Wenzel:Saudi Arabia Threatens to Dump US Treasury Holdings, If Congress Passes 9-11 Bill

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Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, reports NYT.

According to NYT, Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.

The administration, which argues that the legislation would put Americans at legal risk overseas, has been lobbying so intently against the bill that some lawmakers and families of Sept. 11 victims are infuriated. In their view, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the kingdom and has thwarted their efforts to learn what they believe to be the truth about the role some Saudi officials played in the terrorist plot.

Full Report by Robert Wenzel @ The Ron Paul Report Institute:http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/saudi-arabia-threatens-united-states-will-dump-us-treasury-holdings-if-congress-passes-9-11-bill

Krayewski:”The 1994 Crime Bill Was A Liberal Policy”

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Bill Clinton has become part of the 2016 election news cycle once again. He confronted protesters associated with Black Lives Matter who were denouncing the 1994 crime bill, a major piece of legislation that instituted a lot of the policies that drove over-criminalization and hyper-incarceration in the last twenty years.

“You’re defending the people who kill the lives you say matter,” Clinton told the protesters, attempting to link tough on crime policies (which are popular in urban area and among urban Democratic politicians despite the mainstream rhetoric) to crime reduction.

Twenty years ago the 1994 crime bill passed with broad support. It has become an issue this election cycle given increased interest in issues of police and criminal justice reform. Yet arguments over the crime bill have avoided engaging the uncomfortable truth about the role of bigger government in promoting police violence in favor of rhetorical acrobatics.

further down, the post continues:
It matters. One revisionist tact taken with the 1994 crime bill is that it was never supported by liberals. Salon, for example, insists Bill Clinton’s “right-leaning New Democrat policy record is a bad fit for today’s liberal politics.” Clinton blames Republicans for forcing him to add tougher provisions to the bill. Yet the 1994 crime bill went through Congress when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. It was supported by Democrats across the political spectrum, from center-left to hard left. Every member of the leadership of the progressive-leaning Congressional Black Caucus voted for the 1994 crime bill, even as their chairman at the time has now tried to deny he voted in favor of it. 75 percent of House Democrats voted for the bill. They were joined by 46 Republicans and one Independent, the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.

Full post by Ed Krayewski @ Reason Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/08/the-1994-crime-bill-was-a-liberal-policy

Shikha Dalma on “Ted Cruz’s Assault on the Citizenship Rights of Americans”

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After his third-place finish in New Hampshire, GOP presidential contender Ted Cruz is trying to reinvent himself as a civil libertarian in a bid for Sen. Rand Paul’s supporters. Paul’s supporters should be very wary. If Cruz’s extreme anti-gay and anti-immigration tirades don’t give them pause already, the Expatriate Terrorist Act, Cruz’s unconstitutional brainchild, which Sen. Paul refuses to support, certainly should.

The bill’s alleged purpose, as per the Texas senator’s explanation during the New Hampshire GOP presidential debate, is to stop Americans who’ve joined ISIS from returning home to “wage jihad against America.” That adds up to all of 12 Americans give or take. In exchange, however, the bill would expose 300 million U.S. citizens—both naturalized and natural born, both at home and abroad—to the threat of losing their citizenship.

Cruz first introduced this monstrosity in the Senate in 2014, only to have it shot down. But since the San Bernardino attacks, he has renewed his efforts to push it through the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which he sits, and bring it for a floor vote. Meanwhile, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has introduced a companion bill in the House. And given that Republicans now control both chambers, absent a filibuster, this awful legislation could well pass Congress and reach the president’s desk.

Shikha Dalma explains how awful this proposal is @ Reason http://reason.com/archives/2016/02/23/ted-cruzs-assault-on-the-citizenship-rig

Eric Margolis:”Bush Haunts The GOP”

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“The evil that men do lives after them,” wrote Shakespeare. A prime example, former US President George W. Bush who appeared last week campaigning in South Carolina for his amiable younger brother, Jeb.

George W. continues to haunt the Republican Party and damage its electoral chances. At home, Bush has been staying out of public gaze; abroad, he is widely hated and limits overseas travel due to fear of war crimes arrest for his 2003 invasions of Iraq.

Republican spin doctors and the rightwing US media has been trying to soft soap Bush and his mentor, Dick Cheney, for years and slowly expunge their disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that opened a Pandora’s Box of horrors across the Muslim world. Democrats who cheered the war have equally sought to dodge responsibility. However, Hillary Clinton can’t seem to escape her tawdry war record.

The US, claim the Bush/Cheney amen chorus, was “misled” into invading Iraq by “faulty intelligence,” misled by the hope to promote democracy among the benighted Muslims; on a noble quest to remove a frightful dictator Saddam; and, of course, the famous missing “weapons of mass destruction.”

As candidate Donald Trump said last week, these were all bare-faced lies. These spurious allegations had one purpose: to mislead Americans into believing that Bush’s aggression in Iraq was a crusade for justice rather than a crude attempt to turn Iraq, with the world’s second biggest oil reserves, into an American vassal petrostate.

Unfortunately, mainstream America has not yet understood the enormity of the crimes that were committed in Afghanistan and Iraq. These include some one million civilians, cities destroyed, death squads, drone wars, kidnapping, torture and turning the US into a Stasi-like police state. And destruction of Iraq’s water and sewage treatment plants by US air attacks, spreading disease and pestilence across the nation.

Full commentary by Eric Margolis @ The Ron Paul Institute http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2016/february/21/bush-haunts-the-gop/

Ed Krayewski asks “Where have all the anti-war candidates gone?”

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I have a student in one of my classes who told me the other day he had to finish the semester early because he was being deployed to Afghanistan for a second time. The class is about the history of American journalism, so the final lectures cover the media’s role in pushing wars like the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, and even the war on drugs. I hope I get to cover that with him before he leaves.

The war to which the student is being sent ended in 2014, according to President Obama, who said the Afghanistan effort was over even though he had left 10,000 U.S. troops there. The withdrawal of those troops has been postponed a number of times, often at the behest of the weak Afghan government.

In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned on the idea that he would end the unpopular Iraq War and focus on prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, which he argued President Bush had ignored by starting a second war in Iraq. Today, the Obama administration has been engaged in the war in Afghanistan longer than the Bush administration prosecuted the Iraq War. There are few pronouncements anymore explaining why the U.S. is in Afghanistan, other than to train Afghan troops and support counterterrorism operations, the mission for many years now.

Obama launched his presidential campaign as one of the few candidates who had opposed the Iraq war from the beginning (he was a state senator representing Hyde Park in Chicago in 2003). The introduction of positions on the war in Afghanistan complicated the anti-war narrative, but did not dispel all his supporters of it, as Obama apologists argued when President Obama’s Afghanistan surge was being announced.

Of course there were authentically anti-war candidates in 2008, on the Democratic and Republican side. The most successful of them was Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R), who also ran in 2012, winning six state primaries. The anti-war candidates on the 2008 Democratic side, like Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, were relegated to the fringes quickly.

Paul’s position on non-intervention and war was unique among Republicans, whose foreign policy platform was captured in the 2000s entirely by philosophies of interventionism.

Full commentary by Ed Krayewski @ Reason http://reason.com/blog/2016/02/19/death-of-the-anti-war-candidate

Charles Koch: Bernie Sanders Right that Economy is Rigged

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As he campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) often sounds like he’s running as much against me as he is the other candidates. I have never met the senator, but I know from listening to him that we disagree on plenty when it comes to public policy.

Even so, I see benefits in searching for common ground and greater civility during this overly negative campaign season. That’s why, in spite of the fact that he often misrepresents where I stand on issues, the senator should know that we do agree on at least one — an issue that resonates with people who feel that hard work and making a contribution will no longer enable them to succeed.

The senator is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.

I agree with him.

Democrats and Republicans have too often favored policies and regulations that pick winners and losers. This helps perpetuate a cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty in the United States. These are complicated issues, but it’s not enough to say that government alone is to blame. Large portions of the business community have actively pushed for these policies.

Full Commentary by Charles Koch @ The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-koch-this-is-the-one-issue-where-bernie-sanders-is-right/2016/02/18/cdd2c228-d5c1-11e5-be55-2cc3c1e4b76b_story.html

Gov. Gary Johnson responds to State of the Union Address

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January 12, 2016, Santa Fe, NM – Former New Mexico Governor and presidential candidate Gary Johnson released the following statement following President Obama’s State of the Union Address:

“I applaud the President’s optimism. I too am an optimist. But I have a real problem with basing that optimism on what government has done over the past 7 years and what President Obama wants it to do in the future.

He says that anyone who says the economy is in decline is peddling fiction. We can quibble over economists’ numbers, but it doesn’t take an economist to know that continuing to add to the national debt is bankrupting us – and that debt has doubled on his watch, aided and abetted by Congress.

He talks about medical advances, after having done everything in his power to kill medical innovation with new taxes and layers of bureaucracy. His signature promise of better care and lower cost simply isn’t happening.

He speaks of civil rights and those who have resisted expanding them. This from a President whose Administration continues at every turn to dismantle the 4th Amendment, spy on American citizens and plant the government in every aspect of society.

To be fair, there have been steps in the right direction. Meaningful criminal justice reform is taking hold across the nation. More and more governments at all levels are finally seeing the failure of the War on Drugs. But far too many Americans are still being victimized by militarized police and heavy-handed laws.

My assessment of the State of the Union is quite different than President Obama’s, and much simpler. I see a national debt that will hit $20 trillion by the time he leaves office. I see a government that was too big and too overreaching when he took office, and has gotten more so under his watch. And I challenge anyone to show that we are today safer after years of war, failed nation-building abroad and foreign policy chaos.

I’m optimistic, but not because of anything the government is going to do for us. I’m optimistic because it is clear America is tired of too much government and too little freedom, and appears poised to demand change – a different kind of change than we have gotten over the past 7 years.”

Gary Johnson served as Governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003, and ran for President in 2012 as the candidate of The Libertarian Party. Gov. Johnson is a candidate for the nomination of The Libertarian Party for President in 2016. More information on the Gary Johnson campaign can be found @ https://www.garyjohnson2016.com/

Gallup:”Democratic, Republican Identification Near Historical Lows”

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PRINCETON, N.J. — In 2015, for the fifth consecutive year, at least four in 10 U.S. adults identified as political independents. The 42% identifying as independents in 2015 was down slightly from the record 43% in 2014. This elevated percentage of political independents leaves Democratic (29%) and Republican (26%) identification at or near recent low points, with the modest Democratic advantage roughly where it has been over the past five years.

Full report on the rise of Independent voters in America @ The Gallup Organization: http://www.gallup.com/poll/188096/democratic-republican-identification-near-historical-lows.aspx?g_source=Politics&g_medium=newsfeed&g_campaign=tiles

The results of the latest poll show declining loyalty to the two major parties. The growing importance of independent voters provides fertile ground for a third party challenge in 2016

Eland:”U.S. Should Stop Supporting Likely Saudi War Crimes”

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The United Nations top official on human rights recently told the U.N. Security Council that the U.S.-supported, Saudi Arabian-led coalition of Sunni nations fighting Shi’ite Houthi rebels in Yemen bore a disproportionate responsibility for attacks on civilians. Since the civil war in Yemen began in March 2015, more than 2,700 civilians have been killed and dozens of hospitals and schools have been attacked, leading the United Nations to warn of violations of international law.

The problem is that the United States is supporting the Saudi-led coalition’s air strikes by providing intelligence for targeting and also by refueling coalition’s war planes, thus extending the range of their bombing. Domestically, Saudi Arabia has a horrendous record on human rights that it is exporting to Yemen via bombing civilians there. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein exacerbated the Sunni-Shi’ite division throughout the Islamic world, and the war in Yemen is actually a joust for influence in the Persian Gulf between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite Iran, which are bitter regional rivals

Full commentary by Ivan Eland of The Independent Institute @ http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=8635

Chris Christie:”I will shoot down that plane!”

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At the Republican debate on National Security, Wednesday December 15, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called for a no-fly zone over Syria, and committed to enforcing it with brutal force. Wolf Blitzer posed the question: if a Russian plane is flying over Syria, would you want to shoot it down? Governor Christie gave an emphatic response:”I would shoot down that plane!”

To clarify, Governor Christie is not likely to fly a combat plane and actually shoot the plane down himself. Like all the other Republican candidates on the debate stage, Governor Christie has no experience of military service. He does not know how to fly a combat plane, and it is not clear that any American combat planes can support that much weight in the cockpit. Governor Christie just wants to sound tough.

Christie did not explain why America is authorized to order a no-fly zone over Syria. Congress has not declared war on Syria, and no one is advocating a declaration of war on Syria, even as they talk of declaring war on ISIS. As Sen. Rand Paul pointed out, Russian planes are flying over Syria at the request of the Syrian government and at the request of the Iraqi government which was installed after American troops overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime. Shooting down a Russian plane is a recipe for a new world war.

During the Cold War, America never shot down a Russian combat plane. Even after Soviet aircraft shot down Korean Airliner KAL 007, neither the United States nor the Republic of Korea responded with military action. Making such a pledge amounts to more chickenhawk droppings, the like of which littered the debate stage on Wednesday.

Sen. Marco Rubio talked of asserting American leadership, apparently through political interventionism backed by threat of military force. His baby face has probably never seen combat, except maybe the Bush/Gore recount battle of 2000.

Sen. Ted Cruz talked about “carpet bombing Isis” and making sand glow in the dark. In the 1960s there was a rash of airplane hijackings by people who wanted to go to revolutionary Cuba. Does Senator Cruz think that a proper response would have been to make Cuba glow in the dark?

Governor Kasich wants to “give Russia a punch in the nose.” Is he going to take a leave of absence from running Ohio’s government to go fight Russia? Probably not.

And Carly Fiorina wants to “bring back the warrior class” including Gen. McChrystal and Gen. Petreaus. Apparently she thinks the Jihadis don’t have enough weapons. The biggest accomplish of Gen, Betray-us when he was in charge of security in Iraq was to lose track of 157,000 guns. Not sure how that made Iraq safer, or why Carly Fiorina thinks these people knew what they were doing. McChrystal, Petreaus and the others she mentioned created the mess in Iraq that has led to the rise of the Islamic State. But Ms Fiorina wanted to sound tough – a chickhawk among the chickenhawks.

If the Republicans cared about America, they would take the clowns who were on stage Wednesday night, put them on a bus, and send it to the George Washington Bridge – and we can hope that Christie’s underlings have learned from him how to close down that bridge till the election is over and these people cannot do as much harm.