling in the election to achieve another desired end; abolish America’s democracy with an authoritarian fascist committed to furthering Russia’s worldview.
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So first we had that breaking news story about widespread voter machine hacking (and if you haven’t read those chilling details, check them out here). Well, it seems that things have gotten even more dire. Three Wisconsin counties have straight-up admitted that they committed fraud.

We must stand against him, and this guide to resisting Trump is now more important than ever!

Occupy Democrats writes that “A county in Wisconsin named Outagamie County had four precincts in the areas of Cicero, Grand Chute, Bear Creek, and Hortonville which all showed that they had fewer people overall than had voted in the presidential election. This instance, naturally, caused the Internet to fly in a fury claiming, rightly, that voter fraud was taking place. The precincts quickly adjusted their voting totals, which removed over a thousand votes from Donald Trump’s side. What a coincidence, the party which has spent years decrying voter fraud were once again benefiting from voter fraud. Dan Solomon of Fast Company was the first to point this out.”

The village clerk went on record to say, “In order to give election returns to the Outagamie County Clerk’s office as quickly as possible the Chief Inspector added together the votes from the election machine tapes. An error was made while keying the numbers on the calculator during this process resulting in an incorrect number of votes reported on Election night. The official process of tallying the votes was completed and rechecked. These vote numbers were recorded and delivered to the Outagamie County Clerk’s office the morning of November 9th. The official tally reflects the accurate votes in the Village.”

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A complaint has been filed against FBI Director James Comey with Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility that accuses him of interfering in a presidential election.

The Democratic Coalition Against Trump released a statement announcing their complaint:

The Democratic Coalition Against Trump filed a complaint with the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility on Friday against FBI Director James Comey for interfering in the Presidential election, following the FBI’s decision to open up an investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails this close to Election Day. Federal employees are forbidden from participating in political activities under the Hatch Act.

“It is absolutely absurd that FBI Director Comey would support Donald Trump like this with only 11 days to go before the election,” said Scott Dworkin, Senior Advisor to the Democratic Coalition Against Trump. “It is an obvious attack from a lifelong Republican who used to serve in the Bush White House, just to undermine her campaign. Comey needs to focus on stopping terrorists and protecting America, not investigating our soon to be President-Elect Hillary Clinton.”
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An armed shooter opened fire at a Washington, D.C., pizzeria in order to “self-investigate” a false conspiracy about the restaurant pushed by fake news websites and spread by fringe right-wing media outlets. Yet right-wing media figures have dismissed and downplayed the impact of fake news, calling it “satire and parody that liberals don't understand,” saying it is “in the eye of the beholder,” and claiming that concerns about fake news are “silly” and “nonsense.”


Fake News Just Caused An Active Shooter Situation In D.C.

A Fabricated Story Claiming That A D.C. Pizzeria Is A Child-Trafficking Hub Led To A Man With Gun Opening Fire In The Restaurant. Fake news articles alleging that the Washington, D.C., restaurant Comet Ping Pong was a hub for child trafficking were widely shared on social media after the pizzeria was mentioned in hacked emails from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, that were released by WikiLeaks. As The New York Times reported, “The articles appeared on Facebook and on websites such as The New Nationalist and The Vigilant Citizen, with one headline blaring: ‘Pizzagate: How 4Chan Uncovered the Sick World of Washington’s Occult Elite.’” As a result, the owner of the restaurant and the staff started receiving a torrent of threats via social media, including one message that said, “I will kill you personally.” On December 4, a man walked into the restaurant with an assault rifle and fired “one or more shots,” which did not hit anyone, because he was trying to “self-investigate” the conspiracy theory. (The New York Times, 11/21/16; Media Matters, 11/22/16; The Washington Post, 12/4/16)

Conspiracy Spread Due To "Alt-Right" And Fringe Right-Wing Media. The Daily Beast noted that the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory “began proliferating on websites like 4chan and Reddit, especially a Reddit forum frequented by Trump supporters and the alt-right,” which is a movement made up of white nationalists and misogynists, along with the right-wing media website Breitbart. The outlet also noted that the shooter on "his Facebook account ... likes both InfoWars and its host Alex Jones," who "published innumerable stories about Pizzagate." (The Daily Beast, 12/4/16; Media Matters, 8/25/16)
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