“This is an insane escalation. It tells every country that the US government believes in the first use of nuclear weapons against any and every country. Those responsible for this document should be committed to insane asylums, not left in policy positions where they can put it into action.”
“So, why is Vice-president Mike Pence attending the Winter Olympics in South Korea? Is it because he’s a sports fan who just wants to enjoy the quadrennial spectacle of the Olympic games? Unfortunately, no. Pence is going to the games for political purposes. He intends to use them as an opportunity to level a propaganda attack against North Korea, the communist regime that the U.S. government has long been committed to regime-changing.”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2018/02/08/political-gamesmanship-olympics/
“Trump is not the originator of this madness. We have spent decades preparing the slippery slope he is gleefully pushing us down.”
“Though lawmakers and concerned citizens alike can justifiably balk at the prospect of Trump becoming ‘Napoleonic‘ or wasting money on the pomp and circumstance of military worship, the far more damning truth is that this is only a natural progression of a decades-long fetish for American militarism, which, from the looks of the current climate in the United States, does not appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.”
Read more: https://steemit.com/news/@careywedler/what-everyone-is-missing-about-trump-s-military-parade
“Someone started arbitrarily and aggressively buying stocks and the decline was halved. Monday will still go down as a Wall Street massacre, but that anonymous superhero buyer or buyers made it a lot less bloody. Who was the market’s superhero? I’m going to tell you a story and then you decide.”
“Polls show that public opinion on NSA spying shifts back and forth depending upon who is in the White House. In other words, liberal or conservative voters generally aren’t opposed to mass surveillance as long as their party is in power.”
Read more: https://fee.org/articles/the-fisa-reauthorization-only-boosts-big-brother/
“Both parties suppressed this evidence of FBI abuse of the FISA process until after the FISA Amendments Act could be re-authorized. They didn’t want Americans to know how corrupt the surveillance system really is and how the US has become far too much like East Germany. That might cause more Americans to call up their Representatives and demand that the FISA mass surveillance amendment be allowed to sunset.”
“The FISA court has been a fount of outrages because it is an American Star Chamber: the court meets in secret, only hears the government’s side, and approves 99 percent+ of all the search warrants requested.”
Read more: http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/372324-will-fisa-secrecy-doom-democracy
“The involvement of the intelligence community in the 2016 presidential campaign, clumsy and disorganized as it appears to have been, will be part of the next election, and the ones after that. If you’re in search of a constitutional crisis, here it is. After all, when we let George W. Bush create, and Barack Obama greatly expand, the surveillance state, didn’t we think it would eventually come to this?”
“The FISA court document, declassified and released, contains confessions from both the FBI and DOJ that the agencies misled the court and falsely acquired surveillance permission. Why did the FBI and DOJ rush to confess to the FISA court? The reason is that NSA Director Adm. Rodgers discovered their illicit spying, investigated it, and let it be known that he was reporting the FBI and DOJ malfeasence to the FISA court. Adm. Rodgers also informed President Trump. All of this is known. Yet the House Intelligence Committee and the White House released the ‘Nunes Memo’ without pointing out that it was already confirmed by the FISA court itself and by NSA Director Adm. Rogers. Why?”