We here at @united are just trying to police the attire of the daughters of our employees! That’s all! Cool, right? https://twitter.com/united/status/846104385130160128 …
Nassar’s Guilty Verdict Highlights Culture of Sexual Assault With Michigan Doctors and Michigan Licensing Board Blind Eye
January 27, 2018
Nassar’s guilty verdict, and the shocking number of victims he sexually assaulted under the guise of being a medical doctor, have taken down numerous Michigan officials, but why has no one looked at the Michigan Licensing Board that supervised his medical license? Why is it that the coaches are to blame, but the medical licensing board is exempt?
I have complained to the Michigan Medical Board in the past, as have other commenters, about doctors behaving negligently, abusively, and inappropriately, but nothing was moved forward in the investigations. The Michigan Licensing Board, in all of the instances mentioned, didn’t perform a full investigation of complaints against doctors practicing, even when third party verification of injury was available. In the report I filed, I was told that the third-party verification was “unnecessary,” and I had no way to appeal the review. In other words, someone read the report, claimed it didn’t happen, and I was told three times by the Medical Licensing Board that I couldn’t appeal.
I mentioned there was another doctor who could verify what I was reporting. I mentioned the doctor whom I was reporting had a history of substance abuse, and still, no movement on the investigation.
Here is the problem with reporting physicians in Michigan: someone has to do an actual investigation, instead of signing a form that refuses one. I have had multiple readers write to me asking about ways to get the Michigan Licensing Board to examine complaints against physicians. I could only offer my experience. Now I have to wonder if any of those people commenting were part of the group of young women who were abused by Nassar.
It’s definitely appropriate for Michigan officials who turned a blind eye or deaf ear to abuse allegations to resign, and I would also say for criminal investigations to commence for aiding and protecting a pedophile, but the medical community also doesn’t police its own. Since Michigan has set financial restrictions on medical lawsuits–namely that only those with thousands of dollars can access the courts based on a decision called Scarsella (only if a victim has about $10,000 to purchase an affidavit can an injured party even access the courts)–those who are poor, victimized, and without redress have begun to number in the hundreds because of just one man. How many more are out there?
Coupled with the problems with the Michigan Licensing Board, Michigan is a breeding ground for abusive docs, and there is no one to stop them. How many years did Nassar exploit those young athletes? How many adults heard complaints and refused to act on them? How many times did the Licensing Board hear complaints and do what it did with the others? Ignore them without an investigation and offer no appeal?
I am happy to hear of officials resigning. They should. They should also be investigated for criminal collusion, but it’s time set a record about doctors policing their own, especially when Michigan’s Licensing Board was also a party to shielding a sexual predator under the guise of their profession for over 20 years.
What with the problems running the country, the misogyny and keeping the Russian mistress happy, Trump seems to have been very busy lately; however, his sleepless nights may have more to do with problems closer to home. Michael Flynn’s recent guilty plea makes for an interesting bedtime story. Remember how Jeff Sessions happily lost his memory when testifying about his Russian ties? Seems as if Flynn’s attempt at memory loss came with an attached board book, and it made for a plea bargain that is sweet for Mueller and sour for Trump’s associates. Since Flynn was a former White House advisor, and since he admitted to having close ties to Russia, being charged with multiple felony counts and pleading only to one, the skeletons Flynn is hiding are sure to cause some problems for people like Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump.
In addition, the details of Flynn’s guilty plea raise new questions about how much others in the White House — including possibly President Trump himself — knew about the retired general’s conversations with Sergey Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the United States, during the presidential transition.
In a statement read in federal court, Brandon L. Van Grack, an assistant prosecutor on Mueller’s staff, said that in the case of the two conversations at issue, Flynn spoke to Kislyak only after receiving specific instructions from, in one instance, a “senior official” of Trump’s transition team and, in another instance, a “very senior member” of the transition team. Neither official was named. But it has been publicly reported that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a key adviser, was recently questioned by Mueller’s prosecutors and CNN reported Friday that he was the “very senior” transition official in question.
According to various news sources, the BBC, the AP and CNBC, as of last week, before the plea deal was reached, Michael Flynn’s lawyers were reported to have stopped cooperating with White House counsel, and while this may seem like an inordinately smart move overall (as in, what right mind would cooperate with legal counsel backing Trump?), it’s a tell that the Mueller investigation is moving toward charging a current White House staff member. Most attorneys cooperate when their clients are being investigated, but when one is no longer being investigated, because he has already agreed to a plea deal, and the other client is still being investigated, “sharing” between attorneys closes down.
A NYT op ed focuses on the charges the Mueller investigation chose to set aside in favor of Flynn’s “cooperation” and makes a damning case for arguing that the only reason to set aside easily proven charges is to make room for the accused to provide information in exchange for a more lenient sentence:
On Friday morning, Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. while serving as President Trump’s national security adviser. Making a false statement to a federal official is a felony offense, but nowhere near as bad as what the special counsel, Robert Mueller, could likely have charged Mr. Flynn with, including charges for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (similar to those brought against the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates) or those stemming from a possible attempt to kidnap a Turkish cleric in Pennsylvania. By pleading guilty and agree to cooperate with Mr. Mueller, Mr. Flynn also appears to have averted prosecution of his son, who was reportedly implicated in some of the misconduct.
Prosecutors generally offer favorable plea bargains like this one only when the cooperating defendant can provide evidence that incriminates someone “up the ladder” — someone more senior than the defendant himself. In our experience, that is particularly true when the prosecutor is deciding not to pursue other, readily provable charges, like those that seem to exist here.
Maybe Flynn’s tipping point was his son, because it clearly wasn’t about protecting POTUS. Maybe Mueller was able to push Flynn to testify in exchange for not charging Flynn’s son with multiple felonies.
Seems that Mueller has his sights set on Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and who knows, maybe that will be Trump’s achilles, too. The same NYT article points out that the pattern of pushing through the family may be the best method to secure convictions:
It is probably Mr. Kushner who is in greatest jeopardy now. Bloomberg has reported that he is the very senior transition member who directed Mr. Flynn to reach out to Russia. Mr. Kushner has already been questioned by the special counsel and by Congress. If he was one of those officials Mr. Flynn spoke to and he was not honest about it when questioned, he could face similar false statement charges.
Mr. Kushner also failed to disclose approximately 100 foreign contacts on his security clearance application; each omission is a potential false statement.
If Flynn is willing to testify in exchange for protecting his son, what would Trump do? For his son-in-law, Kushner, not much, but what about good ole Donald Jr? Donald Jr. had clandestine meetings with Russian officials that he misidentified.
Donald Trump Jr.’s exposure is also deepened by the Flynn plea, along similar lines as Mr. Kushner. He might (or might not) be one of the unnamed transition participants Mr. Flynn identified. Moreover, the president’s son has been interviewed at length as a part of congressional investigations, and Mr. Flynn’s testimony could show he was not candid. Because of Mr. Flynn’s role on the campaign as a trusted member of the inner circle, he may also have a great deal to say about topics like Mr. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with several Russians, Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner, or about the Trump scion’s contacts with WikiLeaks. If Mr. Flynn’s recollection is not the same as what Trump the Younger told Congress, Don Jr. is in serious trouble.
So, that is an op-ed discussion of why Trump Jr. is in trouble, but what is damning for Trump Jr. is the email chain linking him to Russian operatives offering to “help” with Trump’s Presidential campaign.
Here is a sample of one of the email messages sent to Donald Jr.:
On Jun 3, 2016, at 10:36 AM, Rob Goldstone wrote:
Good morning
Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting.
The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.
This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin.
What do you think is the best way to handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly? I can also send this info to your father via Rhona, but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first.
Best
Rob Goldstone
That email is published by the Washington Post, and if you click on the link above, you will find a detailed exchange between Donald Jr. and Russian government operatives who offer to help in the campaign by providing information on Clinton. Donald Jr. must have been hoping those emails were gone. Guess nothing is gone now with the iPhone. And, as far as Donald Jr.’s statement that he never met with the Russians knowingly? Well, again that iPhone makes it all happen:
On Jun 7, 2016, at 4:20 PM, Rob Goldstone wrote:
Don
Hope all is well
Emin asked that I schedule a meeting with you and The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this Thursday.
I believe you are aware of the meeting – and so wondered if 3pm or later on Thursday works for you?
I assume it would be at your office.
Best
Rob Goldstone
[In case you wondered if he knew about the meeting…]
On Jun 7, 2016, at 5:16 PM, Donald Trump Jr. wrote:
How about 3 at our offices? Thanks rob appreciate you helping set it up.
D
On Jun 7, 2016, at 18:14, Donald Trump Jr. wrote:
Great. It will likely be Paul Manafort (campaign boss) my brother in law and me. 725 Fifth Ave 25th floor.
One might wonder what other light Flynn could shed on the Russia investigation when the emails of Trump Jr. are fodder enough for flames. Manafort charged, Kushner investigated, and now Donald Jr.? Seems to be following a pattern.
There are a few more exchanges about changing the meeting times, and then the final note is implicating:
From: Donald Trump Jr.
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2016 12:03 p.m
To: Jared Kushner; Paul Manafort
Subject: FW: Russia — Clinton – private and confidential
Meeting got moved to 4 tomorrow at my offices.
Best,
Don
Michael Flynn used the same defensive tactic just trotted out by US Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a curiously transmissible case of Russian Amnesia, or perhaps Russian Dementia. Jeff Sessions testified before Congress this week in his opening statements that he hadn’t had contact with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, then upon further questioning admitted to seeing him at a hotel, and then when questioned about whether he had met him two or three times, Sessions argued that information had been “leaked” and should have remained in a closed session.
In his opening statements, Jeff Sessions said he did not meet with Russian officials:
“I did not have any private meetings, nor do I recall any conversations with any Russian officials at the Mayflower Hotel,” Sessions said in his opening statement. “I did not attend any meetings at that event. Prior to the speech, I attended a reception with my staff that included at least two dozen people and President Trump. Though I do recall several conversations I had during that pre-speech reception, I do not have any recollection of meeting or talking to the Russian ambassador or any other Russian officials.
“If any brief interaction occurred in passing with the Russian ambassador during that reception, I do not remember it,” he continued. “After the speech, I was interviewed by the news media, which had gathered as I remember in a different room, and then I left the hotel.”
…
He later said during questioning from senators that he could have “possibly” had a meeting with Kislyak at the Mayflower but that he did not recall it. Sessions also said he went to the Mayflower that day not knowing that Kislyak would be there.
When Senator John McCain asked Sessions pointedly about his interactions with Russia, namely the security issues after the US government found evidence of election hacking the summer of 2016, months before the election, Sessions developed sudden Russia Dementia. In his opening statements, in the same day, Sessions declared he didn’t meet with Kislyak, but then when questioned, didn’t remember meeting with Kislyak:
But he demurred when Republican Sen. John McCain if he had ever raised concerns with Kislyak about “Russia’s interference in our electoral process.”
“I don’t recall that being discussed,” Sessions replied.
By the time Sessions met with Kislyak at the Republican National Convention in July, cyber security researchers had already confirmed that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee. And by the time Sessions met with Kislyak at his office in September, then-President Barack Obama had already commented on the Russian hacking campaign and hinted at what could have motivated it.
When McCain, a Russia hawk who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committeee, asked whether Sessions had ever discussed any issues of national security while meeting with Russian officials in his capacity as a member of that committee, Sessions again said he couldn’t remember.
Funny how a few hours changes a person’s statement, isn’t it? Suddenly Sessions admits to meeting with the Russian Ambassador, but “doesn’t recall” anything that was discussed.
Sessions, who said earlier that he recalled “pushing back” on Russia’s actions in Ukraine when he met with Kislyak. appeared confused, choosing instead to respond to McCain’s earlier question about whether he ever discussed “Russia-related security issues” with Kislyak.
“We may have discussed that,” Sessions said. “I just don’t have a real recall of the meeting. I was not making a report about it to anyone. I just was basically willing to meet and see what he discussed.”
“And his response was?” McCain asked.
When Jeff Sessions was pushed past the Russian Amnesiac defense, he tried invoking executive privilege, even though he is not the President. Jeff Sessions isn’t doing this out of innocence, folks, because he worked for years as a judge–he knows the law. Jeff Sessions is looking for ways get around his required testimony, and in doing so, faces the same instance of impeding an investigation that took out members of Richard Nixon’s team:
“My understanding is that you took an oath, you raised your right hand today and said you would solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And now you’re not answering questions,” Heinrich said. “You’re impeding this investigation.”
He continued:
“So my understanding of the legal standard is either you answer the question, that’s the best outcome. You say ‘This is classified, can’t answer it here, I’ll answer it in closed session,’ that’s bucket number two. Bucket number three is to say I’m invoking executive privilege. There is not appropriateness bucket. That is not a legal standard. Can you tell me what are these long-standing DOJ rules that protect conversations made with the executive without invoking executive privilege?”
The attorney general said it was a “longstanding policy of the Department of Justice” not to reveal conversations between the attorney general and the president, saying he would need to share the questions with the president.
“Can you share those policies with us?” Heinrich asked. “Are they written down at the Department of Justice?”
“I believe they are,” Sessions replied.
“This is the appropriateness legal standard for not answering congressional inquiries?” Heinrich asked.
Shoddy judgment, invoking an unwritten policy, to determine that Sessions is above congressional inquiry, but the question is: will it work? Sessions just announced he is above the law because he is friends with the President. Scary types of friendships, those that are in the middle of investigations themselves.
When Sessions was involved in firing James Comey, he claimed that he was not violating his own recusal from the investigation into Russia’s election interference, but played coy with allegations that Sessions was less than honest. Sessions claimed to be persecuted by innuendo, but he dodged questions by saying, “why don’t you tell me?” “Why don’t you tell me?” isn’t an answer Mr. Attorney General:
“I recused myself not because of any wrongdoing but because of a DOJ regulation,” he explained. “The documentation [about the Russian investigation] — what little I received — was mostly already in the media.”
Last week Comey suggested that Sessions’ “continued engagement in a Russia-related investigation [was] problematic,” for reasons he said he could not discuss in public.
Sessions argued that his involvement in Comey’s firing was not a violation of his recusal. “I do not believe that it’s a sound position to say that if you’re recused for a single case . . . you can’t make a decision about the leadership in that agency,” the attorney general said.
Asked Sessions: “Why don’t you tell me?” He added, “This is a secret innuendo being leaked about me, and I don’t appreciate it.”
Sessions revealed that he did discuss Comey’s firing with Trump, saying that he relied on a memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to justify the firing and that his involvement as attorney general in that decision did not violate his recusal.
So, you can watch is testimony, or you can watch Steven Colbert’s version, which is just as entertaining:
Whenever I think of “the law,” meaning “the laws” that rule our country, our states, our municipalities, I am reminded that all forms of government expect that its citizens will know the laws that govern them and in doing so, will not break them, will “obey the law.” A Huffington Post commenter, who teaches law, Frank H. Wu, has determined that in order to follow a law, we must recognize its legitimacy:
Mr. Wu is struggling with teaching law, particularly in an age in which even, and I suppose, because the President of the United States keeps challenging the legitimacy of law, the boundaries of what should be accepted law become normative with context. Mr. Wu struggles with students who ask him what is “right” about law, what is the “right” answer, while arguing that law should be more objective. He cites the following premise for teaching law students to examine or investigate a legal dilemma:
Law students are taught a conventional format for essays: “IRAC,” which stands for Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. I recommend it for not only law but also life. Spot the issue, research the rule, apply it to the situation at hand, and then drive to closure. In the discussion, address the weaknesses of your position and the corresponding strengths of your opponent’s. There are worse formulas for life. The only disadvantage to this modus operandi is discouragement of risk.
Herein lies the risk is telling students that law is objective: it’s not. Telling students that the law is objective, that is usually applied consistently from courtroom to courtroom, implies that the law itself is enough to override political ambition, political financing, and machinations by corporations seeking to buy their own court win, not to mention a President who believes that simply because he posts arguments to Twitter, the courts should follow his dictates.
Lawyers arguing for what Trump himself has called his “Travel Ban,” have ineffectually implored the courts to ignore Trump’s tweets and to focus instead on the language of the law, the Travel Ban. Because intent with the enforcement of the law is just as important as the enforcement itself, the courts can’t ignore Trump’s tweets. CNN argues that Trump’s tweets contradict his aides and their attempted defense of his larger-than-life Twitter fiasco:
The latest example came when Trump defiantly tweeted on Monday night that he wants to call his plan to stop travel from six Muslim-majority countries a “travel ban” and “not some politically correct term.”
“That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people,” he tweeted.
The message contradicts what White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said just hours earlier to defend Trump after his early Monday morning tweets about the travel ban.
“I don’t think the President cares what you call it, whether you call it a ban, whether you call it a restriction,” Sanders said. “He cares that we call it national security.” She later added, “I think that the President isn’t concerned with what you call it.”
Earlier on Monday Trump tweeted “People… can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN.”
Trump obviously believes he can argue his position on Twitter more effectively than lawyers paid to defend his position can argue it in court. Is Trump creating a de facto form of law that supersedes the courts, just issuing dictates through a public channel as is common with dictators: I just posted this law on Twitter so now it must be obeyed? Or is it enough to capitalize on terrorist attacks to further Trump’s own agenda? Trump obviously has no objection to using dead bodies to argue for his own personal agenda on Twitter, arguing after the Manchester London attacks at an Ariana Grande concert that the death toll affirmed his position on a Travel Ban.
Let’s just, for the sake of argument, pretend that we institute Trump’s Travel Ban. Let’s just assume that it’s legitimate, as Mr. Wu says we must if we are to study the law. Let’s assume that we ban people from other countries because they are Muslim. I wonder, how does this protect us from violence? Does it stop workplace violence? Does it prevent terrorist attacks? I am not sure how banning other Muslims stops any current Muslims in any country from committing terrorist attacks, if that is the argument behind the ban. Does Trump’s argument really amount to an argument that some Muslims are acceptable but more are not? Or is it that the more Muslims in a country, the more likely they are to suffer terrorist attacks? Perhaps his argument is that if we don’t allow Muslims to fly into the country then perhaps we allow them in by boat, as past immigrants arrived, and this would deter terrorist attacks?
Let us not forget, as good students of the law, that the hardest part of this problem is defining the issue: is it how to defend against terrorist attacks? Or is the issue a means of preventing terrorist attacks? Or are we stating that simply by stopping any more Muslims from entering the country, we make ourselves feel secure in an insecure world? Muslims that are in the country now are safe for us to be around, but incoming Muslims are not? The problem is that the issue can’t even be phrased in such a way as to begin to apply the next step in the logic game, research, to determine an answer.
Trump’s supporters, notably Kellyanne Conway (advisor to POTUS) family, tweeted out that Trump should stop tweeting about law. Ironic, isn’t it?
“The [point] cannot be stressed enough that tweets on legal matters seriously undermine Admin agenda and POTUS — and those who support him, as I do, need to reinforce that [point] and not be shy about it,” Conway tweeted.
The Wall Street Journal also took note of Trump’s tweeting in an editorial published Monday night.
“Over the weekend and into Monday he indulged in another cycle of Twitter outbursts and pointless personal feuding that may damage his agenda and the powers of the Presidency,” the editorial states.
Recapping the president’s Monday tweets on the travel ban, the Journal’s editorial board wrote that it was “merely the latest incident in which Mr. Trump popping off undermined his own lawyers.”
Trump took another shot at the media on Tuesday, writing on Twitter, “I would have relied on the Fake News of CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, washpost or nytimes, I would have had ZERO chance winning WH.”
Since Trump tweets are notoriously full of typos, I wouldn’t put much stock in his last tweet about how he would have relied on “Fake News,” but tweets like this beg the question of whom sets “legitimate law.” Kim Davis, a clerk from the South who refused to follow the Supreme Court dictate that gay couples could marry, stated that her religion was her guiding law, even in a government post. Trump argues that his is an “honest and unfiltered message,” that governs his law, while allowing that the wealthy make the laws.
Legitimacy of the message he intents to publicize, or legitimacy of the law he wants to promote never concern Trump. Kellyanne Conway argues that people need to stop focusing on Trump’s Twitter remarks, as Trump has argued that is his main method for furthering his agenda. Vox.com argues that not every head of state is the head of governance, and if Trump were only head of state, then this argument that we not interpret Trump’s arguments for law would make sense: if Trump were merely a figurehead for past political conventions, as opposed to an executive leader, then a bigoted agenda would be seen as nothing more than courting public opinion:
This isn’t an implausible model for a world leader, to be honest. Plenty of countries separate their head of state and head of government. It would be ludicrous to treat the Pope’s statements as hints to future policy changes within the confines of the Vatican City, or to spend more time on what the Queen is saying than what Theresa May is.
When Trump’s staff says that he’s turning to Twitter because he wants to speak directly to his followers, that’s what they’re aiming for: an image of the presidency as a pure communion between a leader and “his people.”
The issue isn’t whether or not Trump is communicating to his people as much as he is attempting to override the system of law that currently governs the United States to further his own agenda. In this, we must be honest: the system of law is by no means objective in the United States. To belabor that point, let us point out the overwhelming disconnect between political divides for the northern United States and the southern United States, or California and Nebraska, political divides by coastlines. That the POTUS seeks to undermine established law, as his Travel Ban was already dismissed in the courts, Trump’s message is no less than expressions of dictatorship. Legitimacy is a valid test of a law, but it falls short when examining motive and execution. A law is simply language, it’s execution allows discrimination to be acted upon, and that is where the real dangers lie.
James Comes Declares Trump Told Him To Drop Russia Investigation: Comey Runs US Presidents
May 18, 2017
I often marvel at the rise of James Comes, a man who has determined the 2016 US Presidential Election and continues to control the current President Trump. (Gag, hate writing that “President” follow-on.) James Comes, even upon Trump’s firing of him for strange reasons, wields tremendous power. His knife knows no bounds: take out first female presidential candidate by goading public suspicions of e-mail hacking, making Putin’s bedding of Trump demigod look like child’s play, and now taking shots at the current President to ostensibly unseat the man who fired him. By all accounts, Comey put Trump in office and now seeks to remove him when Comes is fired.
I don’t know mourns Comey’s loss from the FBI in and of itself, aside from people who want to speak to the press with gushing innuendo of imagined lost personal relationships at the FBI. Comey, himself, wrongly used his office to interfere with the 2016 presidential election by flashing an e-mail red herring while ignoring the Putin storm of Trump collusion. Then, once Trump is in office, Comey begins investigating him. I am suspicious of James Comey and happy to see him gone. The question is: what does this man want?
Why get on national television and discredit a presidential candidate with allegations of wrongdoing that were found to be invalid and then attack the sitting president after election by saying his corruption had gone on long before the election but he had never thought to investigate until now?
Comey has allegedly released a memo stating that Trump asked Comey to drop the Russia investigation, and according to Comey’s exposition, the heroic Comey refused, which then led to his firing:
“I hope you can let this go,” Comey wrote, quoting Trump in the document, which CNN has not viewed but which was described by the sources.The bombshell revelation Tuesday escalated the already raging political crises engulfing the White House triggered by the bureau’s probe into alleged cooperation between Trump aides and Russia and new reports that Trump divulged classified information to top Russian officials.
Would that we could believe Comey. I don’t understand why he never let the memo out before his firing. Or, was Comey merely attempting to control the narrative again. Then the next question is: what could he hope to gain?
In what must be an “oh shit” moment for Trump, although it appears he tends to live in them, something stung Jason Chafftez, the biggest denier that ever lived, to request copies of the memos that Comey apparently kept, and without even testifying, Comey controls the narrative. You can review of Chafftez’s letter here, but in it, Chafftez demands copies of all memos and notes Comey had pertaining to conversations with Trump.
Mr. Rosenstein, who recommended Trump fire Comey, must now contend with a special prosecutor assigned to investigate the Russia contacts with the Trump campaign. Ostensibly Comey was fired for his handling of Hillary Clinton’s email debacle, in which charges were never filed, but James Comey acting as FBI Director, publicly defiled her name a few nights before the election, essentially trying her in the court of public opinion based on fear mongering when criminal charges were denied. Mr. Rosenstein said to Attorney General Jess Sessions that Comey should be removed for Comey’s “refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken” in his handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
In a memo to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Mr Rosenstein said he could not defend Mr Comey’s “refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken” in the way he handled an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State.
The FBI should never have participated in fear mongering or destroying a person’s credibility by innuendo when the facts of the matter never held up to the scrutiny of the law. Comey should have been fired for that, and it was a good move to fire a man for using his office to influence presidential elections based on hearsay. However, now suddenly Comey is a hero, a maligned official who can’t escape Trump’s ego.
The NYTimes reports that Rosenstein was being forced to hire a special investigator for Russian ties because of Trump’s own commentary about why he fired Comey, ostensibly to prevent any more Russia investigation:
The Justice Department appointed Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, as special counsel on Wednesday to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, dramatically raising the legal and political stakes in an affair that has threatened to engulf Mr. Trump’s four-month-old presidency.
The decision by the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, came after a cascade of damaging developments for Mr. Trump in recent days, including his abrupt dismissal of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and the subsequent disclosure that Mr. Trump asked Mr. Comey to drop the investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.
Mr. Rosenstein had been under escalating pressure from Democrats, and even some Republicans, to appoint a special counsel after he wrote a memo that the White House initially cited as the rationale for Mr. Comey’s dismissal.
By appointing Mr. Mueller, a former federal prosecutor with an unblemished reputation, Mr. Rosenstein could alleviate uncertainty about the government’s ability to investigate the questions surrounding the Trump campaign and the Russians.
Mr. Rosenstein said in a statement that he concluded that “it is in the public interest for me to exercise my authorities and appoint a special counsel to assume responsibility for this matter.”
Rosenstein’s only hope for credibility, or a job after a looming Trump implosion, is to show some measure of credibility, and so as rats jump from a sinking ship, Rosenstein brought in an “independent” investigator, wholly impartial I am sure, because is a former FBI director. Take the FBI out, put the FBI in. It’s like a plug and play game, only with much bigger pawns.
You might wonder why Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General of the United States, didn’t appoint the special prosecutor, why he would let his assistant, Rosenstein do the appointing. I can lay your fears to rest: Jess Sessions didn’t appoint anyone because he has had ties to Russia that he lied about until he was pushed to disclose them.
Mr. Rosenstein, who until recently was United States attorney in Maryland, took control of the investigation because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself after acknowledging he had failed to disclose meetings he had with the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey I. Kislyak, when Mr. Sessions was an adviser to the Trump campaign.
Trump declares his innocence. While the handlers can muzzle Trump in a meeting, they can’t muzzle his Twitter feed, and Trump declared the special investigation a “witch hunt,” according to The NY Times reports:
In a pair of early morning Twitter posts, Mr. Trump cited, without evidence, what he called the “illegal acts” committed by the administration of his predecessor, Barack Obama, and the campaign of his former opponent, Hillary Clinton — and said they never led to the appointment of a special counsel.
“With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel appointed!” Mr. Trump wrote, misspelling counsel.
Moments later, Mr. Trump added, “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”
Why Trump couldn’t have just declared his innocence and feigned a world-weary sigh at the push for investigations as though they were silly, instead of erroneously asserting no special investigations occurred with Clinton and Obama is a question regarding sanity best left unanswered. Clinton and Obama were the subject of special investigations for the result of Benghazi crises. It’s simply not true, as with many of Trump’s tweets, that special prosecutors were never assigned during the last presidential tenure.
What’s a president to do? Complain he is being treated unfairly while he is “running the country,” a nightmare few Americans can forget:
With the White House battling multiple scandals — including Trump’s decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey, his alleged leak of highly classified material to Russian officials, and reports he pressured Comey to drop an FBI investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn — Trump and his allies have adopted a mentality of unfairly being under siege.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, appearing Thursday morning on CNBC, said that “we have to just get on with it, get this over. It’s a side show. But what the media forgets in the midst of this side show of media frenzy, the president is running the country.”
It’s as though Trump has forgotten he asked for this spotlight, and his aides act as though they never even knew a spotlight existed. To Trump, being President of the United States was something done behind closed doors, and he admitted as much when he said he could talk to Russia any way he wanted because he had “executive privilege.”
Comey may now turn out to be the biggest leaker yet, proving Trump should keep his friends close and should have kept his enemy closer. According to the Washington Post, Trump is worried that Comey may do to Trump what he did to Clinton, destroy a reputation through media innuendo. Trump warned Comey in a tweet, about how he better hope they don’t have “tapes” of conversations between himself and Comey, sounding exactly like Nixon did during the Watergate scandal, and suddenly from the Comey camp comes a leaked memo about how Trump asked Comey to stop investigating Russian ties to Trump’s campaign:
President Trump is clearly worried that former FBI director James B. Comey is going to come after him, through the media. That’s what Friday’s tweet about “tapes” was all about.
Four days later, a person described by the New York Times as “one of Mr. Comey’s associates” leaked a portion of Comey’s notes from a February meeting with the president. According to the notes, Trump expressed to Comey his desire for the FBI to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
It’s a war of words through the media. Hang legal process, let’s just let the public decide through the press. For Trump, used to controlling every element of his image, it’s blow. Trump is wringing his little hands. Even thought Trump vacillates between defending Michael Flynn and those close to him, and firing Flynn, investigations into Flynn have yet to abate:
Despite the conversation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Comey, the investigation of Mr. Flynn has proceeded. In Virginia, a federal grand jury has issued subpoenas in recent weeks for records related to Mr. Flynn. Part of the Flynn investigation is centered on his financial links to Russia and Turkey.
The Comey scandal, refusing to let Sally Yates testify, the Flynn scandal, and now the appointment of special prosecutor prove that Trump’s trademark phrase, “You’re fired” is no longer the last word.
Man Dragged Off United Airlines Flight Wins Settlement
April 28, 2017
United Airlines, in the middle of a media storm, agreed to pay a settlement to the 69 year old man who suffered a concussion, broken nose and two lost teeth at the hands of United employees. United employees dragged the man off the plan to make room for other flight crew members.
You can watch the video, but honestly, I couldn’t make it through it. Beating a 69 year old man until he is bloody is not something I could watch; however, here is the proof, if you wondered if the story was real.
Since United airlines has taken a financial beating in the wake of this scandal, along with a strange tale of a giant rabbit dying on a United flight (more animals die on United flights than any other), United reached a settlement and has instituted a new round of policies:
Earlier on Thursday, United announced several steps to prevent such episodes from recurring and said that passengers who had arrived on an aircraft shouldn’t have to give up their seats. The airline said it would create a new check-in process that would allow passengers to volunteer to give up their seats for compensation, and increased the limit of that compensation to $10,000 from $1,350.
United had previously announced that it would no longer ask law enforcement officers to remove passengers from its planes over booking issues, and that crew members would not replace boarded passengers.
“I hope other airlines will follow United’s lead,” Mr. Demetrio said in an interview on Thursday. “I have gotten an amazing number of emails from people with tales of woe, and it was not limited to United Airlines. So passenger service is an industrywide issue, and here United has laid the groundwork for the other airlines on what needs to be done.”
You would think that the airlines have a tough enough time managing their customers amid safety concerns, but it appears that 10-year old girls in leggings are the most dangerous airline foe around. Fearless girls in leggings attempting to board flights that their employee-parents purchased? Gate agents told the girls their leggings were too tight. While Reuters, quoted below, asserted the “girls were fine with the po0liy” the treatment, and it was only a passenger complained, but Reuters has no factual evidence from the girls to support this. Way to go, Reuters, “reporting” innuendo:
The girls, who were flying standby on Sunday from Denver to Minneapolis using free passes for employees or family members, were told by a gate attendant that they could not get on the plane while wearing the form-fitting pants.
Passengers using the passes are considered airline representatives, United Air Lines Inc spokesman Jonathan Guerin said, subject to a dress code that prohibits sleep or swimwear, torn clothing and revealing attire.
The girls were fine with the policy, Guerin says, but a traveler named Shannon Watts who overheard the exchange took offense.
Watts was further incensed when another woman who was listening told her 10-year-old daughter to put a dress on over her leggings, apparently thinking United’s policy applied to all passengers, not just those flying free.
Her subsequent tweet storm, which accused the airline of “policing women’s clothing,” quickly went viral, with celebrities such as model Chrissy Teigen and actors Seth Rogen and Patricia Arquette decrying United’s stance.
After the incident, United’s mentions on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram exploded from its average 2,000 daily mentions to 174,000, nearly 70 percent of them negative, said Kellan Terry, a spokesman for the social media analysis firm Brandwatch.
121, 800 people didn’t think it was “fine” to tell young girls they had to change out of leggings because they were too tight. Many people, over a 100,000, in fact, are tired of the pressure put on women, and now on young girls to obsess over what they wear. Here is how to make girls even more paranoid about their appearance– don’t let them fly in leggings.
My own daughter was hassled the last time she flew. (You can read about it here.) She is refusing to fly now. She says that airports and airlines single out girls. It appears she is right.
Delta Airlines published an excellent burn on Twitter:
Flying Delta means comfort. (That means you can wear your leggings.
)
United, rather than stating a benign response to Twitter comments, began an ill-fated (and woefully unprepared) Twitter feud with commenters who were irate over United’s policing of young girls’ clothing, whether flying on a buddy pass (parent who works for the airline purchases ticket) or in general. And the response from Twitter commenters was much more adept than from those at United:
United’s response on Twitter was such a huge botch that United’s Twitter failure was reported as a news story:
As for the fuss that’s erupted over United’s weekend incident, Harteveldt wonders if the airline could avoided much of that with a better social media response. The incident only seemed to gather steam after United responded to the first tweets about the situation not with a gentle explanation, but rather by citing the company’s “contract of carriage” and its “right to refuse transport for passengers” who don’t meet criteria spelled out there.
“United flew itself into a social media mountain on Twitter,” Harteveldt says. “They absolutely failed in every regard in their Twitter communications. United’s responses are partially responsible for this escalating into the controversy it has now become.”
Instead, Harteveldt suggests United would have been better served with a “benign” acknowledgement of the initial tweet and a pledge to look into it rather “than digging in their heels and handling it as they did. It did nothing to help the airline.”
Perhaps United Airlines missed the Fearless Girl statue in New York, but it appears a little girl has the power to terrorize even the most hallowed corporations, entire airlines included.
TSA Invasive New Pat Down To “Lessen Cognitive Burden” On TSA Agents-NSFW illustration
March 10, 2017
TSA admits that the “cognitive burdens” on staffers forced them to allow TSA screeners to use their fingertips to pat down women’s breasts and both genders’ genitalia. Basically TSA is saying their agents are too stupid to find guns or explosives using the backs of their hands, flyers will now be subject to “invasive” (according to web news source) pat downs.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has declined to say exactly where—and how—employees will be touching air travelers as part of the more invasive physical pat-down procedure it recently ordered.
But the agency does expect some passengers to consider the examination unusual. In fact, the TSA decided to inform local police in case anyone calls to report an “abnormal” federal frisking, according to a memo from an airport trade association obtained by Bloomberg News. The physical search, for those selected to have one, is what the agency described as a more “comprehensive” screening, replacing five separate kinds of pat-downs it previously used.
The decision to alert local and airport police raises a question of just how intimate the agency’s employees may get. On its website, the TSA says employees “use the back of the hands for pat-downs over sensitive areas of the body. In limited cases, additional screening involving a sensitive area pat-down with the front of the hand may be needed to determine that a threat does not exist.
You can always pay an extra $80 for the TSA-precheck, which might be well worth the money if TSA admits that the cognitive burden of pat downs is too great for its staff. Otherwise, TSA refuses to state how the pat downs will occur, what will be touched and how. Passengers are already subject to a virtual strips search, and now, pat downs akin to a police department arrest scenario. Great time to fly, people.
You gotta know that when airports have to inform local police that passengers will most likely report their “search” as a criminal activity that there is huge problem.
Personally, my daughter who had a TSA agent yell at her, tell her she would separate her from me to take her to a private screening room for a pat down alone, all because of sequins on her shirt, has decided she no longer wants to fly. This from a kid who started flying and traveling with me when she was one-year old. She is the age at which she will be making decisions about the course of her travels, and she is also at the age to be determining whether or not she will fly. She will not. I won’t force her.
I filed a complaint. I spoke with supervisor, who told me there was nothing he could do. My daughter said she didn’t mind her sparkle neckline being patted down, but she was almost in tears at the yelling by the TSA agent. She no longer will voluntarily go through an airport.
While standing in line at the airport, I was also subjected to shoving by the TSA agent, to the point that I received bruises on my shoulders and arms from other passengers’ bags hitting me as the TSA agent pushed them back to “maintain the line.” No one was out of line, really, but some people got confused about whether they were supposed to stand on the line or behind it when they were supposed to approach with their tickets and I.D.
The G– airport TSA agents had also been stealing passengers’ belongings as they went through security, and while an investigation was launched, the damage was done. TSA agents in Michigan really struggle. Apparently their “cognitive burden” was too great. Essentially TSA won’t say how many people are subjected to pat downs, but there are estimates, and while the agents may be too stupid to find guns on people, the real issue was not finding guns in bags. Pat downs don’t help with that.
The TSA screens about 2 million people daily at U.S. airports. The agency said it doesn’t track how many passengers are subject to pat-down searches. These searches typically occur when an imaging scanner detects one or more unknown objects on a person or if a traveler declines to walk through the machine and opts for the physical screening.
“Passengers who have not previously experienced the now standardized pat-down screening may not realize that they did in fact receive the correct procedure, and may ask our partners, including law enforcement at the airport, about the procedure,” TSA spokesman Bruce Anderson wrote March 3 in an email, describing why the agency notified police.
The pat-down change, first reported Friday by Bloomberg News, is “intended to reduce the cognitive burden on [employees] who previously had to choose from various pat-down procedures depending on the type of screening lane,” the ACI-NA wrote in its notice.
Physical screening has long been one of the public’s strongest dislikes about airport security protocols. The TSA has all pat-downs conducted by an employee of the same gender as the traveler and allows a passenger to request a private area for the screening, as well as to have a witness present. Likewise, the traveler can request that the pat-down occur in public view.
Because they TSA agents couldn’t decide how to screen,cognitive burden and all, everyone gets their butt felt up.
Denver reports that there will be “more intimate contact,” but fails to specify how and where:
At Denver International Airport, employees were notified last week that the searches “may involve an officer making more intimate contact than before.”
The TSA isn’t saying how agents will be touching travelers, but the agency notified local police in case anyone reports an “abnormal” search. Typically, travelers only get a pat-down if something was triggered during screening or they opt out of going through the body scanners.The TSA used to have five types of pat-downs. Now, there will only be one way and they’ll still be performed by agents of the same gender.
Still, the pat-downs have long been disliked by travelers and a more rigorous, invasive search will not be liked by some.The change comes after agents found a record number of guns last month, according to the TSA blog.
In one day, 21 firearms were found at airport security checkpoints across the country. A loaded magazine, a variety of knives and a live smoke grenade were also found.
If you opt out of the digital strip search or “body scanner,” then you will be subjected to a pat down. CBS reports that TSA claims that passengers won’t spend more time in security because of this, but it’s impossible to see how TSA can justify that statement.
A 2015 study found that TSA agents missed 95 percent of planted dangerous and hazardous items planted at security checkpoints as part of an undercover test.
The TSA says the new pat-down policy will not extend the amount of time a passenger spends at a security checkpoint.TSA officers of the same gender as the passenger will use the back of their hand for pat-downs over sensitive areas of the body, including breasts, groin, and buttocks, the TSA website says.The TSA also says that passengers will be told by the officer exactly what they will do before doing it. Passengers may also request a private screening.
If you look at the TSA screening notice on the TSA website, it states that pretty much TSA agents are allowed to molest you, all in the name of safety, of course. Other people’s safety, actually, but obviously not your own, during the TSA molestation procedures:
A pat-down may include inspection of the head, neck, arms, torso, legs, and feet. This includes head coverings and sensitive areas such as breasts, groin, and the buttocks. You may be required to adjust clothing during the pat-down. The officer will advise you of the procedure to help you anticipate any actions before you feel them. Pat-downs require sufficient pressure to ensure detection.
TSA officers use the back of the hands for pat-downs over sensitive areas of the body. In limited cases, additional screening involving a sensitive area pat-down with the front of the hand may be needed to determine that a threat does not exist.
TSA appearing to be in an extreme state of public denial, stated that most flyers won’t notice the difference, but at the same time, had to warn stakeholders that there were more intimate procedures required. You don’t warn the money people of a change in procedure unless you expect a fall-out. When forecasted earnings are going to be hit that so hard that stakeholders have to be notified of impending doom, you know that the situation is bad. TSA blithely announced no one would even notice its new invasive pat downs, a.k.a. TSA molestations:
“Invasive is not the word I would use,” said TSA spokesman Michael England, referring to the new pat-down. “We feel like this new procedure will be more effective in finding prohibited items. This is a simple change of procedure that 99.99 percent of people are not even going to notice.”
So, I didn’t come up with this, but this is the image created when I pulled up consumer responses to TSA screen measures:
boing boing.net take on TSA screenings
The person who created the post, above, states he was hit in the testicles by TSA agents as retaliation for asking about not crushing his laptop:\
If the TSA thinks that you’re suspicious — or if you opt out of the “optional” full-body scanner — you get a junk-touching “secondary screening” in which the screeners “pat you down” by rubbing the backs of their hands on your genitals and other “sensitive areas” (they can be pretty rough — a screener at ORD once punched me in the balls to retaliate for me asking him not to rest the tub containing my bags on top of my unprotected laptop).
But it’s about to get much worse. Under new TSA rules, screeners will be able to lovingly cup and fondle your genitals and “sensitive areas” during a secondary search. The new guidelines call for searches so invasive, local TSA outposts have been told to notify local cops to expect accusations of sexual assault from fliers.
I predicted this. The day the TSA started letting its best-connected, wealthiest fliers buy their way out of the normal screening procedure, it was an iron-clad certainty that the way everyone else gets treated would get worse, and worse, and worse. We have not hit bottom. I predict cavity searches for “very suspicious circumstances” by 2020, with no way to opt out and choose not to fly once the party gets started.
Generally, studies have shown that men feel safer in TSA screenings and pat downs than women, and that influences buying decisions for women. As in my post yesterday, https://unaskedadvice.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/nursing-mother-arrested-and-held-until-she-dumped-milk-into-the-sink-marines-send-nude-photos-and-wall-street-ponders-lowest-birth-rate-since-great-depression/, feelings of safety impact women. Feelings of personal safety impact life choices, obviously.
TSA costs and spending have risen exponentially over the years, but at what cost to passengers? Canada kept some data about the “welfare loss” or lost revenue from security charges, not just procedures back in 2011 and posted losses of $2.2 billion:
Using 2011 data, Gillen and Morrison (2015), estimate the welfare loss in Canada due to the imposition of security fees for that year.16 According to these estimates, in 2011 there were 690,000 fewer passengers flying to/from and within Canada as a result of the air transport security charge. This translates into $227 Million in forgone revenue to the airlines and an economic welfare loss of $2.2 Billion.17
TSA screenings and long lines alone cost airlines money, as 2016 predicted record losses in profits:
The data indicates that millions of Americans will either skip planned spending on travel or will spend less (replacing plane trips with road and rail means those travelers will not journey as far, U.S. Travel economists note). All told, the lost travel spending will total $4.3 billion for the three-month summer peak season—a figure that would have directly supported 37,500 additional domestic jobs.
“To put these figures in perspective, the problems at TSA security lines are costing our economy almost a billion and a half dollars in spending and more than 12,000 jobs every month,” said U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow.
…We’re looking at convincing data that says hundreds of thousands of people are potentially reconsidering whether to get on an airplane every single day. Given the importance of travel to both our economy and our way of life, it is not an overstatement to call that a national crisis in need of a national solution.”
A Forbes economist has a view of the TSA that argues that for all the people the TSA pushes into the driving lane, which is more dangerous than flying, TSA isn’t really “saving” lives:
There is no free lunch (or free pat-down). When you do one thing, you give up the opportunity to do another. Even if the TSA has made us safer and saved lives (it hasn’t), these saved lives have come at a cost. For every life saved in a TSA-prevented terrorist attack, more lives are lost on highways as people substitute away from air travel and toward driving. Getting rid of the TSA would mean fewer dead people, on net. That’s a win in my book.
People Respond to Incentives. When you change the costs and benefits of something, people change their behavior. By making flying more costly, the TSA encourages more people to drive. Even when we take terrorism into account, flying is far safer than driving. As a result of the TSA’s new “enhanced pat-downs” and nude imaging, people are going to die today, tomorrow, and indeed every day from now on who wouldn’t die if flying were more convenient.(emphasis added)
The inefficiency and questioned need for TSA regulations has reached such a fevered pitch that Trump is calling for TSA budgetary cuts, something that is definitely necessary considering the success of the TSA programs like “Behavioral Analysis,” which focus on how often people yawn and blink. (I don’t make this shit up–I can’t.)
For example, the TSA’s budget cuts would include a $65 million reduction for the agency’s totally useless behavioral detection officers.
A November 2012 audit by the Government Accountability Office found that, after 10 years of running its behavior detection program, the TSA could not demonstrate its effectiveness. The TSA even admitted that it did not have any way to measure whether the program worked, aside from counting “referrals to local law enforcement” (which turned out to be a list of people arrested for everything from unruly behavior to public drunkenness, the GOA found, but not a single instance of a legitimate national security threat).
“Until TSA can provide scientifically validated evidence demonstrating that behavioral indicators can be used to identify passengers who may pose a threat to aviation, the agency risks funding activities that have not been determined to be effective,” the GAO concluded, using auditor-speak for “this program should be defunded.”
Undeterred by the audit, the TSA is still using behavior detection officers (at an annual cost of around $200 million) and has expanded their use at some airports, seemingly in an attempt to prove their usefulness. Guidelines for the program, published in 2015 by The Intercept, show that the TSA’s crack team of behavior-monitoring agents are told to identify potential threats (like Reason’s Ron Bailey) who yawn too much, blink too little, breathe quickly, make eye contact with security personnel, or don’t make eye contact with security personnel. Truly stunning that they haven’t busted any terrorists with this pseudo-science, isn’t it?
In case you thought that sort of thing was fake, and it’s not, t Reason.com has a real list of behaviors the TSA monitors with its “behavioral analysis.” Be sure to watch closely. A problematic contact lens could get you arrested. Let’s “lessen the cognitive burden” on TSA agents and all fly naked.
“Make America Mate Again” was the title of an article published by Bloomberg, a well-known financial news service, and it caught my eye as news came up about one mother who was arrested during a civil protest in New York yesterday in the Day Without Women protest and held in jail so long that she was pumping and dumping her breastmilk in a jail cell sink. Economists have released reports about the US birthrate being the lowest since 1936, and mothers are being held from nursing their babies for blocking traffic.
Sarsour, the last of the three leaders to be freed, said the mood inside the jail cell was “empowering” and “inspiring.” Mallory, who was released about an hour earlier, said a dozen or so women were singing freedom songs to pass the time.
Sarsour was upset that authorities were still holding fellow Women’s March co-chair Bob Bland, who gave birth just a few months ago and needed to nurse her baby.
Mallory, Perez and Sarsour said they would wait outside of the precinct until the last woman is released. Members of the group tweeted earlier that they were arrested after blocking traffic.
“I got arrested with some of the strongest women that represent the best that New York City has to offer,” Sarsour said. “I feel empowered, I feel proud of what I did today and I’ve done this many times before. … I hope it sends a message to people that you’ve got to risk it, you’ve got to be bold in this moment.”
In fact, the nursing mother who was so full of milk that she had to express it in a jail sink was the very last woman to be released. It’s not a coincidence that this story broke as another news story broke about male Marine Corp members creating a site of 30,000 users dedicated to sending out pictures of women naked to embarrass them or retaliate for a break-up.
Demonstrating that men still have a lot to learn, and that women are grossly underrepresented in Wall Street, one quoted factor in the decline in birth rate cited “more opportunities for women,” as if gender violence, economic insecurity and sexual aggression just have no bearing on bearing conversations.
In all likelihood, this decline [1936]was owed to the growing secularization of society at this time, and in particular, the growing opportunities for women outside of traditional gender roles-– not to the collective trauma of World War I. These new mores went hand in hand with sharp declines in the formation of new households, as younger people put off marriage and childbearing. This trend, or what Barber described as a “rapid and very large decline in the rate of growth of non-farm households,” led to a dramatic decline in residential construction starting around 1926.
Apparently we live to breed, unless something better comes along, of course…
On March 6, 2017, just this week, an editorial on economics demonstrates that women are choosing to have fewer children in the U.S. Of course, no mention is made of holding nursing mothers in jail cells until they are the last released and are leaking milk into the sinks.
To put the fertility rate in perspective, it is now at about 1.85 births per woman. To maintain a stable population requires at least 2.1 births per woman. The US has been at or below the replacement fertility rate since 1972, as the chart below shows.
Perhaps economists should consider that while women in leadership and working for a company lead to 34% higher profits, a large enough profit margin to warrant its own ticker [SHE], it seems society is slow to recognize that the gender disparity, sexual violence and discrimination have a direct cost for women and fertility. Realistically, it’s about value. If society values women having children, it had better put its money where its mouth is, literally.
I was looking for coverage today about the “Day Without Women” protests, and I was rewarded amply with Fox News coverage about women who need to take care of children not showing up for work being “too busy protesting President Trump.” Note, if you watch that sort of thing, that no men are commenting on the story, because Fox News isn’t suicidal, but blonde women with southern accents, and a minority anchorwoman, discuss how women not working will hurt childcare. You think? Pretty much, that’s the point. Women who work in that industry don’t serve some altruistic means of meeting their own baby needs by caring for other people’s children who make more money than they do–childcare workers and teachers work to get paid. It’s actually called work, not altruism. Apparently that twist of irony is lost on Fox News.
Case in point, some teachers are calling it a massive strike, as pay for teachers is routinely abysmal. Why should women be paid when taking care of other people’s children is supposed to meet their every womanly need?
The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers will be picketing schools on Wednesday to protest “five years without raises,” and the Chicago Teacher’s Union told NBC News its members would be rallying that evening.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten told NBC News that Wednesday isn’t an AFT strike “in the traditional sense,” but a teacher who wants to participate would be making an “individual decision.” Weingarten will be speaking at the Women Workers Rising rally in Washington, DC.
Events are also taking place at colleges. Ghazala Hashmi, a faculty engagement coordinator at Reynolds Community College in Richmond, VA, told NBC News the school granted teachers permission to hold a rally on campus.
“We rally for the rights of girls and women throughout the world,” said Hashmi, “To quality education, medical resources, and social and legal protections from sexual violence and gender oppression.”
On one hand, parents complain of being inconvenienced by school closures, and on the other hand, imply that they are deserving of these women serving them without proper pay. Irony appears to be lost on deserving parents, as well.
Even CNN complained about how women are angry that other women working in childcare and education aren’t serving them when they strike:
The national strike movement on Wednesday coincides with International Women’s Day. It aims to draw attention to inequities working women face compared to men, from wage disparity to harassment to job insecurity.Several school districts across the country are closing to allow staff and teachers the chance to participate. While some people in those communities applauded district leadership for the show of solidarity, others criticized them for leaving working families scrambling to find childcare.
Damn those women for not serving “working families,” as if they don’t have “working families” of their own. Most families work, so this is a specious argument.
The news media seem to miss the point that the whole reason for a strike is to inconvenience someone who depends on low-paid work.
Politico, with no trace of irony, published a piece saying that women not working could end civil society and cause anarchy.
Do organizers truly want to encourage a movement that would lead to nothing less than the breakdown of civil society? This isn’t a feminist ploy, it’s one for anarchy.
Umm, aside from the broken argument that a strike is a “feminist ploy,” might as well say “toy,” in equal tones of derision, the whole point is to show people how much society depends on women, and if a society doesn’t value women, then anarchy is a pretty powerful term for devaluing women. What would happen if women didn’t work? Society, according to Politico author, Amanda Carpenter, would collapse. A “breakdown of civil society” is awesome stuff. Yes, when 50% of the population is missing, society would break down, but again, that’s the whole point.
Miss Carpenter’s incoherent rant about how women should babysit because it’s important to other people is pretty typical of the emotional vomit online:
The “Day Without A Women” organizers made a severe misstep by making children and working families, many of whom who can’t easily skip work or get babysitters, into collateral damage for their dead-end, self-soothing political agenda. School may not be in session in Alexandria, in Prince George’s County, in Chapel Hill, or in parts of Brooklyn, but there’s a lesson the nation can learn from these closures. The modern progressive movement doesn’t have any goals. Just feelings, which come before all else.
First of all, children can’t get babysitters. That would be a parent’s job, so including children in that effluvia is an emotional misdirect: “don’t hurt the kids, you womanly beasts.” Then again, aren’t women the ones supposedly enjoying serving as babysitters? Sounds like Miss Carpenter finally learned her lesson about how important childcare is, but she doesn’t realize it. Miss Carpenter accuses there is no “goal” in the progressive movement, so she seems to have misunderstood that point about her arguing about the importance of childcare and schools all while saying that highlighting that only focuses on “feelings.”
Miss Carpenter uses the guilt trop to try to shame women for asking for more, arguing that “feelings coming before all else” is unworthy of women. It’s a common trope today: women aren’t important, but their loss hurts kids. Mirror, here is your reflection.
Getting attention paid to the importance of women is what this movement is all about. Anarchy is appropriate for a world without women. We should be paying attention to this. Women are important, and the stakes are high.
As one commenter stated, gender violence, gender-based healthcare, all have life-threatening consequences for women, so of course we should be paying attention:
A reminder that while the status quo is unacceptable, the longer-term trend is pointed towards gender equality. And this trend is global, not simply confined to the western world. Just look at healthcare. Maternal mortality remains a mass killer in the developing world. It may not be as newsworthy as gender-based violence or as stark and immediate as disease or starvation, but it is the second biggest killer of women of reproductive age in the developing world.
Of course, that quote was taken from the UK, The Guardian, not a US based paper. The US news media really struggles with this concept of women not bowing to pressure from guilt, from shaming.
In Mexico, this movement can’t come too soon. Viral video footage of a teacher telling students in school about how he beats his wife if she won’t have sex and rapes her has garnered nothing more than an administrative reprimand and emphasized how life-threatening domestic violence and gender violence are for women:
This is an international movement, not a self-centered US movement based solely on Trump. Women in the international community have spoken out:
The European Parliament’s Greek vice president, Dimitris Papadimoulis, greeted International Women’s Day with a shocking forecast from the World Economic Forum.
Greek women have suffered the country’s ongoing economic crisis disproportionately. Although seven years of economic meltdown have narrowed a gap in the employment rate between men and women – because of soaring unemployment rates among men, not an increase in the hiring of women – Greece’s employment gender gap remains well above the European Union average. In 2015, the gap was 18 percentage points in Greece, compared with 11 across the rest of the EU.
Women are desperate. Gender disparity ending in 169 years? They can’t afford it, literally.
I like the term anarchy. I like the power of the movement, but I also like the people are talking about how women not accepting abuse is “inconvenient” and “hard on working families,” because it highlights how frequently US society expects to get ahead by taking advantage of women, by shaming them. The shaming, shaming, shaming. Shame women over childbirth, bodies, reproductive choices, daycare or no daycare, babysitters, not babysitting, not serving as nurses, not serving as teachers… Notice that women aren’t supposed to ask for anything? They’re not supposed to have feelings. They aren’t supposed to be safe with medical care. They aren’t supposed to have equality for another 169 years because it’s inconvenient now, and that, Dear Readers, is the point. Anarchy sounds about right.
Michael Flynn Resigns Amid Russian Revelations: “Dishonest or Forgetful”
February 15, 2017
Let’s not tarnish Michael Flynn’s reputation or anything, thirty years in the armed forces service, serving under two Presidents (even for only a few days), and lying to the general public about calling Russia to discuss how he would lift sanctions when he became President. Whoops, Michael Flynn was never elected. Michael Flynn was acting under orders from then-President Elect Trump. Tellingly, Trump hasn’t admitted that Flynn misled him about calling Russia to discuss sanctions then-President Obama had imposed, because Flynn wouldn’t have been in the position of calling Russia were it not for his position with Trump.
Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin at dinner honoring Russia
Obama had fired Flynn back when Obama was President for “insubordination,” and the scuttle is that Michael Flynn used increasingly hostile rhetoric toward Muslims. The AP reports that Flynn has maintained a rocky history:
The White House said Tuesday that President Trump asked for the resignation of his national security adviser, a hard-charging, feather-ruffling retired lieutenant general who just three weeks into the new administration had put himself in the center of a controversy. Flynn resigned late Monday.
At issue was Flynn’s contact with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington. Flynn and the Russian appear to have discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia late last year, raising questions about whether he was freelancing on foreign policy while President Barack Obama was still in office and whether he misled Trump officials about the calls.
The uncertainty about his future had deepened Monday when the White House issued a statement saying that Trump is “evaluating the situation” surrounding Flynn. In his resignation letter, Flynn said he held numerous calls with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the transition and gave “incomplete information” about those discussions to Vice President Pence.
The center of a storm is a familiar place for Flynn. His military career ended when Obama dismissed him as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. Flynn has said he was pushed out for holding tougher views than Obama about Islamic extremism. But a former senior U.S. official said the firing was for insubordination, after Flynn failed to follow guidance from superiors.
What a reputation. How could we tarnish Michael Flynn’s reputation when he has done such a smashing job of it himself? Indeed, it’s impossible to believe that a man who as in the military for about thirty years suddenly called Russia on tapped phones, unknowingly, of course, and discussed what would happen to Russian sanctions just as a concerned citizen. Why would Russia take calls from just any American citizen?
The Washington Post and other U.S. newspapers, citing current and former U.S. officials, reported last week that Flynn made explicit references to U.S. sanctions on Russia in conversations with Putin’s ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. One of the calls took place on Dec. 29, the day Obama announced new penalties against Russia’s top intelligence agencies over allegations they meddled in the election with the objective of helping Trump win.
While it’s not unusual for incoming administrations to have discussions with foreign governments before taking office, the repeated contacts just as the U.S. was pulling the trigger on sanctions suggests Trump’s team might have helped shape Russia’s response. They also contradicted denials about such sanctions discussions by several Trump administration officials, including the vice president. Some Democratic lawmakers want a congressional investigation.
Michael Flynn worked Intelligence. He made no mistakes. Either he felt he was immune to impropriety because Trump told him to call Russia, or he believed that Russia could protect him from fallout. The Japan Times had covered the story quoted above, and they also had a synthesized summary of Flynn’s military history, demonstrating that when a shake up this big happens in US intelligence circles, everyone notices.
Flynn’s sparkling military resume had included key assignments at home and abroad, and high praise from superiors.
The son of an Army veteran of World War II and the Korean War, Flynn was commissioned as a second lieutenant in May 1981. He started in intelligence and eventually rose to senior positions, including intelligence chief for U.S. Central Command.
Ian McCulloh, a Johns Hopkins data science specialist, became a Flynn admirer while working as an Army lieutenant colonel in Afghanistan in 2009. At the time, Flynn ran intelligence for the U.S.-led international coalition in Kabul and was pushing for more creative approaches to targeting Taliban networks, including use of data mining and social network analysis, according to McCulloh.
“He was pushing for us to think out of the box and try to leverage technology better and innovate,” McCulloh said, crediting Flynn for improving the effectiveness of U.S. targeting. “A lot of people didn’t like it because it was different.”
A man who started his career in intelligence and rose to Intelligence Chief for U.S. Central Command doesn’t “accidentally” “forget” his calls to foreign governments would have been monitored. Which leads us to the next question: What did Michael Flynn think would protect him from criminal charges when he began issuing deals for the US with Russia back in December 2016, before Trump was even President?
Flynn wasn’t the only Trump associate contacting the Russians during a time when it was confirmed that Russia interfered with the United States elections. News outlets seem to believe Trump’s motive for mentioning Electoral College numbers is merely hubris, but it’s also a way to distract any attention away from the fact that Trump would most likely have lost the election without Russia’s help. How can Trump’s win and Russia’s help ever be separated? When cornered, which is easy to accomplish with Trump, Trump responds by talking about the size of his win.
But there is more. Trump associates were also linked to stealthy calls to Russia, and those calls haven’t been openly discussed yet. The NY Times reports there are multiple calls from Trump’s team to Russia, with love, and they aren’t limited to the Michael Flynn scandal.
The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. In those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.
The F.B.I. declined to comment. The White House also declined to comment Tuesday night, but earlier in the day, the press secretary, Sean Spicer, stood by Mr. Trump’s previous comments that nobody from his campaign had contact with Russian officials before the election.
When Trump is questioned about his ties to Russia, Trump complains that “illegal leaks” were the only reason he essentially fired Flynn anyway. Trump never asserted that he didn’t support Flynn making side deals with Russia during Obama’s Presidency. Trump just complained that it was illegal for people to tell the public that Flynn had been talking with Russia.
President Trump lashed out at the nation’s intelligence agencies again on Wednesday, saying that his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, was brought down by illegal leaks to the news media, on a day of new disclosures about the Trump camp’s dealings with Russia during and after the presidential campaign.
“From intelligence, papers are being leaked, things are being leaked,” Mr. Trump said at a White House news conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. “It’s a criminal action, criminal act, and it’s been going on for a long time before me, but now it’s really going on. And people are trying to cover up for a terrible loss that the Democrats had under Hillary Clinton.”
Dodge and parry. That’s all Trump has left. “Dumpy Trumpy” as my father calls him, has no other options other than to keep evading questions he can’t answer without perjury at a later date.
CNN reports that the sheer volume of communication between Trump’s team, at a time when Russia was being sanctioned for interfering in the US elections, is enough to warrant investigation.
However, these communications stood out to investigators due to the frequency and the level of the Trump advisers involved. Investigators have not reached a judgment on the intent of those conversations.Adding to US investigators’ concerns were intercepted communications between Russian officials before and after the election discussing their belief that they had special access to Trump, two law enforcement officials tell CNN. These officials cautioned the Russians could have been exaggerating their access
Republicans are no longer rank and file supporting Trump and Michael Flynn with emerging Russian connections.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday it’s “highly likely” the Senate intelligence committee will investigate former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s discussions with the Russian ambassador.
“I think the fundamental question for us is what is our involvement in it, and who ought to look at it,” the Kentucky Republican said. “And the intelligence committee is already looking at Russian involvement in our election. As Sen. (Roy) Blunt has already indicated, it is highly likely they will want to take look at this episode as well. They have the broad jurisdiction to do it.”The Senate’s second-ranking Republican and other GOP senators have called for an investigation into the episode, building on a string of investigations underway on Russian interference in the US elections. Sen. John Cornyn told reporters Tuesday that the Senate standing committees with oversight of intelligence needs to investigate.Asked by CNN if he wanted the Senate’s committees to investigate Flynn, Cornyn replied: “Yes.”
The UK reports on the Flynn controversy in a way that people here in the US haven’t pounced on yet: characterizing Flynn as EITHER “dishonest” or “forgetful.” Strange that a National Security Advisor with 30 years in the intelligence field suddenly became “forgetful” in the middle of his position. But either we have had a NSA with dementia or a case of lying to the feds. Neither is palatable.
Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway made it sound like a mutual decision on Good Morning America as she gently ushered Flynn out.
Flynn resigned because he realized he’d become a distraction for the administration, she said. ‘It became increasingly unsustainable for him.’
Kellyanne Conway Calls Flynn “Dishonest or Forgetful”
Careful, careful Trump, because now the Republicans have backed away, and Russia appears unhappy with Flynn’s resignation. Those love affairs can turn brutal fast. The Independent of the Uk reports that Russian diplomats have even written Facebook posts about Flynn’s resignation.
Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s upper parliamentary chamber, wrote on Facebook that Mr Flynn’s resignation was “not just paranoia but something even worse.
“Either Trump hasn’t found the necessary independence and he’s been driven into a corner… or Russophobia has permeated the new administration from top to bottom.”
Even the Russians see the writing on the wall, especially when Trump isn’t willing to face it.
“‘Flynn is out, but the Russian problem remains in the Trump White House,’ The expulsion of Flynn was the first act. Now the target is Trump himself,” Pushkov said in another tweet.
Perhaps the Valentine Trump sent to Russia with love is already fading.
Shia LeBouf Arrested on LiveCam After Shouting Down Racist
January 26, 2017
It’s a form of performance art, one that has already drawn attention from people looking to thwart it. If you thought that Trump’s presidency attracted white supremacists, racists and bigots, and if you feared that they now have a voice to spew across the nation, you might have proof from the video clips below.
It sounds innocent enough: Shia LeBouf has set up a live cam for people to approach and say “He will not divide us.” It is simple, but it’s message threatens white supremacists, because the live cam was set up on Donald Trump’s inauguration. Or, because white supremacists are just easily threatened and incredibly rude. Someone has a video stream set up, and people are talking on it, and the racist enters and wants to ruin it. Why?
At some point during the charged interactions, LeBouf is arrested. Watch that video below. But why was he arrested?
What is certain about that video is that Shia appears unrepentant. Perhaps his arrest stems from this incident below, in which a white supremacist approaches the camera to shout inflammatory comments. I watched the seen and thought there was a fight brewing. It’s clear that Labeouf doesn’t appreciate racists shouting into his camera, but is this really enough for arrest? Why not arrest the man who clearly is shoulder to shoulder with Lebeouf to shout racist comments? He is laughing. Shia is not.
Lest you think that this sort of harassment was unintentional, accidental maybe, check out the conversations below, where BuzzFeed reported that white supremacists have been using chat rooms to try to organize to take down Shia’s protest.
We can ask why, but I don’t think there is a good answer except that the discourse has changed. Trump has made it politically acceptable to attack people with outright lies (Alternative Facts, a term coined by Kellyanne Conway, but that’s a whole other post), and it’s not met with rebuttal.
The white supremacist using Shia’s feed approaches to make incendiary commentary, words used by white supremacists and Nazis, a tribute to Hitler and the deeply disturbing concept of the Aryan race (white, blonde hair, blue eyes). According to BuzzFeed, the commentary from the the disruptor means this:
“14, 88” is a code among neo-Nazis and white supremacists referring to one of two 14-word pledges repeated by members of the Aryan Nation: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” or “Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.” The repetition of “88” refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet, “H,” which is how neo-Nazis abbreviate “heil Hitler” so they can quietly signal each other.
Not only does Shia instantly grasp what the white supremacist is saying, he actively blocks it. While I hate to see two men pushing in a dance that leads to punching, I am proud of Shia for not letting his project be railroaded. I am proud that there is a person who is willing to fight to block the rising level of racist dialogue emanating from Trump’s presidency, not to mention Nazism, which has been name-dropped more frequently with a Trump presidency than any other in recent history.
It’s an amped up “discussion,” with pretty sick commentary.
It’s pointed, and it’s designed to attack Shia, very intentional.
Confession time: I made a mistake and read the comments under posts like this.
It’s shallow, and usually I don’t indulge because one person’s “comment” is another’s form of hate speech, but this time, I wanted to see if there was any brevity. For some Trump supporters, there is the argument that America was “great in the 60’s” because Republicans led the civil rights movement (no, I didn’t make that up), and for others, it’s a point of person pride to attack people who profess Nazi beliefs. There were also comments about how Shia succeed in producing performance art, pretty indicative of what is going on in American politics, and my own perspective? It’s fascinating that so many people are willing to join in the performance art. So many people have started alternate threads, argued points, showed up to speak. Pretty amazing involvement. Now, if we can just prevent violence there.
Serena Williams Calls On Rude Reporter To Apologize For Criticizing Her Performance: Reporter Wins Asshole of the Week Award
January 25, 2017
Part of the problem with the Trump presidency seems to have spilled over into Australia, namely: criticizing women, particularly for a perceived lack of “womanly” (as defined by white men) daintiness (which would be way less threatening to the impotent male ego dishing here than say,equality). Most men, good men, recognize value in other people, even if those other people are of a different gender, nationality, or appearance, because only an idiot writes off the human race when it is different from oneself. But, there are plenty of assholes out there apparently, and this one wins the Asshole of the Week Award for criticizing Serena’s performance by calling her “scrappy.”
Let’s put “scrappy” into context here. “Scrappy” translates to “bossy,” as applied to women here, meaning that which is threatening to men suffering from ego issues. “Scrappy” relates the same way, as if a woman playing tennis should be concerned with her eyeshadow as opposed to her total physical dominance of a sport, worldwide dominance actually. Fuck that guy. “Scrappy” is not accurate, but “world domination” is. Dude, any time you call Serena “scrappy,” you just exposed your impotence.
Not just my aggravation with that term being applied to women as a form of insecure male misogyny. Check out the internet definition:
-
consisting of disorganized, untidy, or incomplete parts.“scrappy lecture notes piled up unread”
synonyms: feisty, tenacious, determined, persistent, dogged, aggressive, forceful; More -
2.NORTH AMERICANinformaldetermined, argumentative, or pugnacious.“he played the part of a scrappy detective”
“Pugnacious” or “Argumentative,” and Serena might as well apologize for having breasts AND, gasp, being determined. This is the issue with all white men (like Trump and his cabinet) spewing their insecurity: it leaks around the edges and spills into normal conversation as if it were accepted, apparently worldwide. It just infected the Australian Open. It just festered enough that women wrote about it. My daughter showed me this clip, asked me to write about it, saying: “Mom, you have got to see this…”
The New York Post provided a transcript of the exchange here:
Reporter: Looked a little bit of a scrappy performance. A few more unforced errors, a few double-faults.
Williams: I think that’s a very negative thing to say. Are you serious?
Reporter: Just my observation.
Williams: Well, you should have been out there. That wasn’t very kind. You should apologize. Do you want to apologize?
Reporter: I do. I’m sorry.
Williams: Thank you very much. That was a great performance. I played well. She’s a former top-10 player. The last time we played together was in the finals of a Grand Slam.
Honestly, Serena doesn’t look totally comfortable dressing him down, looking away, but maybe that is just holding her temper. She calmly holds him accountable for his offensiveness, and then she moves on. In reality, no woman should have to apologize for not having a dainty tennis game, ever. Slayed, Serena.
Men Doing the Dishes Leads To Better Sex And Staying Married: Wives Will Divorce Over Housework “Second Shift”
January 19, 2017
Sounds like every woman’s dream, watching a man lather up and suds the dishes? Actually, it is, especially if he rinses well and puts them away. Studies show that men who do more housework get better sex. No, for real, do the dishes, man.
A new study from the University of Alberta found that male-female couples hadbetter and more frequent sex when men chipped in with the chores. The findings revealed that when a man felt he was making fair contributions to household chores, the couple had more sex and each partner reported more sexual satisfaction.
Could be about investment. A partner who does the daily maintenance in a house is willing to do the daily maintenance in a relationship. The dishes may just be a symptom of a partner who is willing to work at the relationship. One of the people who authored the study described it as respect, but in either case, having another adult pull his own weight to maintain his own home is, shockingly, healthy…
“A division of household labor perceived to be fair ensures that partners feel respected while carrying out the tasks of daily life,” Johnson wrote in his paper. “Completing housework may or may not be enjoyable, but knowing that a partner is pulling his weight prevents anger and bitterness, creating more fertile ground in which a (satisfying) sexual encounter may occur.”
It’s a lot of wording, but a 2014 study demonstrated that concepts of egalitarianism, such as who actually does the work versus who perceives how the work is done, matter greatly in a marriage. Need it broken down further? Does he actually do the housework he says he does, or does he just believe he pitches in more than he does:
We used multi-level modeling to examine associations between cognitive egalitarianism, behavioral egalitarianism, and marital quality with a specific focus on discrepancies in the reports of husbands and wives. As hypothesized, both husbands and wives had lower marital quality when their cognitive egalitarianism was discrepant from their partner, and such a discrepancy had a greater influence on wives’ reports of marital quality, especially for wives with higher cognitive egalitarianism. Although we expected similar results for the associations between behavioral egalitarianism and marital quality, we found that the strength of the association between wives’ behavioral egalitarianism and marital quality decreased as the discrepancy from their husbands’ behavioral egalitarianism increased.
In other words, if he doesn’t walk the walk, a wife can tell, and it never makes her happy to do all the housework. “Man Tip #42” may well be accurate…
Expectations and follow through seem to most affect wives, when it comes to household chores, but tellingly, men didn’t notice either way:
“These results were interesting because usually marital satisfaction is studied in only one spouse. Here we were able to see what happens when there’s a discrepancy in spouses’ attitudes on this issue,” Brian G. Ogolsky, a lead author of the study, said in a press release. “If a woman believes that household chores should be divided equally, what happens if they adopt a traditional approach to the matter? The most satisfied couples have similar expectations and follow through on them.”
The takeaway? Ogolsky notes that since expectations play such a large role in marital happiness, couples should discuss these matters early on. “Newlyweds need to thoughtfully plan how they can make their expectations about sharing chores work out in real life, especially if the new spouses strongly value gender equality in household labor. This issue will only matter more after children start arriving,” he advised.
Guys, just do the dishes already. Clean the bathroom… No, really, the idea is about setting expectations in the concept of preparing to get married and follow through once the marriage begins.
The problem is that almost 70% of divorces are filed by women, so when expectations don’t meet practice, those seemingly unimportant household chores can be predictor of divorce trends.
So what is it about marriage that leaves women less satisfied and more likely to walk away? Rosenfeld told HuffPost that the findings give credence to the feminist idea that some women feel stifled and oppressed by heterosexual marriage.
“It supports the theory that sociologists refer to as ‘the stalled gender revolution,‘ meaning that as much as women’s roles in society have changed, women’s roles within the families have changed very slowly,” he said, citing husband’s expectation for wives to do the bulk of the housework and childcare, even when both spouses work.
“Women feel stifled and oppressed by heterosexual marriage…” Sounds like a post I wrote before, one of my most famous posts and most popular among women: Women Don’t Want to Get Married and Have Children Because It’s A Lot Of Work–Who Is Surprised. The reality amongst my friends who got divorced is that they separated from their husbands because they wanted to lower their workload. They haven’t chosen to get remarried. So I pulled this from my old post, an oldie but goodie:
Today’s European Union-funded report, which examined working practices across member states, says that the average man in full-time employment works about 55 hours a week.In the UK that figure includes about 3.6 hours commuting, and eight hours of domestic work such as cleaning, cooking and child care.By contrast, the average working week for a woman in full-time employment in the EU is 68 hours.
For British women that comprises 40 hours in the office, 3.3 hours commuting and 23 hours a week spent doing domestic work.
“The stalled gender revolution,” as it was more famously made into a book, “The Second Shift,” by Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung. The Second Shift refers to the stats of women performing more work than men in the home, and therefore, no matter their careers or jobs, are force to work a “second shift” not shared by men. Heterosexual marriage seems to reinforce this increased workload for women, which also leads to the statistic of almost 70% of divorces being filed by women.
The NY Times summed it up as a woman working an extra month more than her husband each year, or marriage forcing women to just work harder and longer:
Women, Ms. Hochschild reports, bear the brunt of what she calls a ”stalled revolution,” one that got wives out of the home and into the first shift of paid employment but resulted in surprisingly meager change during the domestic second shift. The wife, her research confirms, typically is still the primary parent and remains ultimately responsible for keeping house. In most marriages, the woman’s paid work is still considered a mere job, in contrast to the man’s career. Thus the woman’s first shift – her employment – is likely to be devalued, thereby rationalizing her continuing responsibility for the second shift. The language of domestic economics, in which husbands still ”help” wives, suggests how little conceptual change has taken place. The additional hours that working women put in on the second shift of housework, she calculates, add up to an extra month of work each year.
When this second shift plays out in a family situation, unsurprisingly women with fewer financial resources complain about the added work, but in situations where the couples have more money, it is simpler to just pay for the “role of of the mother,” whatever that may mean, and hire household help that would normally be assigned to the woman.
In principle it’s easier to traverse these chasms if you’re rich. After all, professionals address the conflict of home and career by hiring small armies of surrogate wives. But as it turns out, very few use their enhanced income to purchase leisure or more time with their children. Surprisingly few husbands choose to work part time. In general, the upper-income professionals in Ms. Hochschild’s sample tend to be the worst hypocrites. ”Other couples, however, seemed to capitulate to a workaholism a deux, each spouse equitably granting the other the right to work long hours, and reconciling themselves to a drastically reduced conception of the emotional needs of a family.” Such couples ”almost totally parceled out the role of mother into purchased services.”
The trick is the role of a wife. Does hiring a “surrogate wife” mean household help? I have always said that marriage is a demotion for women’s roles when it means taking on a maid’s status without pay. The role of a wife has changed in our society, from being a woman who supervises household help to the wife being the only one who works in the house.
Consider the following graphic, which while a funny assertion on the value of cleanliness, nevertheless assigns cleanliness to women.
Getting married may actually hurt a woman’s relationship, as dating couples tend to equally break up around gender lines (meaning the dating splits are initiated equally between genders), while divorce filling are disproportionately filed by unhappy wives, as opposed to girlfriends. What makes this statistic true? The role of a wife is inherently unsatisfying to 70% of women filing for divorce because of gender roles. According to a social scientist who studies the phenomenon, marriage doesn’t favor gender equality:
“I think that marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality,” Rosenfeld said. “Wives still take their husbands’ surnames, and are sometimes pressured to do so. Husbands still expect their wives to do the bulk of the housework and the bulk of the childcare. On the other hand, I think that non-marital relationships lack the historical baggage and expectations of marriage, which makes the non-marital relationships more flexible and therefore more adaptable to modern expectations, including women’s expectations for more gender equality.”
So I look up the term “unhappy wives” in Google images, because why not choose photos to demonstrate how people view marital relationships? Any trends? Well, not very good ones…
She is angry and he doesn’t care. Or, she is angry and it’s not rational.
She is unhappy in bed, or with sex, and he is oblivious.
He doesn’t listen to you unless you cry. Use tears to get what you want.
Notice the heading doesn’t say “Girlfriends” and use that title to cry for a toaster. The role of crying to receive an appliance to reduce work is aimed directly at a wife, who is assumed to be doing all the household chores by hand. The husband is assumed to control the money, and the gender roles of marriage reinforce women as domestic servants rather than as equal partners.
According to a recent paper, published in 2015, it’s the institution of marriage that causes the problems, because the institution of marriage imposes gender roles that are unequal and unrewarding for women, something a dating relationship doesn’t do:
Jessie Bernard (1982) famously wrote: “There are two marriages, then, in every marital union, his and hers. And his… is better than hers.” The feminist critique of heterosexual marriage is consistent with wives being more likely than husbands to want to divorce. The feminist critique of heterosexual marriage, however, has less direct application to nonmarital heterosexual relationships. Nonmarital heterosexual relationships generally involve lower levels of commitment, fewer children, and nonmarital unions are less influenced by the legal and cultural history of marriage as a gendered institution (Cherlin, 2009; Poortman & Mills, 2012; Rosenfeld, 2014).
It comes down to what most men in heterosexual marriages expect women to do for housework and care taking, and that role is that the wives will take care of all the housework and childcare:
Research on housework has consistently found that the gender housework gap was larger in marriage than in nonmarital cohabiting relationships (Davis, Greenstein, & Marks, 2007; Gupta, 1999; Shelton & John, 1993; South & Spitze, 1994). Married men resist housework to an extent that cannot be explained by practical considerations and constraints (such as the presence of children or men’s higher earnings, see Brines, 1994; Shelton & John, 1993).
“Married men resist housework to an extent that cannot be explained…” makes me laugh and laugh. There is no logical reason married men resist housework more than dating men, other than the reactions of men to marriage roles. He’s a man, and even he can’t explain the gendered behavior patterns.
Is it the kids? Who takes care of the kids? Who makes more money? Who has the higher education? Nope, turns out that marriage isn’t as good for women as it is for men. When all other factors have been taken into consideration, women don’t get as much out of marriage as men do:
Table 3 provides an explanation: women’s relationship quality is slightly lower than men’s relationship quality in marriage regardless of whether the marriage later broke up.8 In additional analyses (available from the author), I show that the gender marital satisfaction gap in HCMST is not mediated by age, relationship duration, earnings gap, religious affiliation, education, income, race, prior marriages, or the presence of children.
It’s not the kids or the money, but the relationship that drives the divorce rate, and since women initiate far more divorces than they do dating break-ups, marriage plays a part in a women’s relationship satisfaction rates.
The researcher studying the trend of why women file for divorce more so than men lays it on the line for marriage: catch up or be thrown out:
“I think that marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality,” Rosenfeld said. “Wives still take their husbands’ surnames, and are sometimes pressured to do so. Husbands still expect their wives to do the bulk of the housework and the bulk of the childcare. On the other hand, I think that non-marital relationships lack the historical baggage and expectations of marriage, which makes the non-marital relationships more flexible and therefore more adaptable to modern expectations, including women’s expectations for more gender equality.”
Just not as good for her as it is for him, or maybe it’s not that simple. Dating couples tend to break up more frequently than married couples, but among married couples, women overwhelmingly exit the marriage when their expectations of gender equality erode their lives. According to one paper, most marriages are stable, but more women are unhappy in marriage than men:
Most married women are happily married, and married couples are relatively stable. Across 6 years of HCMST data, the weighted marital breakup hazard rate was 1.2% per year for heterosexual married couples,9 compared to 9.4% per year breakup rate for unmarried heterosexual couples who ever cohabited, and a 30.3% per year breakup rate for unmarried heterosexual couples who never lived together. Even though most married women are happily married, a modest difference in husbands’ and wives’ marital satisfaction can result in most divorces being wanted by the wife.
Guys, doing the dishes, taking care of your own housework, showing gender equality, those are the things that lead to better sex and long-lasting marriages.
As Trump Cozies Up To Russia, US Deploys Troops To Poland and States That Gave US Intel That Russia Pushed Money Into Trump Campaign
January 13, 2017
As Trump leans in to Putin, a daily bromance through Twitter, Obama deploys troops to Poland to help secure the border as Russia inexorably edges closer.
American soldiers rolled into Poland on Thursday, fulfilling a dream some Poles have had since the fall of communism in 1989 to have U.S. troops on their soil as a deterrent against Russia.
Some people waved and held up American flags as U.S. troops in tanks and other vehicles crossed into southwestern Poland from Germany and headed toward the town of Zagan, where they will be based. Poland’s prime minister and defense minister will welcome them in an official ceremony Saturday.
“This is the fulfilment of a dream,” said Michal Baranowski, director of the German Marshall Fund think tank in Warsaw. “And this is not just a symbolic presence but one with a real capability.”
U.S. and other Western nations have carried out exercises on NATO’s eastern flank in past years, but the new deployment — which includes some 3,500 U.S. troops — marks the first-ever continuous deployment to the region by a NATO ally.It is part of a larger commitment by President Barack Obama to protect a region that grew deeply nervous when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and then began backing separatist rebels in Ukraine’s east.
The link above focuses on the Golden Showers element of Trump (read about the Golden Showers here: Russian Documents Leaked Showing Trump’s Campaign Links to Russia And “Perverted Sexual Acts” “Golden Shower Presidency”), but setting Trump aside for just a moment, let’s take a look at the significance of NATO-backed troops moving into Poland. Why is it so important that US troops move into Poland? Putin considers it an act of aggression, moving into his back yard, if you will. It appears he already believes Russia controls Poland, as he has taken this latest installment of US troops as an insult.
“These actions threaten our interests, our security,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday. “Especially as it concerns a third party building up its military presence near our borders. It’s not even a European state.
How near is Poland to Russian borders?
Actually, Poland doesn’t directly border Russia, but it’s telling that Putin believes that US troops in Poland are at its border. Sounds like Russia believes that US troops in Poland are in its borders.
When Russia first started talking about nuclear arms, Obama promised Poland that the US would match it, but Poland feels that this latest move is yet another round of promises by the US that fall short of real protection.
Poles still feel betrayed by Obama’s “reset” with Russia early on in his administration, which involved abandoning plans for a major U.S. missile defense system in Poland and replacing it with plans for a less ambitious system, still not in place.
“All recent U.S. presidents have thought there can be a grand bargain with Russia,” said Marcin Zaborowski, a senior associate at Visegrad Insight, an analytic journal on Central Europe. “Trump has a proclivity to make deals, and Central and Eastern Europe have reason to worry about that.”
Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski expressed hope this week that any new effort at reconciliation with Russia “does not happen at our expense.”
The armored brigade combat team arriving in Poland hails from Fort Carson, Colorado. The troops arrived last week in Germany and are gathering in Poland before units will fan out across seven countries from Estonia to Bulgaria. A headquarters unit will be stationed in Germany. After nine months they will be replaced by another unit.
In a separate but related mission, NATO will also deploy four battalions to its eastern flank later this year, one each to Poland and the three Baltic states. The U.S. will also lead one of those battalions.
Baltic states were also the region from which intelligence accounts from Russian interference were verified. I wrote about this in the Golden Showers post:
It was passed to the US by an intelligence agency of one of the Baltic States. The CIA cannot act domestically against American citizens so a joint counter-intelligence taskforce was created.
In other words, those very states to which we are now sending troops were the same states that had intercepted intel info that money from the Kremlin was going directly to the US presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The information about the money flow from Russia to the US came from none other than our allies in the Baltic States.
How back can hacking be? Trump declared “hacking is bad,” but his simplistic rendition means he is no match for a former KGB operative like Putin. Newsweek reports that Russian hacking is more extensive than finding out that Clinton got debate questions before Trump:
The Russian penetration in the United States is far more extensive than previously revealed publicly, although most of it has been targeted either at government departments or nongovernment organizations connected to the Democratic Party. Russian hackers penetrated the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department. The State Department cyberattack, which began in 2014 and lasted more than a year, was particularly severe, with Russian hackers gaining entry into its unclassified system, including emails. (Hillary Clinton left the State Department in 2013, which means that if she had used its unclassified email system rather than her private server—a decision that has dogged her throughout the campaign—any of her emails on the government system could have been obtained by Russian hackers.)
The breadth of the cyberattacks of nongovernmental organizations is astonishing. Russian hackers have obtained emails and other information out of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, but also have struck at organizations with looser ties to the party, including think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, where some of Clinton’s longtime friends and colleagues work.
Dismissing the intelligence information that determined Russia had “kompromat” on Trump requires disbelieving European states to whom we have just delivered military troops. While the United States blithely determined there was no factual merit to the intelligence briefings, Trump’s organization had been disseminating Russian media to the United States media outlets at news to cover:
Even as Trump was disputing the role played by the Kremlin in the hacking, his campaign was scouring sites publicly identified by American intelligence as sources for Russian propaganda. Ten days before the third debate, Newsweek published an article disclosing that a document altered by Russian propagandists and put out on the internet—ultimately published by Sputnik—had been cited by Trump at a rally as fact. (The information distributed on the internet placed words that had appeared in Newsweek into the mouth of Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton confidante. Taken in that context, they suggested that her closest allies believed she bore responsibility for the attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya.)
Subsequently, Sputnik, which took down that article, published another one essentially denying the news organization was controlled by the Kremlin and attacking Newsweek. Before the day was out, the Trump campaign was emailing links to the article from the Russian propaganda site to multiple reporters, urging them to pursue the story.
Before we launch into our denial diatribe again, let’s just remember that troops haven’t entered the Baltic states like this since the Cold War. It’s as though the US government is run by two different arms attached to the same body. Trump is Putin’s mouthpiece, and Obama deploys troops to push back against Putin. Think that the US deployment is a joke? No joke when tanks are sent in. The chilling statement echoed by Germany of war, is starting to look more and more real, even as Putin and Trump puppets deny the reality.
While Trump denounces Golden Showers as “fake news,” which may occupy him for years to come, we are inexorably drawn closer and closer toward the flame of war. It’s as simple as distracting a crying baby, and with Trump, it appears nothing else is needed. Compliment him or attack him, any attention given, and Trump immediately becomes fixated on the attention and its inescapable ego stroking. Trump argues about “fake news” while NATO deploys troops to bolster Baltic states. It’s as though Trump can’t even feel his own hands when they move from the from of his face.
Luckily for Americans, Trump’s cabinet picks, who aren’t agreeing with him, have responded to this threat of military troops. NATO is hoping that Trump being just one person, that the US will continue to back NATO efforts to push back against Russia’s expansion through Europe. The Guardian, a UK based news outlet, has already moved on from salacious Trump details and is more focused on the pressing matters of Russian aggression and the newly appointed cabinet response to troop deployment Poland, namely hoping that US troops won’t be prematurely withdrawn:
That prediction was reinforced by Trump’s proposed defence secretary, James Mattis, and his proposed secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who backed Nato during Senate confirmation hearings.
Tillerson, who has business dealings in Russia, described Russia’s annexation of Crimea as “as an act of force” and said that when Russia flexed its muscles, the US must mount “a proportional show of force”.
Nato was caught out by the Russian annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and has struggled to cope with Russia’s use of hybrid warfare, which combines propaganda, cyberwarfare and the infiltration of regular troops disguised as local rebels.
Of course everyone in the US is distracted with Trump’s sexual perversion and maybe won’t acknowledge Russia’s advances. However, the CIA nominee from Trump’s cabinet is a former veteran who fought in the last Cold War against Russia, and he doesn’t underestimate Russia. The NYTimes reports that Pompeo, Trump’s CIA nominee, is literally a Cold War veteran:
The first battle that Representative Mike Pompeo prepared to fight was against the Russians, when he commanded a tank platoon in Germany in the twilight of the Cold War. On Thursday, he made clear he was ready to take on America’s old adversary if confirmed as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
…The question hanging over Mr. Pompeo, and America’s 17 intelligence agencies, is how to handle a president who embraces President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia while the agency tries to keep Russia in check. So far, nothing in the C.I.A.’s 69-year history has prepared it to deal with a president who is as openly derisive of its work as Mr. Trump.
Trump never commanded a platoon of tanks against Russia, and it appears that Pompeo is not swayed by Trump’s bromance with Putin or Trump’s Golden Showers distraction. Pompeo appears committed to keeping Russia in check, despite NATO fears that the President Elect won’t understand Russia’s moves:
Mr. Pompeo may have somewhat assuaged those concerns on Thursday when he was asked at his Senate confirmation hearing if the C.I.A., under his leadership, would continue to pursue intelligence on Russian hacking — allegations that have come amid a swirl of unsubstantiated rumors about links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
“I will continue to pursue foreign intelligence with vigor no matter where the facts lead,” Mr. Pompeo said. He added that he would do this “with regard to this issue and each and every issue.”
The C.I.A. under his leadership, he said, would provide “accurate, timely, robust and cleareyed analysis of Russian activities.”
Perhaps the Republicans won’t let Trump slide on Russian war tactics, but while Putin may have sent in a clown when he pushed to elect Trump, Putin may have underestimated other Americans who remember all too well the last time they engaged with Russia. Putin has made lots of enemies, and one man, no matter what news-grabbing headlines he may command, even as salacious as sexual perversion, can hold the attention of the country when troops are deployed. This is a much more arresting sight, wouldn’t you say?
News commentators have also noticed escalating tensions between the US government and Russian government, outside of the Trump/Putin tango, and I am not the only one forecasting dangerous times ahead. PressTV commentators note that US troop deployment could be viewed as a ramp in more hostile relations:
Press TV has spoken to Brian Becker, member of the ANSWER Coalition, as well as Brent Budowsky, columnist with The Hill, to discuss this issue.
Brian Becker sees the US troop deployment to Poland as a very “provocative” move, adding that Washington and NATO have been “relentlessly” pushing eastward toward Russia’s border since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
“25 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was an agreement – ratified again in 1996 – that the United States would not take advantage of the end of the Soviet Union by expanding NATO into Eastern and Central European states that had been Russia’s principal allies. And in fact, it has done just that. It has pushed relentlessly,” he said.
He also opined that Russia has no intention of invading the Baltic States, but that it perceives the United States’ continuation of setting up missile shields in those countries as an attempt to gain “military superiority.”
The analyst went on to say that the United States initially positioned the missile shield systems in Poland and Romania under the pretext of stopping Iran’s nuclear threat which never really existed.
Therefore, he argued, now that the United States and the P5+1 countries have signed the nuclear agreement with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Washington must remove those missile shields.
He further stated if the United States has no intention to start a war, there is no reason for it to carry out military exercises with NATO on Russia’s doorstep.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Becker noted that NATO troop deployment to Eastern Europe is like a “gravy train” that will connect the commercial interests in the region to the US military-industrial complex.
He also asserted that it is not the people of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia who have called for NATO troops to come in and save them from the “Russian menace,” rather the right-wing governments of those countries.
ANSWER stand for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, and bills itself as a US organization, but the quote above was published by PressTV.ir, an Islamic Republic of Iran news organization. ANSWER’s stated mission is to end war; however, Iran has used that information to portray the US as engaging in war against Russia, which would only serve Iran well if it could also inflame tensions between the US and Russia, distract both countries who want to stamp out ISIS. Iran has nothing to lose by highlighting tensions between the US and Russia in hopes to destabilize them further.
Lest we Americans miss what has been happening, troops were sent to Poland back in April 2014, when Russia moved into the Ukraine, and more troops were deployed in October 2016 when Russia amped up nuclear arms missiles plans:
NATO defense ministers are meeting throughout Wednesday and Thursday to map out plans for each of the groups.
‘Close to our borders, Russia continues its assertive military posturing,’ said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday.
‘This month alone, Russia has deployed nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad and suspended a weapons-grade plutonium agreement with the United States.
‘And Russia continues to destabilize eastern Ukraine with military and financial support for the separatists.
This above pronouncement was published by the UK on Oct. 26, 2016, when the Americans were eclipsed by Russian hacking scandals and its Presidential election. The Russians distract Americans from electing Clinton while moving troops closer to Baltic states and preparing nuclear arms.
Americans played along, jumped on the bandwagon to fight Clinton, all the while playing into the Kremlin’s hands. Thank goodness NATO wasn’t distracted enough to miss Russia’s nuclear ams proliferation during that time. While Trump played the Clinton “hacking scandal,” Putin played with nuclear arms:
The pictures were revealed online by chief designers from the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau.
A message posted alongside the picture said: ‘In accordance with the Decree of the Russian Government ‘On the State Defense Order for 2010 and the planning period 2012-2013’, the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau was instructed to start design and development work on the Sarmat. ‘
The RS-28 Sarmat missile is said to contain 16 nuclear warheads and is capable of destroying an area the size of France or Texas, according to Russian news network Zvezda, which is owned by Russia’s ministry of defence.
The weapon is also able to evade radar.
Putin is capable of playing a shell in cups game, and Trump is only capable of watching one hand at a time. Unfortunately, Americans were bogged down by shaming Clinton, and couldn’t admit that Russian interference might have been subterfuge all along. I wondered why Russia would go to such lengths to antagonize Americans, and whenever Russia starts a campaign like this, I am always looking for the end game. What did Russia really want? Aside from hacking Clinton’s email? Russia wanted a distraction, cover for its nuclear arms program.
Trump Debate Question Scandal and Golden Showers vs. Putin Nuclear Arms Development. According to The Daily Mail.UK, this is what Putin has been working on, proving his ability to multitask far exceeds Trump’s:
It is expected to have a range of 6,213 miles (10,000 km), which would allow Moscow to attack European cities as well as reaching cities on America’s west and east coasts.
Dr Sutyagin points out that the SS-18 missiles which the Russians currently rely on were designed in 1988 during the Soviet Union and were built at a factory in Dnipropetrovsk, in what is now the Ukraine.
He said: ‘Not only are they too fast but they have got rid of the predictable flight path.
‘It manouevres all the way so it is terribly difficult for any missile defence system to shoot it down.’
The Russian Defence Ministry plans to put the Sarmat into service in late 2018 and remove the last SS-18 by 2020.
The Sarmat has been in development since 2009 and is scheduled to start replacing the old ICBMs in 2018.
The new missile is said to be undergoing testing near Miass in Russia.
While the US is engaged in managing their clown, Iran uses propaganda to claim the US has declared war with Russia, Russia is developing nuclear warheads in the Ukraine, which Russia just happened to invade when it needed to upgrade its old nuclear weapons in the Ukrainian plant. Russia has had a plan all along: use propaganda to distract the US, use propaganda to get ISIS to fight the US and weaken it, use propaganda to destabilize the Presidential election and all the while, use the distraction as cover to build its nuclear weapons while it invades the Baltic states and moves across Europe. Once KGB, always KGB. Let’s not underestimate this man and call him a mere chauvinist, let’s just call him dangerous. And really, America, let’s wake up to the reality that he planning for war.
Unasked Advice 