Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

factfinder_77

factfinder_77's Journal
factfinder_77's Journal
January 19, 2017

New CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room - 13 million pages of documents

Welcome to the new CIA Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room. Be sure to bookmark this site, and note that our former URL will be decommissioned in the near future.

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/

Do UFOs fascinate you? Are you a history buff who wants to learn more about the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam or the A-12 Oxcart? Have stories about spies always fascinated you? You can find information about all of these topics and more in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room.

January 19, 2017

Trump Has This Deep Fear That He Is Not a Legitimate President

the days immediately after the election that shocked the world, POLITICO Magazine convened the group of people who know Donald J. Trump better than anyone outside his family. We asked his biographers the questions that were on everyone’s mind: What happens next? Will the unabashedly self-promoting and self-obsessed businessman transform himself into a selfless and dignified president of the nation he was elected to lead?

Now, after more than two months of Trump’s norm-shattering transition, we gathered Gwenda Blair, Michael D’Antonio and Tim O’Brien by conference call (Wayne Barrett, the dean of Trump reporters, could not participate because of illness) to assess whether Trump has continued to surprise them. Their collective wisdom? In a word, no.

From his pick of nominees for posts in his cabinet to his belligerent use of Twitter (our conversation was a day before he traded barbs with Congressman John Lewis) to his unwillingness to cut ties with his business to avoid conflicts of interest, they see the same person they’ve always seen—the consummate classroom troublemaker; a vain, insecure bully; and an anti-institutional schemer, as adept at “gaming the system” as he is unashamed. As they look ahead to his inauguration speech in two days, and to his administration beyond, they feel confident predicting that he will run the country much as he has run his company. For himself.

“He’s not going to be that concerned with the actual competent administration of the government,” D’Antonio said. “It’s going to be what he seems to be gaining or losing in public esteem. So almost like a monarch. The figurehead who rallies people and gets credit for things.”


http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/trump-biographers-presidency-legitimate-214655
January 18, 2017

Priorities USA relaunches, hires Brian Fallon and Symone Sanders.

Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC that supported Hillary Clinton’s White House bid, is accelerating its move to reposition itself as a hub of post-2016 Democratic activity.

The group plans to bring on a pair of prominent operatives from both Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, including Brian Fallon, Clinton’s national press secretary and a frequent presence on television during campaign season, who will join the group as a consultant with the position of senior adviser. While he is expected to start his own public affairs practice, Fallon will spend the bulk of his time working for Priorities. Former Sanders national press secretary Symone Sanders will assume the role of strategist for communications and political outreach, a person familiar with the moves told POLITICO.

Led by chief strategist Guy Cecil, the group is also due to promote Patrick McHugh, its deputy executive director during the campaign cycle, to executive director, while Anne Caprara, who previously had that job, will move into a senior adviser role. Kim Kauffman, who led the group’s financial operations as it became the highest-raising super PAC ever, will keep that job in Priorities’ new incarnation.

The series of moves come as Priorities, which spent months savaging President-elect Donald Trump with television, digitally and radio ads, maneuvers Democrats’ rejiggered post-electoral landscape and builds out its new role — one that includes Every Citizen Counts, a voting rights group with which it merged in December. Planning to work with a series of left-leaning groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood Action Fund — and to support movements and ballot measures in the states — the super PAC is also expanding its research and digital operations.


http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/priorities-usa-democrats-233744
January 18, 2017

And the 2016 Ralph Nader Award Goes to Bernie Sanders - Time.com

Sanders distracted Hillary Clinton from creating a unified vision for the future

On Election Day, Senator Bernie Sanders earned the 2016 “Ralph Nader Award” for the Leftist Most Responsible for Helping Republicans Win the Presidency. True, Donald Trump cleverly exploited voters’ frustrations. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 was as rigid and empty as it was when she lost in 2008. Still, Sanders helped Clinton lose. His insurgency pushed her too far left to prevent an effective re-centering in the fall, while goading her into wooing different constituencies rather than uniting the nation.

In fairness, Sanders ran a surprisingly effective campaign tapping the same anti-establishment fury Donald Trump stirred. Although Sanders and Trump are very different, their campaigns were not. Each treated Hillary Clinton as a compromised, Wall Street–worshipping, Establishment sellout. Both demonized Washington insiders and free trade, rather than tackling the real structural problem: the United States deindustrialized because Americans refuse to pay what it costs to hire American workers and instead buy cheaper imported products. As a result, just as Ralph Nader siphoned tens of thousands of votes on Election Day 2000 in Florida from Al Gore, causing the deadlock and George W. Bush’s victory, Bernie Sanders’ similar vampire effect enfeebled Hillary Clinton.

This dynamic followed a classic historical pattern. Sanders drew Clinton from the center toward the Democrats’ extreme flank. That shift paralleled Jimmy Carter’s leftward lurch when Ted Kennedy ran in 1980, and George H.W. Bush’s rightwing swerve when Pat Buchanan rebelled in 1992. Each time, the frontrunners felt forced to placate loyalists they should have been able to take for granted, while embracing extreme positions that haunted them during the general election campaign.

This year replayed that Insurgent’s Vampire Effect. Clinton expected to inherit the nomination without serious opponents. Joe Biden and John Kerry, each of whom sees a potential president whenever he looks in the mirror, didn’t run, deferring to the Clintons’ power in the party and to Hillary Clinton’s claim that it was “our time” as women to win the presidency—an appeal that, surprisingly, bored younger women.

As an independent, Sanders lacked such loyalty. His hip campaign addressed the displaced and disempowered, claiming Hillary Clinton was the problem not the solution. In response, Hillary Clinton channeled Walter Mondale in 1984, desperately appealing to different special interests. Characteristically, after winning Super Tuesday, she declared: “We have to defend all our rights—workers’ rights, and women’s rights, civil rights and voting rights, LGBT rights and rights for people with disabilities.” This pluralistic appeal failed to offer a unifying national mission. It illustrated Donald Trump’s complaint that Democrats were so busy kowtowing to minorities they neglected the white majority and the nation’s need for consensus.

Having catered to the millennial and minority sensibility in the spring, Hillary Clinton missed the mainstream, failing to recalibrate for the fall. This misread was most apparent in her neglect of her greatest political ally, Bill Clinton, and his legacy. In the 1990s, President Clinton shrewdly led from the center, forging a “Third Way” progressivism more balanced than the big-government, special interest group-oriented liberalism which Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush handily defeated in the 1980s. Clintonite centrism embraced free trade as bringing prosperity not exporting jobs. Clinton fought crime, framing it as threat to all Americans, especially blacks. Clinton reformed welfare to restore governmental credibility and recipients’ dignity. Clinton talked candidly about restructuring the economy while rebuilding traditional culture, because too many Americans felt they were “living in the funhouse.”

Pressed by the Sanders Sensation, intimidated by Black Lives Matter, even Bill Clinton backpedaled, apologizing for fighting crime and his centrist legacy. With no one explaining how bad crime was in the 1990s, how dysfunctional the welfare system was, how two-thirds of blacks supported both initiatives, Clinton’s legislation seemed draconian. Hillary Clinton became a doughnut candidate, sprinkling sweets to particular groups but lacking any core. That distortion made her the perfect foil for Donald Trump’s demagoguery.

Sanders liberals considered Clintonian centrism not liberal enough, not minority-sensitive enough, not pure enough. The result is a president-elect hostile to liberalism, unafraid of demonizing minorities and epitomizing a killer instinct that makes Clintonian triangulation look naïve. All this makes Bernie Sanders the Ralph Nader of 2016


http://time.com/4569766/bernie-sanders-ralph-nader-2016/
January 17, 2017

Trump to be sued for inappropriate sexual contact, lawyer says

Source: Washingtonexaminer

A woman who has accused Donald Trump of inappropriate sexual conduct in the past is expected to announce a lawsuit against the president-elect at a press conference Tuesday afternoon.

Multiple reports indicated attorney Gloria Allred will hold a press conference at 2:30 p.m. ET in Los Angeles announcing a lawsuit against Trump. The plaintiff is one of the multiple women who accused Trump of inappropriate sexual contact before the election

More than 10 women accused Trump of sexual misconduct before the election. Many of the women came forward after a tape was released showing Trump making lewd statements about women on a hot mic during a taping of Access Hollywood.

The announcement on Tuesday would be the first lawsuit against Trump regarding those claims.

http://launch.newsinc.com/embed.html?trackingGroup=91212&siteSection=washexam590_ent_mus_sty&videoId=31626152

Read more: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-to-be-sued-for-inappropriate-sexual-contact-lawyer-says/article/2612067

January 17, 2017

Trump eyes 10 percent spending cuts, 20 percent slash of federal workers - thanks low income workers

Insiders said that the spending reductions in some departments could go as high as 10 percent and staff cuts to 20 percent, numbers that would rock Washington if he follows through.

At least two so-called "landing teams" in Cabinet agencies have relayed the call for cuts as part of their marching orders to shrink the flab in government.

The cuts would target discretionary spending, not mandated programs such as Medicare or Social Security, the sources said.

The spending reductions are expected to be used to help pay for Trump's plan to boost the Pentagon's budget, tax cuts and some pet projects, potentially including the anti-immigration wall on the nation's southern border.

The teams also are looking at staffing cuts over four years through attrition, a hiring freeze and reorganization.

The plan is winning cheers in conservative, anti-tax and anti-spending corners in Washington that have long sought massive cuts in the bureaucracy.



http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/boom-trump-eyes-10-spending-cuts-20-slash-of-federal-workers/article/2612037



January 17, 2017

Trump a Russian double agent-forcing a hate China policy that will lead to war between US and China

Trump tries to warm up to Russia even if all experts says they are engaging in covert tactics to interfere and reduce US power.
At the same time, Trump is provoking China putting us all in risk for a future monetary and/or military war between US and China.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-usa-trump-idUSKBN15001X

Profile Information

Member since: Tue Apr 5, 2016, 04:54 PM
Number of posts: 841
Latest Discussions»factfinder_77's Journal