“It’s easy to explain, once you understand that there is no such thing as foreign policy: all policy is domestic.”
Read more: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2017/04/11/behind-trump-syria-turnabout/
“The real story—and scandal—of intelligence surveillance and incidental collection is the mass incidental collection and use of Americans’ communications without a warrant. Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), countless Americans are subject to the same incidental collection that President Trump now thinks is a serious problem, and the rules for accessing and using those communications are far more lax than the Susan Rice process, and totally unrelated to foreign intelligence and national security.”
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-real-surveillance-problem/
“The Trump administration’s justification for its airstrikes on Syria manages somehow to be even weaker than Obama’s Libya arguments. The time to push back is running out for Congress. If they can’t do it with a deeply, widely unpopular president who in his first three months in office has antagonized not just members of the opposition party but members of his own as well, they may never be able to.”
Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2017/04/07/congress-and-potus-agree-the-president-c
“In October, Trump blasted then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton‘s position on Syria — that the U.S. military should take out al-Assad’s airfields, the exact type of strike Trump ordered Thursday — by saying attacking a Russian-backed government could start World War III.”
Read more: https://mic.com/articles/173471/trump-world-war-iii-attacking-syria-wwiii-ww3
“Presidential fear-mongering has a long and sordid history. We cannot understand the threat that Trump poses without recognizing how prior presidents used similar ploys.”
“On Thursday, two Democratic senators said that Trump indicated he would support the bank following a lunch with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. In addition, they said Trump promised to fill two vacant seats on the bank’s board, which in the meantime is barred from financing deals of more than $10 million. ‘I specifically talked with the president about the need to get the Export-Import Bank up and running,’ Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota said. ‘It’s great news he agreed.’ Though the bank said that 90 percent of its authorizations are for small businesses, Boeing is one of its biggest beneficiaries.”
Read more: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/10/ex-im-bank-trump-likes-it-conservatives-hate-it.html
“With promises to ‘drain the swamp!’ still ringing in our ears, we have watched Trump appoint nothing but Goldman banksters, Soros stooges, neocon war hawks and police state zealots to head his cabinet. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we examine the swamp-dwellers with which Trump has filled his swamp.”
Last week, a Navy SEAL raid in Yemen conducted under Reaper drone cover killed at least 30 civilians, including the 8-year-old sister of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American who was previously killed in an Obama-era drone strike. The girl ‘was shot in the neck and killed’ by her assailants, bleeding to death over the course of two hours.
“While candidate Obama came to office pledging to end George W Bush’s wars, he leaves office having been at war longer than any president in US history. He is also the only president to serve two complete terms with the nation at war. Looking back at President Obama’s legacy, the Council on Foreign Relation’s Micah Zenko added up the defense department’s data on airstrikes and made a startling revelation: in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs. While most of these air attacks were in Syria and Iraq, US bombs also rained down on people in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. That’s seven majority-Muslim countries.”
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/america-dropped-26171-bombs-2016-obama-legacy
“In a dramatic reversal, many members of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus said Thursday they are prepared later this month to support a budget measure that would explode the deficit and increase the public debt to more than $29.1 trillion by 2026, figures contained in the budget resolution itself. [Rand Paul’s] floor speech attacking the budget measure for making no attempts at deficit reduction — it projects a $9 trillion increase in the debt by 2026 — was preempted by statements from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), pledging to vote for the resolution anyway.”