Tag Archives: Obama

The Failure of Huff and Puff Foreign Policy, by Doug Bandow

Posted on March 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

Most of the world sees US politicians’ bluster for what it is: bluster. From Doug Bandow at antiwar.com:

The Tougher Hawks Talk, the Worse They Perform

For all their talk of peace through strength, American hawks favor windbag diplomacy. In their view there is no international problem that cannot be solved with theatrical hyperventilating leavened by threats and insults. The more serious the challenge, the more they bloviate. Failure only inflates their inner windbag.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were experts in this tactic. They imagined U.S. foreign policy as an alternative ending for the tale of the Big Bad Wolf. All they had to do was huff and puff harder and longer, and the bad guy’s house would always fall down.

The Trump administration most famously took this approach with Iran. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action significantly lengthened Tehran’s “breakout time” for developing a nuclear weapon and created internal pressure on the regime to open up economically to the West. Even hardliners like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis backed continuation of the agreement despite having misgivings when it was first negotiated.

However, Trump abandoned the pact, insisting that reimposing economic sanctions would force the Islamic Republic to make a gaggle of additional concessions. Pompeo gave an imperious speech at the Heritage Foundation, setting Iran’s surrender terms – Tehran’s abandonment of its sovereignty, independent foreign policy, and defensive deterrent in 12 easy steps. All that was missing was the stipulation that Iranian leaders would be expected to genuflect, heads touching the floor, to the president before signing the capitulation before the entire world.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Horseshit, Military, War

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Trump Derangement Syndrome on Nitrous, by Eric Peters

Posted on July 25, 2018 | Leave a comment

In its attempt to make us all drive electric cars, the Obama administration mandated that corporate fleets average 50 mpg by 2025. Fortunately, Trump wants to roll this impossible goal back. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

As a journalist I understand completely why so many people rightly loathe the media. It is because the media no longer understand – or just doesn’t give a damn – about the difference between conveying facts and attempting to force-feed its opinions to you – these opinions presented with the most insolent certainty, formed in such a way as to make it clear that anyone reading who harbors a secret doubt is not merely a doubter but a denier; i.e., a malicious and vile person who must be dealt with.

It’s the sort of thing which leads to fists and worse.

Well, here we go again.

Bloomberg – the organ of billionaire leftist Michael Bloomberg – is practically signing death warrants (and probably would, if it had the power) in its “coverage” of the Trump administration’s apparent intention to dial back an Obama-era increase (a near-doubling) of the federal fuel economy mandate, which is lately being conflated with the most despicable dishonesty as an “emissions” (of “greenhouse gasses”) mandate – which is an outright lie.

The mandates are Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) mandates and you’ll note there is nothing in that term even hinting at “emissions” – of any sort. CAFE dates back to the 1970s and the Energy Policy Conservation Act  – italicized to emphasize the emphasis on energy and its conservation rather than emissions.

It decrees that every car company’s combined fleet of cars must achieve a “corporate average” of X miles-per-gallon, that number constantly going up, along with heavy fines for “non-compliance” (the writ-large version of the “shared responsibility” fines which the Obamacare recalcitrant – including this writer – are being hit with).

One of the Obama regime’s final acts of regulatory thuggery – after all, no one votedon this – was to unilaterally decree that the corporate average MPG mandate ascend to 50-something MPGs by the 2025 model year.

This was a vicious decree because, in the first place, who are these people to be dictating the mileage of our cars – the ones we pay for? This includes the gas which goes in their tanks.

What gives them – the bureaucrats nesting in DC – the moral right?

To continue reading: Trump Derangement Syndrome on Nitrous

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Posted in Business, Government, Law, Media, Politics

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Hear What Peter Schiff Says Is Coming Next: ‘There’s No Way To Stop This’, by Mac Slavo

Posted on February 9, 2018 | Leave a comment

Will Trump be the fall guy for economically idiotic policies stretching back to Richard Nixon’s 1971 closing of the gold window? From Mac Slavo at shtfplan.com:

peterschiff

Peter Schiff, a market analyst who had accurately predicted the 2008 recession and the recent stock market plunge says more is coming.  Wait until you hear what he says is on the horizon for America and the global economy in the Trump era.

In an interview with Infowars‘ Alex Jones, Schiff details what we can all expect from the economy.  And even though Trump has fought to save the economy, the federal reserve is working against the president. “Unfortunately, he is the fall guy. There’s no way to stop this,” Shiff begins.

“The problem is so big that the minute the Fed has to try to solve it, it’s gonna unleash a much bigger one [problem],” Shiff says.  Jones begins his intro by not sugar coating the problem the economy is in thanks to government interference. The economy is a giant bubble and it will pop at some point, not just deflate.

“The Fed were dragging their feet in raising rates while Obama was president.  They talked about raising rates but at the end of the day, they barely moved them up. The pace of hikes has increased since Trump was elected, but part of the reason for that…I mean, the media is not talking down the economy; if anything they’re overhyping the economy.  Everybody’s talking about how strong the economy is, how everything is great. Everybody is taking credit for this great economy. The Fed wants to take credit for it, Trump wants to take credit for it, so if everybody wants to talk about how great the economy is, the Fed doesn’t have any excuse if it doesn’t raise rates…in order to keep up the pretense that the economy is as strong as everybody thinks, the Fed is in this box where it has to raise rates.

But they [the Fed] can’t tell the truth that it’s really a bubble, and if we raise rates, we’re gonna prick it, so they’re kinda in this bind.  And they are still telegraphing that they’re gonna raise rates three or four times this year.  And that is the problem.“

Schiff then goes on to explain some of the problems Trump inherited from Obama that will be difficult, if not impossible to solve without a crisis.

To continue reading: Hear What Peter Schiff Says Is Coming Next: ‘There’s No Way To Stop This’

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Posted in Collapse, Debt, Economy, Government

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It Wasn’t Comey’s Decision to Exonerate Hillary – It Was Obama’s, by Andrew McCarthy

Posted on September 5, 2017 | 1 comment

Back in April of 2016, Obama designed the legal framework for former FBI Director James Comey’s subsequent exoneration of Hillary Clinton. From Andrew McCarthy at nationalreview.com:

The thing to understand, what has always been the most important thing to understand, is that Jim Comey was out in front, but he was not calling the shots.

On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference.

The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham. Pundits and the Trump administration are shrieking because this indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed.

It shows, they cry, that the fix was in!

News Flash: This is not news.

Let’s think about what else was going on in April 2016. I’ve written about it a number of times over the last year-plus, such as in a column a few months back:

On April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the [criminal statutes relevant to her e-mail scandal]). The president acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, its importance had been vastly overstated.

This is precisely the reasoning that Comey relied on in ultimately absolving Clinton, as I recounted in the same column:

On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey publicly stated that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in using a private email server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The director acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, it was just a small percentage of the emails involved.

Obama’s April statements are the significant ones. They told us how this was going to go. The rest is just details.

To continue reading: It Wasn’t Comey’s Decision to Exonerate Hillary – It Was Obama’s

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Deep Six the Deep State, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on May 26, 2017 | Leave a comment

The mainstream media is not interested in the depredations of the intelligence agencies because the agencies are the sources of some of the media’s best stories. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com (“Deep Six the Deep State” was a tag line SLL used to advertise Prime Deceit. Raimondo inexplicably gives SLL no credit for the title.):

Rogue “intelligence community” must be slapped down

You won’t read about this in what passes for the “mainstream” media, but newly declassified documents reveal that the Obama administration was violating its own rules and spying on Americans with such frequency that even the normally compliant FISA court scolded them:
“The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.”

 

“More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.”

Was this covered by the New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” or the Washington Post, which has adopted the slogan “democracy dies in the dark”? Of course not. They’re too busy reporting on leaks of classified information from their Deep State sources, some of which is no doubt the product of this illegal spying.

I count less than half a dozen stories about this, all of them in conservative outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, The “liberal” media isn’t interested for the simple reason that they don’t want to interfere with the very process that provides them with so many “scoops.”

In 2011, the Obama administration loosened the rules whereby intelligence agencies could share information on US citizens – which we now know was illegally obtained and shared with other agencies by the National Security Agency. That same year, the FISA court enjoined the administration to put into practice minimization procedures that would protect the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans – but that didn’t happen. Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, in defending her unmasking of Mike Flynn’s conversations with Russian officials, said it was all perfectly legal — except it wasn’t. We’re now learning that, two weeks before election day, the FISA court rebuked the administration, saying:

“Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collections under Section 702. The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”

To continue reading: Deep Six the Deep State

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Uncategorized

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News Organization Asks Trump To Declassify Obama’s “Unmasking” Requests On Political Opponents, by Tyler Durden

Posted on May 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

Here’s a request President Trump should be only too glad to comply with. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

The NSA is allowed under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on foreign powers without a court warrant.  That said, U.S. law strictly prohibits the targeting of American citizens for such surveillance…that whole pesky ‘4th amendment thing’ was a real thorn in Obama’s side.  As such, protocol requires that if the NSA accidentally intercepts Americans or information about them overseas, it is supposed to legally put the information in a virtual lock box.

But starting in 2011, former President Obama made it easier to access that information, essentially creating keys for intelligence professionals and even his own political aides to unlock the NSA’s lock box to consume surveillance on Americans.  Now, Circa has filed an official request asking the Trump administration to declassify the frequency of Obama’s unmasking requests related to, among other folks, his political opponents.

Circa has formally requested that the Trump administration declassify records showing how often government officials have searched National Security Agency intercepts for intelligence on U.S. presidential candidates, members of Congress, journalists, clergy, lawyers, federal judges and doctors and how often such Americans had their identities unmasked by the intelligence community after Barack Obama made it easier to do so in 2011.

The request follows anexclusive Circa report on Wednesday that revealed that the Obama administration conducted more than 35,000 searches on NSA intercepts seeking information about Americans during the divisive 2016 election year.

“The law makes President Trump the ultimate declassifying authority, and we believe the president can answer many troubling questions by declassifying this information, including how often First Amendment protected professionals had their privacy impacted by NSA intercepts and why some of Trump’s own aides were unmasked in NSA data by the prior White House,” said John Solomon, the chief operating officer of Circa and the author of Wednesday’s story.

This request comes after it was revealed just yesterday that government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept metadata, which include telephone numbers and email addresses.

To continue reading: News Organization Asks Trump To Declassify Obama’s “Unmasking” Requests On Political Opponents

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Uncategorized

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Does It Matter Who Pulls the Trigger in the Drone Wars? by Peter Van Buren

Posted on April 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

The victims of US drone strikes are remarkably unconcerned under what rules of engagement the US attacked them. From Peter Van Buren at antiwar.com:

We’re allowing a mindset of “anything Trump does is wrong” coupled with lightening-speed historical revisionism for the Obama era to sustain the same mistakes in the war on terror that have fueled Islamic terrorism for the past 15 years. However, there may be a window of opportunity to turn the anti-Trump rhetoric into a review of the failed policies of the last decade and a half.

A recent example of “anything Trump does is wrong” has to do with his changing the rules for drone kill decision making. In May 2013 President Obama self-imposed a dual-standard (known as the “playbook”) for remote killing. The White House, including Obama himself reviewing a kill list at regular meetings, would decide which individuals outside of the “traditional war zones” of Iraq and Afghanistan would be targeted.

Meanwhile, in America’s post-9/11 traditional war zones, military commanders then made, and now make, the kill decisions without civilian review, with the threshold for “acceptable civilian casualties” supposedly less strict. Of course the idea that any of this functions under “rules” is based on the bedrock fallacy that anything militarily done by the last three presidents has been legal under the never-updated 2001 authorization for war in Afghanistan. For perspective, remember Islamic State never existed, and Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen had stable governments at the time Congress passed that authorization.

In sum: since 2013 the military can kill from the air at will inside Iraq and Afghanistan (the status of Syria is unclear), as well as other areas designated unilaterally by the U.S. government as “traditional,” with allowances for less regard for the collateral damage of innocents slaughtered. It is the president himself who plays judge, jury, and executioner across the rest of the globe, including in several acknowledged cases, ordering the deaths of American citizens without due process.

Supporters of this policy set refer to the president’s role as oversight. And because the president is supposed to make his decisions with more regard than the military for civilian deaths (though there are no statistics to support that has been the outcome), the process represented, in the words of the New York Times, “restraint.”

To continue reading: Does It Matter Who Pulls the Trigger in the Drone Wars?

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Government, Military, War

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Did the Government Spy on Trump? Of Course. It Spies on All of Us! by Ron Paul

Posted on March 27, 2017 | 2 comments

It’s disturbing if the government spied on Trump. It’s far more disturbing that the government spies on the rest of us. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.com:

There was high drama last week when Rep. Devin Nunes announced at the White House that he had seen evidence that the communications of the Donald Trump campaign people, and perhaps even Trump himself, had been “incidentally collected” by the US government.

If true, this means that someone authorized the monitoring of Trump campaign communications using Section 702 of the FISA Act. Could it have been then-President Obama? We don’t know. Could it have been other political enemies looking for something to harm the Trump campaign or presidency? It is possible.

There is much we do not yet know about what happened and there is probably quite a bit we will never know. But we do know several very important things about the government spying on Americans.

First there is Section 702 itself. The provision was passed in 2008 as part of a package of amendments to the 1978 FISA bill. As with the PATRIOT Act, we were told that we had to give the government more power to spy on us so that it could catch terrorists. We had to give up some of our liberty for promises of more security, we were told. We were also told that the government would only spy on the bad guys, and that if we had nothing to hide we should have nothing to fear.

We found out five years later from Edward Snowden that the US government viewed Section 702 as a green light for the mass surveillance of Americans. Through programs he revealed, like PRISM, the NSA is able to collect and store our Internet search history, the content of our emails, what files we have shared, who we have chatted with electronically, and more.

That’s why people like NSA whistleblower William Binney said that we know the NSA was spying on Trump because it spies on all of us!

To continue reading: Did the Government Spy on Trump? Of Course. It Spies on All of Us! 

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Privacy, Surveillance

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A Bad Week and Getting Badder Bigly Fast, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on March 17, 2017 | 1 comment

Between the brouhaha over Deep State surveillance of Trump, the debt ceiling, and repealing and replacing Obamacare, the president has some “challenges.” From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Well, of course they bugged Trump Tower. Why wouldn’t they? Trump’s big blunder du jour is that he tweeted “wiretapped,” like some hapless sap out of a 1950s I Was a Spy for the FBI movie. (I know people who still say “ice box,” too.) So he left himself — or rather poor Sean Spicer — open for a week of legalistic pettifogging by reporters acting as litigators for the Deep State’s intel corps.

Anyway, Wikileaks “Vault 7” document release earlier in the month made it clear that US intel has the ability to cover and confuse the tracks of any entity —including especially US intel itself — that ventures to penetrate any supposedly private or secure realm. And, by the way, that probably settles the matter of who “they” are. Whatever statutory restraints once existed against CIA spying on American citizens is long gone by the boards.

You might suppose, too, that the combined forces of Hillary and Obama, along with the still-entrenched Democratic establishment, would have tried through late 2016 to stop The Menace of Trump at all costs. Somebody had done them dirty in funneling the DNC and Podesta emails to Wikileaks, and it was imperative to fight back — especially with FBI director James Comey (a Republican, after all), going all rogue on Mrs. Clinton. Hence, the manufactured Russia-did-it story that has gotten more mileage than any political hallucination since Senator Joe McCarthy, at his height of influence, played the newspapers like a whole orchestra of flugelhorns.

It’s hard to see how Trump might ever established the truth of this matter. One of the strange features of these internecine wars is that the Department of Justice — as far as we know — isn’t deposing scores of operations people from the myriad agencies under the NSA umbrella to establish who’s been doing what. Anyway, there’s enough loose scuttlebutt around Washington that Trump might have a pretty good idea of who at the various agencies hates his guts, and is working against him, and one wonders why he doesn’t just fire a bunch of them. Perhaps that’s yet to come.

To continue reading: A Bad Week and Getting Badder Bigly Fast

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Debt, Government, Intelligence, Medicine, Politics, Surveillance

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Did Obama Spy on Trump? by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on March 16, 2017 | Leave a comment

Will we ever know for sure if Obama spied on Trump? Probably not, because a president can spy on whomever he or she wants, without a warrant and without leaving any other kind of paper trail. That’s the real tragedy of the Obama spying on Trump brouhaha. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

The question of whether former President Barack Obama actually spied on President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and transition has been tantalizing Washington since President Trump first made the allegation nearly two weeks ago. Since then, three investigations have been launched — one by the FBI, one by the House of Representatives and one by the Senate. Are the investigators chasing a phantom, or did this actually happen?

Here is the back story.

Obama would not have needed the warrant to authorize surveillance on Trump. Obama was the president and as such enjoyed authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to order surveillance on any person in America, without suspicion, probable cause or a warrant.

FISA contemplates that the surveillance it authorizes will be for national security purposes, but this is an amorphous phrase and an ambiguous standard that has been the favorite excuse of most modern presidents for extraconstitutional behavior. In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon used national security as a pretext to deploying the FBI and CIA to spy on students and even to break into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, one of his tormentors.

FISA was enacted in the late 1970s to force the federal government to focus its surveillance activities — its domestic national security-based spying — on only those people who were more likely than not agents of a foreign government. Because FISA authorizes judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make rules and establish procedures for surveillance — essentially lawmaking — in secret, the public and the media have been largely kept in the dark about the nature and extent of the statute and the legal and moral rationale for the federal government’s spying on everyone in the U.S.

To continue reading: Did Obama Spy on Trump?

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Posted in Government, Intelligence, Law, Surveillance

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