Singapore is grappling with a controversy that refuses to go away, a month after rainwater flooded a tunnel of its mass rapid transit (MRT) service, leading to the partial suspension of train runs at weekends. A rare public apology by top transit executives and an assurance from the government that the cause was clear and the fix not complicated have done little to appease the public that has come to expect glitch-free efficiency. The front page of the state-owned Straits Times newspaper this week featured a photo of grim-faced top transit executives in the gallery of parliament as the transport minister said they had to do better and could face pay cuts. The facts of the 7 October incident are not complicated, and the cause of the incident is clear, Minister Khaw Boon Wan said, adding that poor maintenance and neglect of duties by transit managers were to blame. It is the responsibility of management to set the right culture of professionalism and excellence. It begins from the top. And if there is poor culture, the CEO is responsible. The scrutiny of the disruption, which in most cities would be considered minor and barely newsworthy, reflected the pressure on the government to explain how it had failed to deliver a near-perfect public service. Singapore residents are highly dependent on public transport. It is one of the world s most expensive places to own a vehicle and it recently announced that it will not allow any growth in its car population from February. Voter discontent with public services can be particularly alarming to the ruling party which saw its worst election showing in 2011 when 40 percent of voters went against it, partly in dismay over the growing strains on public transport. The People s Action Party has ruled Singapore, one of the richest and most stable countries in the world, without interruption since independence in 1965. Transit operator SMRT chief Desmond Kuek was quoted in an email to staff as saying this week should have been a celebration marking the 30-year anniversary of the subway operations. Instead, we were awash in collective shame because a few of our staff had let us down, Kuek said in the email, according to the Straits Times.


As an example of just how much the left hates Donald J. Trump, after becoming enraged because football great Jim Brown expressed kind words for Trump, a writer for SportingNews. com decided that Brown's decades of work for civil rights was erased merely because the Hall of Famer was nice to Trump. [SportingNews writer David Steele began his January 18 piece noting that the Cleveland Browns star has been a candidate for the "Mount Rushmore of social, political and activism. " "If Jim Brown is not on the Mount Rushmore of social, political and activism by athletes in our time (up there with, at least, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos) he's on the short list waiting for a vacancy," Steele wrote. But that adulation came to an abrupt end. "He was, that is," Steele continued. "Jim Brown himself is now the vacancy. " How could a man who spent nearly 50 years at the forefront of the civil rights movement be toppled from that place with just one action? He said nice things about Donald Trump. "Those are the consequences when you insert yourself into a feud between John Lewis and Donald Trump — and take the side of Trump while insulting Lewis," Steele proclaimed. Steele, who once wrote for the Baltimore Sun, went on to "explain" his "reasons" for erasing 50 years of civil rights advocacy work, "There is simply no way to reconcile Brown's words, and all the others he has spouted in defense of the man who has spent the week insulting an icon of the movement, and this image, of the meeting Brown himself adjourned on behalf of Ali 50 years ago, when the same forces Lewis was fighting were coming after Ali's resistance to the draft. " So, because Jim Brown said a few nice things about Donald Trump and opposed the hateful attacks Congressman John Lewis launched against Trump, including the outright lie that he never missed a past inaugural when he in fact skipped George W. Bush's for the same "he's illegitimate" reason, Brown's decades of good work has become meaningless. Brown has done a lot for his community, and was universally praised by civil rights activists for organizing sports figures to come to the aide of boxing great Muhammad Ali when his title was stripped from him for refusing service in the Vietnam War in 1967. The NFL great also founded the Black Economic Union to help promote business in the nation's inner cities. But his founding of the Foundation has done the most good, after he spent years trying to mitigate the gang culture. "I was doing economic development for minorities. I was getting black folks to use their dollars to help each other. I looked up and saw black men killing each other over red and blue. Until we did something about that, there was no use for economic development," Brown recently told the New York Daily News. Since its founding nearly 25 years ago, has improved the lives of gang members, prison inmates, kids and thousands of other people in more than a dozen states across the nation. The heart of is a course Brown created which helps train young blacks to gain control of their emotions in order to lead useful, productive lives. The program he developed helps youth learn to keep a job, raise a family, and go back to school. But to David Steele, all that is meaningless. "That Jim Brown is dead," Steele says at the tail of his hyperventilating and biased attack on Brown. In the end, though, one might doubt that a man who has 60 years of fame and achievement under his belt will be much bothered by the words of a man with a failed newspaper career and who now writes for a sports website. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com.


Exposing Huma Abedin, Rigged Election Computers & the Man Behind the Rigged Silver Market Posted on Home » Silver » Silver News » Exposing Huma Abedin, Rigged Election Computers & the Man Behind the Rigged Silver Market  Is it finally time to EXPOSE the rigging of the Gold and Silver markets? The rising silver price today may be our clue to that mystery:  From Bix Weir :  As I've said before – this battle is way more complicated and has deeper implications than just the Presidential Election. This is about taking down the Bad Guys and all their embedded moles in the government and in the financial institutions.  So here we go with exposing just WHO Hillary Clinton trusted with all our "State Secrets."  A quick introduction to Huma Abedin…  But the Bad Guys still have power over the rigged electronic voting machines so it may have to come down to an armed STREET WAR unless the Bad Guys stand down.  It's getting more and more likely that there will BE NO ELECTION on November 8th unless the Good Guys better unleash EVERYTHING they have on the emails before we get too close to election day.  Also, I have noticed a lot of talk about the Clinton's relationship with Marc Rich again. Is it finally time to EXPOSE the rigging of the Gold and Silver markets? The rising silver price today may be our clue to that mystery!


Nancy Pelosi just flunked Constitutional Law! Pelosi repeated her request that the National Park Service deny a permit to an alleged alt-right demonstration called Patriot Prayer. Pelosi said not allow these elements to use a national park to spew forth their venom. She then said that protecting people was the Park Service s first responsibility. This is a trend of the left lately they claim stopping free speech, protests and removing statues have become homeland security issues. Jeh Johnson just commented this week that we must remove statues because they ve become a homeland security issue. See where this is going? The left claims to be for free speech but in reality they aren t for anyone on the opposing side speaking out. This is getting into dangerous territory but not because of what the right is doing IronicJEH JOHNSON SUDDENLY THINKS CONFEDERATE STATUES ARE A THREAT TO HOMELAND SECURITY: This is rich! The guy who opened our borders to criminals during the Obama era is now telling us that statues are a homeland security threat? Former Obama administration official Jeh Johnson said on This Week with Martha Raditz that the removal of Confederate statues was a matter of public safety and homeland security on Sunday Oh brother!According to David French of National Review:Where to begin? First, It s flat-out unconstitutional for the park service to deny a permit to any group simply because public officials deem the group s speech venomous. Even if their speech is truly vile, they have the same right of access to the park as any other expressive organization.Second, while we want law enforcement to protect people, it is also required to protect liberty. Any police force that maintains security without also protecting liberty has failed in its core constitutional function.Third, the quote is wrong. She s obviously referring to Oliver Wendell Holmes s famous statement in Schenck v. United States that The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. Fire. Wolf. Whatever. It s not important compared to the next point below.Fourth, anyone who quotes Schenck is quoting bad law. In fact, it s one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court s history. The court upheld the Espionage Act conviction of the secretary of the Socialist Party of America for writing and distributing a pamphlet opposing the draft during World War I. Schenck could never be sent to jail for this conduct today.


A Tennessee woman has obviously bought into the left s playbook to act as crazy as possible when at a town hall The ironic thing in what she did is she now cannot vote. Felons can t vote LOL!WEAKELY COUNTY, Tenn. A Weakely County woman was arrested after reportedly following Congressman David Kustoff and then threatening him.Police say Wendi Wright followed a car down Highway 45 Monday afternoon. Inside the car were Congressman Kustoff and aide Marianne Dunavant. Wright reportedly followed the car after it left a town hall on the UT Martin campus.THIS WOMAN LEFT THE TOWN HALL AND ENDANGERED THE LIVES OF THE CONGRESSMAN AND HIS PASSENGER! WHO DOES THAT?A police report states Kustoff and Dunavant felt they were in danger of being forced off the road.When they pulled into the driveway of someone they know, Wright reportedly ran to the car and screamed while banging on the car and reaching in.She then reportedly blocked the car until police were called and she ran away.Wright later posted about the incident on her Facebook account.She is charged with felony reckless endangerment.This incident is such a sign of the times we re in. The left is so out of control and so angry.THIS CONGRESSMAN HAS A WIFE AND TWO CHILDREN!The main stream media and Democrat politicians are guilty of feeding this anger and hate with all of their lies and inflammatory language. Shame on them!


It s no wonder Trump is losing and losing badly with women. A new poll from McClatchy-Marist shows Clinton leading Trump by 24 points among registered female voters (58 percent to 34 percent), and 23 points among likely female voters. Remember, Mitt Romney lost the female vote by 11 points, and John McCain by 13 points.While the Trump campaign and his supporters scratch their heads as to why he s performing so poorly with the demographic that makes up the majority of the country, the Clinton campaign is reminding them why.A new (and brutal) ad has just been released from the Clinton camp. Asking voters if Trump is the president we want for our daughters? the ad, titled Mirrors, uses the Donald s deplorable, sexist, offensive and objectifying words against women against him. From, I d look her right in that ugly face of hers, to A person who s flat-chested is very hard for them to be a 10, Mirrors showcases women all across the country looking at themselves their bodies, appearance at their phones, wondering if they are worthy, as Trump s disgusting words echo off the screen.When talking about Kim Kardashian, Trump thought it would be a good idea to talk about her famous asset: Does she have a good body? No. Does she have a fat ass? Absolutely. So presidential.The most damning part comes at the end, when Howard Stern asks Trump, So you treat women with respect? Trump s answer? No, I can t say that either. This ad is so powerful. Trump, who is well known to be a serial misogynist, sexist, and all around pig, should be ashamed of the way he regards women, their appearances, and livelihoods. No wonder his first wife cited cruel and inhumane treatment as the grounds for their divorce, and called him a chauvinist on TV.Little girls, and indeed little boys, are watching. Their parents have a choice: do we elect a man who has a proven track record of demeaning women he doesn t even know, or do we elect a woman who wants to tap everyone s potential, no matter who they are or what they look like.Watch the powerful ad that showcases just how much of a pig Donald Trump is:


The human rights situation in Turkey is unacceptable, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters on Thursday, adding European Union leaders had asked their executive arm to look at cutting pre-accession aid to Ankara in a responsible way . Merkel urged her fellow leaders on Thursday to cut European Union funds to Turkey that are linked to Ankara s bid to join the bloc. She was supported by Belgium and the Netherlands. But speaking to journalists after the a dinner at which leaders discussed relations with Turkey, Merkel said she wanted a common EU position on the accession talks and said dialogue with Turkey had to continue. She also said she did not foresee talks with Ankara on expanding a customs union with the EU.


Sunday on ABC's "This Week," while discussing the current House Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, News One Now host Roland Martin said President Donald Trump " hoodwinked," "bamboozled" and "led astray" white voters. Partial transcript as follows: STEPHANOPOULOS: He is working it hard because they know the cost of losing in the House. The president can't lose … MARTIN: And he can work it as hard as he wants to, but as I'm watching the town halls. I'm thinking about Malcolm X, you've been had, you've been took, you've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok. To watch these white, voters upset and mad saying, I voted for you. And I'm going 'we tried to tell you this is what the man said he was going to do.' Now they're faced with the backlash of, now they love the Affordable Care Act and now Republicans are in a box. The number has gone up 20 points this last year. STEPHANOPOULOS: Even though the numbers don't work, they want to believe the president on this. Follow Pam Key On Twitter @pamkeyNEN


U.S. President Donald Trump would favor Senate Republicans changing voting rules to allow a simple majority of the Senate to approve his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court if Democrats block his choice, he said in an interview airing on Thursday. "I would. We have obstructionists," Trump told Fox News, referring to possible use of the so-called nuclear option that would overturn Senate rules requiring 60 votes to overcome a procedural hurdle, or filibuster, for Supreme Court nominees. There are currently 52 Republican senators in the 100-seat chamber. Trump plans next week to announce his choice to fill the vacancy caused by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. His nominee could restore the decades-long conservative majority on the court. Democrats are seething over the Republican-led Senate's refusal last year to consider Democratic President Barack Obama's nomination of appeals court Judge Merrick Garland for the lifetime post, an action with little precedent in U.S. history. Trump told Fox News anchor Sean Hannity that he had made his choice. "I have made my decision pretty much in my mind, yes. That's subject to change at the last moment." Among the front-runners are three conservative jurists: Neil Gorsuch, a judge on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; Thomas Hardiman, who serves on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; and William Pryor, on the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. On Tuesday, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said he told Trump that Democrats would fight any nominee they consider to be outside the mainstream. Assuming all 52 Senate Republicans back Trump's nominee, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would either need to lure eight Democrats to his side or change the rules and ban the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations. Despite the nuclear option threat, Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice, which tracks judicial nominations, said in an email to Reuters that a Democratic filibuster "would still be far better than what Republicans did to Merrick Garland." More than three years ago, Democrats used their then-majority in the Senate to ban filibusters against presidential nominees other than for the Supreme Court. The move came after Republicans blocked several key Obama nominees. Vice President Mike Pence told Republican lawmakers on Thursday that Trump would nominate a "strict constructionist" to the court, referring to the literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's text without regard to changes in American society.


Here are highlights of the Reuters Oval Office interview with U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday. ON WHETHER HE WAS AWARE HIS SON DONALD TRUMP JR. WAS MEETING WITH A RUSSIAN LAWYER "No. That I didn't know. Until a couple of days ago, when I heard about this. No I didn't know about that." ON WHETHER HE WISHED HE HAD KNOWN HIS SON WAS HAVING THE MEETING "Look - that campaign ... I actually always thought I'd win, to be honest with you, because I've been winning my whole life, to be honest with you, but we started a campaign as a non-politician, and many people were skeptical. Some weren't, some people who know me weren't ... but many were skeptical. And it was a wild time. And we would meet with many people." "That same meeting: a person comes in, sits, leaves, quickly. It was a 20-minute meeting, I guess, from what I'm hearing. Many people, and many political pros, said everybody would do that. If you got a call and said, 'Listen I have information on Hillary and the DNC,' or whatever it was they said, most people are going to take that meeting, I think." "I think many people would have held that meeting." "And you have to understand, when that took place, this was before Russia fever. There was no Russia fever back then, that was at the beginning of the campaign, more or less. There was no Russia fever." "Most of the phony politicians who are Democrats who I watched over the last couple of days – most of those phonies that act holier-than-thou, if the same thing happened to them, they would have taken that meeting in a heartbeat." "First question - first 20, 25 minutes - I said, 'Did you do it?' He said, 'No, I did not, absolutely not.' I then asked him a second time, in a totally different way. He said, 'Absolutely not.'" "Somebody did say if he did do it, you wouldn't have found out about it. Which is a very interesting point." "Look: Something happened and we have to find out what it is, because we can't allow a thing like that to happen to our election process. So something happened, and we have to find out what it is." "We have to find out and get to the bottom of what's going on, because we can't have even the slightest suspicion about our election process." "Now, everybody agrees that there was no impact on the votes in this election, which is very important to say, but we have to make sure that nothing could ever happen to our election process." "Do I feel I can trust anybody, OK? I'm a very suspicious person. I am not a person that goes around trusting lots of people. But he's the leader of Russia. It is the second most powerful nuclear power on earth. I am the leader of the United States. I love my country. He loves his country. He's for Russia. President Xi – I had a long meeting with him too, 2-1/2 hours, great relationship. He's for China, I'm for the United States. They're for their countries. But I do things the way I do things, and it's just worked out." "But we had a very productive meeting. Including the fact that I think we have a good shot at piece by piece getting Syria to stop fighting. Ultimately Ukraine. And other things, including the destruction of terrorists as we know them." "So I'm sitting with Putin, and we had a very good - we were there two hours and 15 minutes - we had a very good meeting. One of the things brought up was a ceasefire. I said, 'We've got to solve this problem in Syria. And Ukraine by the way.' And what happened is we sat down and we worked out a ceasefire, which is by the way, as of 20 minutes ago, totally holding, and that's four days. Four days doesn't sound like a lot, but they've never had a ceasefire that lasted at all. That's because Putin told them, as opposed to somebody that nobody ever heard of. Putin and I agreed to it, and we have a four-day ceasefire. That means many lives have already been saved because of four days. But it's going to go on for a while, and things are going to go better." "I was very tough with President Putin. We have a very important relationship. It's going to be a relationship where lots of lives could be saved, like as an example with the ceasefire, which nobody else could have gotten but me." "I campaigned on strong military, strong borders, and low oil prices." "Look what I've done – oil prices have been driven down. We're sending LNG to Poland, massive shipments to Poland. That's not what Putin wants. And for the military, we've got $56 billion more of equipment than anybody ever thought of, in the last budget. Putin doesn't want that – so why would Putin want me?" "It's really the one question I wish I would have asked Putin: Were you actually supporting me?" "I'm very big on energy, and that's not good for Russia, because Russia makes its money with energy. That drives the price of energy down. I also am very strong on the military, very, very strong on the military. I'm also very strong on cyber." "I would bet that inwardly Putin would have been against me." "The mood in the White House is fantastic." "We have done more in five months than practically any president in history." "If you look at Iraq and if you look at Syria and you see the progress we've made with ISIS, it's been almost complete." "The White House is functioning beautifully. The stock market has hit a new high. Job numbers are the best they've been in 16 years. We have a Supreme Court judge already confirmed. Energy is doing levels that we've never done before. Our military is doing well. We're knocking the hell out of ISIS, which Obama wasn't. There's not a thing that we're not doing well in. The White House is functioning beautifully, despite the hoax made up by the Democrats." "The problem is, I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything. This isn't a question of defense. I didn't do anything. I had no relationship to Russia. So I said, what can the legal team do?" "The only frustration is that this Russia story is a hoax made up by the Democrats as an excuse for losing an election that they should have won because it's almost impossible for a Republican to win the Electoral College." "There was zero coordination. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. There's no coordination, this was a hoax, this was made up by the Democrats." "This is the greatest con job in history, where a party sits down the day after they got their ass kicked, and they say, 'Huh, what's our excuse?'" "It just continues and continues, and honestly it's a disgrace, and it's very bad for our country. And the Russians must be laughing, because this narrative is so bad for us as a country."


Comedy Central s roasts of various celebrities are well known by this point, and it s just as well known is that the roasts almost never focus exclusively on the person being roasted. This year s roast is all about Rob Lowe, and the roasters do go after him quite heartily and gleefully. However, it seems that Ann Coulter is also inexplicably a roaster this year, and the other roasters decided to burn her about as bad as they did Rob Lowe.Coulter is a Trump fangirl. She s also just about the most racist and hateful public figure in all of existence. She takes all of Trump s bizarre rhetoric 700 steps farther than it needs to go, while calling him out for not going far enough. These comedians don t really seem to like her all that much, and neither did the audience. They actually booed her for using her appearance there to promote her most recent book, In Trump We Trust. Oh, please.Variety did us all a favor and captured the following zingers delivered at Coulter s expense:Nikki Glaser: The only person you will ever make happy is the Mexican who digs your grave. Peyton Manning: I m not the only athlete up here. As you know, earlier this year, Ann Coulter won the Kentucky Derby. Davidson: If you are here, Ann, who is scaring the crows away from our crops? Lowe: After seeing your set tonight, we ve seen the first bombing you can t blame on a Muslim. Jeff Ross: Ann is against gay marriage. What is your thinking on that? If I can t get a husband, they can t either? Jewel: I do want to say as a feminist that I can t support everything that s been said tonight. But as someone who hates Ann Coulter, I m delighted. Rob Riggle: If Ann Coulter is here, someone must have said her name three times. Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! And perhaps the harshest, from Jimmy Carr: Ann is one of the most repugnant, hateful, hatchet-face bitches alive. It s not too late to change, Ann. You could kill yourself. Coulter herself tried to play comedian, too, and threw out this, ahem, gem, which was probably the only gem she uttered all night: I want to welcome everybody to the Ann Coulter roast with Rob Lowe. That s about the only thing she s ever gotten even close to right, even if she did solidify the idea that this roast is all about her. Everything she thinks is twisted, bigoted, false, and delusional. As the old clich goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Coulter, however, is right considerably less frequently than that.These are just a few of the jokes various Rob Lowe roasters shot her way, despite the fact that she was likewise a roaster, but has no connection to Lowe. Lowe explained her appearance by saying that they need all flavors at these roasts in order to make them work, and that s why she was there.Whatever the reason, though, Variety insinuates that her entire performance fell far more flat than anybody else s. Poor, poor Ann. Our hearts bleed for her and how stupid she ll look on Labor Day, which is when this will air.Featured image by Christopher Polk/Getty Images


News, information and analysis from the black left. Black Agenda Radio for Week of Nov 21, 2016 Submitted by Nellie Bailey a... on Mon, 11/21/2016 - 20:44 2016 presidential campaign Green Party: Part of the Solution  "I fully expected that we were going to get at least five percent of the vote," said Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka . "I suspect that when push came to shove, particularly in those swing states, people held their nose and voted for the lesser evil." Nevertheless, it is essential that the Greens continue to put forward "transitional demands that are meant to galvanize people and win concessions from the state, but also that you keep people focused on the fact the real objective is to transform this system, to take power from the capitalist state." No World War, But Plenty of Domestic Oppression  "I think the threat of World War Three has receded significantly," said author, activist and historian Paul Street . However, "I don't know if I'll think that of Trump in two years," he added. "The more immediate dangers seem to be: police statist assaults on undocumented Latino immigrants, a registry of Muslims, and a potential designation of Black Lives Matter and civil rights activists as quasi-terrorists. The other great, existential threat is runaway climate change because Trump has pledged to thoroughly deregulate energy." Saving Mumia and Others from a Curable Disease  Activists in the Free Mumia movement plan a rally on December 9, in Philadelphia, to pressure prison officials to treat the political prisoner and thousands of other inmates suffering from hepatitis C. "Healthwise, Mumia is not doing good at all," said Pam Africa , of Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal. "He has the appearance of good health, but he's itching all over" and "his health is declining." A judge ruled that Pennsylvania prison officials are obligated to treat Abu Jamal, but he used a technicality to avoid ordering that the cure actually be administered. Pam Africa said next month's rally will also highlight unsafe, blackish water in prisons. At one facility, she said, "young people coming into the prison are losing their hair." U.S. Election Ran on "Fear" and "Betrayal"  "It is accurate to say that economic discontent played a part" in Hillary Clinton's defeat at the polls, said Mumia Abu Jamal . But he thinks other factors were at least as important. "The Trump campaign represented, not just fear, but profound paranoia, and also white revenge for the darkening of America." However, "if Trumpism represented vengeance, then Clintonism represented betrayal," because the Democrats failed to stand up on issues vital to their base constituencies. Torture, Anyone?  Former Kansas Republican congressman Mike Pompeo is likely to be named CIA director in the Trump administration. "He's a big fan of torture," said Ray McGovern , a former CIA analyst who now spends most of his time trying to rein in the national security state. McGovern told Paul Jay, of The Real News Network, that Pompeo "visited Guantanamo, he said it was great, and then said, "As far as I can see, those prisoners are gaining weight.'" President Obama must share the blame. "If Obama had the strength of his convictions, he would have gotten rid of the torturers in the CIA," said McGovern. "He let them stay, and now they're having a celebration." Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.


President-elect Donald Trump will hold a series of meetings on Sunday in New Jersey as he continues to put together a team for his incoming administration, Trump spokesmen said. They said Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence will meet with: talent agent Ari Emanuel; civil rights attorney Peter Kirsanow; Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach; Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson; Bridgewater Associates President David McCormick; and retired Marine Corps General John Kelly. Trump and Pence will also meet with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie; former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; U.S. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers; Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives T.W. Shannon; American investor Wilbur Ross; and Jonathan Gray, global head of real estate at Blackstone Group, they added during a call with reporters.


President Barack Obama said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server was a mistake, but that U.S. national security hadn't been endangered. In his first extensive remarks on the controversy that has roiled the Democratic presidential primary, Mr. Obama said on CBS's "60 Minutes" program that questions about Mrs. Clinton's email arrangement were legitimate. "It is important for her to answer these questions to the satisfaction of the American public," Mr. Obama said.


There are no winners among Iraq s Kurds, just weeks after Kurdish president Masoud Barzani gambled away his people s autonomy in a defiant independence referendum. The losing bet has come at a steep price for everyone involved. Barzani has had to give up the presidency, his Kurdish political foes have angered their popular base, and the Kurdish people, who overwhelmingly voted to break away from Iraq, feel further than ever from their lifelong dream of independence. The ultimate winner, analysts say, is Iran, widely believed to have backed and orchestrated Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in his Oct. 16 offensive to recapture Kurdish held-areas, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The Iranians outwitted the Americans; they were the driving force behind the deal to hand over Kirkuk, said Hassan Shaaban, a political commentator and rights activist in Baghdad. The balance of power has been transformed in the north of Iraq, exposing the limited hand the Kurds have to play in future negotiations. It has also exposed the dominant role Iran played in transforming the fate of the Kurdish region. Iran is poised to exploit the political aftermath, pushing to move the centre of power from the regional capital Erbil, where the Barzanis and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) have dominated, to its Kurdish allies in the city of Sulaimaniya. Iran was always one step ahead on the referendum, said Renad Mansour, an Iraq expert at the Chatham House think-tank. They knew Barzani was never going to postpone the vote, he said, adding: The U.S. was left scrambling while the Iranians were plotting. A senior Iranian official said Tehran had advised Barzani against the referendum but he would not listen. We tried to stop this referendum because it was not in their interest. But unfortunately Mr Barzani miscalculated his social base among Kurds and went ahead with the vote, Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran s National Security Council, was quoted as saying by Mehr news agency on Tuesday. Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani has for years been allied to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the main rival of Barzani s KDP. But the referendum has drawn the powerful Iranian commander even closer to Kurdish politics, and shown how far Iran s reach has extended beyond the central government in Baghdad. Ahead of the vote, Soleimani warned Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq to withdraw their forces from Kirkuk or face a fiery onslaught by Iraqi forces and Iranian-backed fighters, according to Kurdish and Iraqi officials. The warning prompted Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to withdraw from most areas, and deepened the split between Barzani s power base in Erbil, and the rival Talabani clan in Sulaimaniya, long allied with Iran. Iraqi politicians have voiced concern about the growing influence of Iran, despite praising Abadi for reining in Kurdish ambitions. We feel worried seeing the octopus arms stretching deeper in the north, said Ahmed Asi al-Obeidi, a Sunni tribal sheikh and a member of Kirkuk s tribal council. We all have seen the problems Iranian meddling has caused in other parts of Iraq, including mainly Sunni areas, and if the same amount of interference is repeated in Kurdish areas, then the worst is coming and instability will prevail. Addressing his people, demoralized by humiliating territorial defeats, Barzani said on Sunday that he would step down, just one month after the vote he championed in the face of regional and international opposition. He accused his enemies of committing high treason in surrendering Kirkuk to Iraqi forces without a fight, while his rivals have directed the same accusation against him for holding the referendum in the first place. The vote and its ensuing political and military retribution from Baghdad - backed by Iran and Turkey - demolished the position of relative strength the Kurds had enjoyed for years. The blame has been placed on Barzani s shoulders, both by his political opponents, notably the rival Talabani clan allied to Iran, and his Western allies, who were angered by his insistence on holding the vote against their advice. On Sunday, Kurdish lawmakers agreed to divide Barzani s presidential powers between parliament, the judiciary and the government, in the absence of imminent presidential elections and a named successor. Barzani remains head of the KDP, which dominates parliament and government, and will still sit on the High Political Council, an opaque non-governmental body which emerged after the referendum. He will thus retain his ability to influence policy. Barzani could therefore mitigate the mounting political chaos. But his position instead highlights the lack of clarity over who is in charge as crucial negotiations with Baghdad get underway over the region s future. Dominant since he became president in 2005, Barzani has consolidated the power of his office, and boosted his family members political profiles. Before the referendum, Barzani s son Masrour was his likely successor, but he has been damaged by his backing for the vote. Instead, Nechirvan Barzani, Masoud s nephew and the regional prime minister, has moved to the fore. He has gained some of Barzani s newly devolved presidential powers, and maintained ties with the Kurdish opposition, making him a more palatable candidate to mend regional fences. He also enjoys a close relationship with Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan. On Monday, the United States commended Barzani for stepping down and said it would actively engage with Nechirvan, and his deputy, Qubad Talabani, a member of the rival political faction with whom he maintains a good relationship. Who emerges as the next leader of the Kurdistan Regional Government is anything but straightforward. In addition to an intra-Kurdish compromise, the influence of Baghdad and Iran will have to be considered. Senior Kurdish officials from both the KDP and PUK say their best bet is to present a united front in negotiations with Baghdad. But that now seems all but impossible. Iraqi forces, including the Iran-backed Shi ite militias, now control border crossings in the north, vital trade routes for the Kurds. The military capitulation in Kirkuk was a crushing blow to the Kurds, both morally and financially, halving the region s oil export revenue overnight. Now the Talabanis are facing their own succession crisis, following the death of former president Jalal Talabani. Iran saw the disintegration of their Kurdish ally in Talabani, said Mansour, who added Iran needed a clear successor to ensure its continued influence. Another set of sons and nephews are vying for leadership in the aftermath of the referendum. But the PUK base has expressed more widespread disappointment with how their leadership handled the Kirkuk crisis. We were betrayed by our leaders in Kirkuk, who stopped us from fighting the (Iraqi Shi ite) militias, said a PUK-allied Peshmerga commander who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. They sold us to Iran for their own benefit. For a graphic on Iaq's Kurdish zone, click tmsnrt.rs/2yXRWcI


Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) is the physical embodiment of the anti-Trump resistance in Congress. She has openly called for the orange one to be impeached on multiple occasions, and rails against him on national television at every opportunity. Her latest attack on The Donald comes via his own favorite platform Twitter.Of course, Rep. Waters participated in the Tax Day marches that were designed to pressure Trump to release his tax returns as every president and presidential candidate has done for decades. Of course, Trump broke all the rules of politics and still managed to get elected. So, the breaking of this particular tradition should come as no surprise.Well, Rep. Waters has had enough of Trump s lies and lack of transparency, so she took to Twitter to rail Trump once again:Trump will not release his taxes b/c he has something to hide. He's only out to enrich himself, his wealthy cabinet, & White House swamp Maxine Waters (@MaxineWaters) April 18, 2017It can't be lost in the chaos that Trump's campaign is still under FBI investigation for colluding w/ Russians to undermine our democracy Maxine Waters (@MaxineWaters) April 18, 2017Nothing in the past two weeks has changed anything about what we've learned about Manafort, C. Page, & the rest of Trump's #KremlinKlan Maxine Waters (@MaxineWaters) April 18, 2017The President is a liar, his actions are contemptible, & I'm going to fight everyday until he's impeached. Maxine Waters (@MaxineWaters) April 18, 2017Rep. Waters is correct. Trump is a liar. He isn t releasing his taxes because he s hiding god only knows what. Further, we can t let him distract us with missiles and bombs. We must know what he is hiding and who he is working for, and we must know if he colluded with Russia to win this election.Keep on fighting, Auntie Maxine. We need good, strong Democrats like you to derail Trump s hateful agenda.


Marine Corps Veteran Frank Biggio appreciates your recognition of his services, but he doesn t want it anymore. This year is far too important. Instead, he says, he wants you to vote and he wants you to vote for Hillary Clinton.In an op-ed in Cleveland.com, Biggio outlined strong differences between the two major party candidates, and for him, Trump is unacceptable:One of our options includes a man who has glibly spoken about using nuclear weapons in Europe and the Middle East and seems unconcerned about nuclear proliferation by other countries simply because it is going to happen anyway; who fails to comprehend the deterrent effect of U.S. troops in South Korea against increasingly belligerent threats by North Korea; who would allow NATO member states on Russia s western border to fall to Kremlin aggressions unless they pay up; and who has denigrated the family of an Army captain killed in action while serving his country.This is a mercurial man who will have almost unchecked authority to put uniformed men and women in harm s way, but whose understanding of foreign affairs and military strategy is based almost solely on his instincts rather than analysis.Biggio goes on to say that he has served under many commanders and none of them have resorted to primitive and distracting antics like belligerent shouting or chest thumping. He also wrote about how every commander he s served under is humble with victories and takes responsibility for failures. Trump, he said, would never credit his team for success and he d never take blame for failure. Instead, Biggio compared Trump to the fictional Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny :Trump is no Eisenhower. He s more like the fictional Captain Queeg played by Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny paranoid, erratic, condescending and ultimately incompetent. There are many other apt analogies, but each is equally frightening when thinking of Trump directing the deployment of our military to today s ambiguous front lines, perhaps just to prove that he can.Biggio is concerned for the 2.2 million members of the military if Trump is elected:Will we elect a man who, without offering any clarity, boasts that he will be so good at the military, your head will spin, as if his high school graduation from a military academy validates that claim, and hopes that the electorate will simply trust that will be so? Whose behavior and public comments cause a collective group of 50 foreign policy experts, most of whom are from the Republican Party and have at one time sat in the White House Situation Room and contemplated the implications and repercussions of deploying our military, to publicly denounce him and the security and foreign policy positions he has proposed?Biggio agrees with many that Clinton is not without flaws (who is?), but he admires and respects her experience, her pragmatism and the fact that she knows when to be decisive and when to exhibit restraint:This Election Day, please thank me for my service by voting for Hillary Clinton as our president and commander in chief.We will, Major Biggio.


U.S. President Donald Trump's failure to fill dozens of senior-level positions at the Pentagon is making it difficult for defense contractors to forecast business. Defense company officials, speaking on conference calls after their just-reported quarterly earnings, did not blame Trump directly, but said the lack of appointments to key positions at the Pentagon had slowed contract awards and created uncertainty. "The still-high number of unfilled leadership appointments and the approaching government physical year-end continue to serve as headwinds," said Roger Krone, chief executive of Leidos Holdings Inc (LDOS.N), on an Aug. 3 call with analysts. Krone, whose company is one of the largest providers of services to U.S. armed forces, said those open posts have slowed the awarding of government contracts. The Department of Defense said it has 42 unfilled top-level posts that require Senate confirmation, including general counsel, inspector general and other important roles like secretary of the Army and undersecretary of the Navy. The Pentagon referred a request for comment on its unfilled posts to the White House. A White House official said: "Democrat obstruction has played a key role in jamming up the president's agenda." Of the 42 open positions that require Senate confirmation, 29 have no nominee identified, while 13 have nominees awaiting confirmation. For two of the largest U.S. defense companies, General Dynamics Corp (GD.N) and L3 Technologies Inc (LLL.N), thin staffing at their largest customer was a talking point with investors. The Defense Department is "working on filling several positions in the Pentagon and that has definitely resulted in a slowdown," said Ralph D'Ambrosio, chief financial officer of L3, a prime contractor for surveillance, security and detection systems. Because of the slowdown, the quarter just ended was the lowest second-quarter spending level on record at $62.5 billion, according to a report by data analysis firm Govini, seen by Reuters. The report said "federal procurement resources are stretched thinner than they ever have been." Leidos' Krone pointed to the expected one-year delay of the Navy's $3.5 billion NMCI NextGen program to update the intranet used by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps as an example of a big contract delay. Defense spending for the 2018 fiscal year and beyond was unclear, said Byron Callan, a defense analyst at Capital Alpha Partners, noting that few companies have changed their long-term profit expectations, suggesting that uncertainty has made forecasting more difficult. "The fact that we didn't have an enacted (fiscal year) 2017 budget until the early part of May, which was seven months into the fiscal year, has definitely slowed down the contracting activity and the obligation activity within the Department of Defense," said D'Ambrosio. Some of the positions have been difficult to fill. Two of Trump's nominees for Army secretary, its top professional civilian position, withdrew their names from consideration. The White House then nominated Raytheon Co (RTN.N) lobbyist Mark Esper, and he is awaiting a vote on his confirmation. General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic said during her company's conference call that "without these appointments, it is difficult to process contracts" and to make progress on defense-related projects. Novakovic's information systems and technology business unit has thousands of shorter sales-cycle service contracts which can reflect delays quickly.


On January 29, the U.S. State Department announced that the agency had identified 37 pages of top secret emails among the 55,000 pages of emails contained on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton s private email server.Not surprisingly, Clinton s GOP rivals went straight to work spreading half-truths and misinformation about the announcement.As former Chair of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Dianne Feinstein pointed out in a statement on Friday, several key facts are being left out of the narrative surrounding the announcement.For starters, the 37 pages of top secret communication actually involve only seven chain emails. Each of these seven emails was sent to a larger group of recipients, including the former Secretary of State.None of the top secret emails were sent from Hillary Clinton s private server.All of the emails originated from within the State Department s unclassified system. None of them contained the mandatory top secret label which is required for all classified communication.During a press conference on Friday, State Dept. spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that the emails were being withheld because they meet the definition of top secret communication now.Kirby also stressed that the emails were not marked classified at the time that they were sent. Was the information contained in the emails considered classified at the time they were sent? Keep in mind that all 55,000 of Clinton s emails were sent between March 2009 and February 2013. Since the State Department regularly raises the status of unclassified material to the level of classified, it s more than likely the content of these seven emails was not considered classified when it was sent.According to Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, in at least one case, the emails appear to involve information from a published news article. The last time the GOP went wild with claims that Clinton had top secret emails on her private server, we later found out that the information had been retroactively classified by the FBI.To summarize:In other words, this is not the huge scandal republicans were hoping for. Instead, it s just another baseless right wing attack on Hillary Clinton that falls apart under even the slightest amount of scrutiny.Featured image credit: Pixabay


While Trump's edge is just 1 point — which is well within the margin of error — the Republican candidate has made up 13 points in under two weeks. Trump — who used to read off every poll he led during rallies but had begun to call them inaccurate after he started to decline — has decided he likes them again, or at least he likes this one. But not everyone wants to capitalize on the poll. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich called the new poll an "absurdity." At this point in 2012, Mitt Romney led President Obama by 1 point. The daily tracking poll was conducted Oct. 27-30, 2016, and included 1,128 likely voters. The margin of error is 3 points.


GOP congressman Steve King (R-IA) had endorsed Republican nominee Donald Trump after Ted Cruz ended his presidential campaign, but a recent statement of his is raising some eyebrows he actually praised Trump s rival in a speech!On Thursday, King told a crowd at the Iowa State Fair that he and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton can barely see eye to eye on anything and if he were to be re-elected, he ll break out of my shell if I have to do battle with an agenda that Iowans reject. However, King said the former Secretary of State is somebody I can work with if she were to win this election. King s full statement to the audience, as quoted by the Des Moines Register s Jason Noble, was: If it s Hillary Clinton, we don t agree on very much. So you ll probably see me become a vocal member of Congress if you should elect me to go back to Washington after November.But I also know that I ve sat across the table with Hillary Clinton eye-to-eye, and when you re working outside of staff and outside of press, she is somebody I can work with. You can listen to King s remarks below:That almost sounds like resignation to the fact that Trump is destroying his campaign and dragging the GOP down with him. Coming from an elected Republican like King, this is a pretty powerful statement especially considering all that the Republican Party has done to smear Clinton s name. Of course, King is still going to vote for Trump in November, but it sounds like he s coming around to accepting Clinton as the probable next president of the United States.Clinton has been smart in recognizing that so many anti-Trump moderate GOPers are looking for their place in this election, and she is positioning herself as someone who can unite people. Clearly, it is working. As Trump continues to grow more insane and violent in his rhetoric, we can only expect to see more statements like this coming from prominent GOPers.


Donald Trump s ties to Vladimir Putin have been questioned again and again, and for good reason. Trump has previously said good things about Putin and has done so once again, but not before he released the holiday letter he received from the Vladimir.Putin wrote the letter to Donald just over a week ago, on December 15th, saying: I hope that after you assume the position of the President of the United States of America, we will be able by acting in a constructive and pragmatic manner to take real steps to restore the framework of bilateral cooperation in different areas as well as bring our level of collaboration on the international scene to a qualitatively new level. In the letter he also wished the Trump family happiness and success.During his annual news conference Putin suggested that America and Russia should discuss ways to normalize our relations. During his election campaign, Trump said it would be proper to normalize and it can t be worse, and I agree with him. Putin has also tweeted about his hopes to ally with the US:On the first meeting with Trump: We will discuss how to put Russia-US relations back on track President of Russia (@KremlinRussia_E) December 23, 2016Trump responded in a short statement: A very nice letter from Vladimir Putin; his thoughts are so correct, I hope both sides are able to live up to these thoughts, and we do not have to travel an alternate path. However, Trump s tweets say he s definitely willing to travel down an alternate path. Yesterday, on the 22nd, Donald Trump tweeted The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016He also made a statement to Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all, So it s certain that Trump is perfectly fine with starting an arms race, even though that generally leads to war. Trump probably doesn t have enough knowledge of history to know that though.What will happen between these superpowers remains unclear, but hopefully it doesn t involve nuclear war, and with it the destruction of the world as we know it.


Comments  Republicans are fond of blaming the media for their troubles, but never blaming voters for utterly rejecting their party's platform of racism, hatred and economic inequality. To some Republican voters, it will even come as a surprise that Donald Trump loses next week's election, but the signs were all there and here's an excerpt from just one of the rare Fox News stories that admits it: " 'Sleeping Giant' awake and roaring – early voting shows high Latino turnout ":  The tens of millions of early votes cast point to strength from Democratic-leaning Latino voters, potentially giving Clinton a significant advantage in Nevada and Colorado. With more than half the votes already cast in those states, Democrats are matching if not exceeding their successful 2012 pace, according to data compiled by The Associated Press.  Latinos, another group that Democrats have been banking on, are turning out in larger numbers than anticipated, and they very well may be the ones who give the party's presidential nominee the margin of victory. "We are seeing the trajectory of the election change in some states, but Democrats are also making up ground," said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor and expert in voter turnout.  They don't let Sean Hannity or Lou Dobbs on to Fox News Latino, which is probably why it actually publishes some factual stories, unlike Fox News or Fox Business, who just today had to retract an entirely false story about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.  Meanwhile, Univision exit polling is showing that Latinos have the same high level of regard for Hillary Clinton in Florida that they have for President Barack Obama. This level of support is considered key to the Democratic nominee's strategy to win the Sunshine State, which would act as a firewall, closing almost all of the Republican nominee's paths to the presidency. The Miami Herald reports :  Hillary Clinton has hit a key marker among Florida Hispanics, according to a new poll: She's reached the level of popularity that helped President Barack Obama win the nation's largest battleground state in 2012.  Sixty percent of Florida Latinos favor Clinton, the Univision News poll shows. That's the same number that voted for Obama four years ago, according to exit polls from that election.  The polls further indicate that Hillary Clinton will probably get at least 60% of the latino vote in Florida, but there's 9% of the sample that is still not decided, so it could be much higher by the time election day finishes.  Politico is reporting that the Democratic nominee's 30-point lead amongst Latino voters in Florida isn't just a problem for Trump, but that for the entire GOP it's a "terrifying" prospect. For the wing of the Republican party that likes to win elections, this poll is probably invoking the moment where they see their party's entire electoral history as the party of Lincoln flash before its eyes, which can only mean that the end of the decadently twisted Grand Old Party is near.  Republicans wrote an autopsy of their party after their politics of division, hatred and the 47% blew the 2012 election, which declared the GOP dead in the water. Particularly, the report cited the Tea Party's radical anti-immigration policies, racist dog whistles and the war on women.  Luckily, that spurred the rank and file GOP voters in 2016 to pick an orange zombie Presidential candidate, a man who has turned off women and latinos like a switch, and added muslims, finished off black people and finally convinced college educated voters to trust that the Democratic party is the only rational political actor that can be trusted.  Donald Trump's "safe zone"– THE Fox News Network – is reporting a massive turnout in the latino communities the Republican candidate so despises.  Now, there is absolutely no way he can claim that the election is rigged next Tuesday night when all of the major news networks pronounce his campaign dead, and the Republican Party along with it.


The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that "anti-Cuban" actions recently announced by Washington were regrettable and that Moscow confirmed its solidarity with Havana. The ministry also said that the new approach toward Cuba by the U.S. administration resembles a "Cold war rhetoric". U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday ordered tighter restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba and a clampdown on U.S. business dealings with the Caribbean island's military, saying he was cancelling former President Barack Obama's "terrible and misguided deal" liberalizing ties with Havana.


Is it Hillary s political privilege that allows her to go unpunished for her criminal activity? Hillary was just given a pass to run for the highest office in our nation by the FBI after sending an untold number of highly classified emails from her personal server, while a Marine who served four tours of duty overseas sent one classified email from his personal server in an effort the save the lives of his fellow Marines and he is forced out of the military. But then again, the Clinton Crime Family is never subject to the same rules as We The Peasants The deck is stacked in favor of those at the top. Everyday Americans need a champion. -Hillary ClintonU.S. Marine Corps Captain Jason C. Brezler, a decorated Marine officer who has deployed four times, faces being discharged from the Corps he loves because he used his personal email to send a single classified report as an urgent warning when lives were at stake.Meanwhile Intelligence Inspectors General (IGs) found two top secret documents out of a randomly-picked set of forty from Hillary Clinton s emails and she is being allowed to continue her campaign with little or a no consequence and, generally, the story is being ignored by the mainstream media.As reported by the left-wing Daily Beast, on July 25, 2012, U.S. Marine Corps Captain Jason C. Brezler was in the U.S. attending grad school. In fact, he was in class when received an email about Sarwar Jan, the former police chief who Brezler helped to remove from office. The email was from Marine Major Andrew Terrell, who served with Brezler in 2010. Jan, as police chief, was a notorious drug and weapons trafficker and a friend of the Taliban who ran a child kidnapping/rape ring on the side. Terrell s email said that the former police chief had returned to the area where they served, near FOB Delhi in Afghanistan. The accompanying message from Terrell read, Jason, I just got an email from one of my friends in Afghanistan; he just met Sarwar Jan. He is looking for anything we have on him. Do you still have that paper Larissa wrote on this guy in Now Zad? It could be very helpful. Anything you can think of would be useful. Thanks brother, Andrew. Larissa Mihalisko was a Marine intelligence officer who had prepared a report on Jan with information provided by Brezler and Terrell. Brezler had kept a copy along with other necessary operation reports on the personal laptop he used in the war zone, the Marines not having provided him one.Now, in the moments after he received the urgent message from Terrell, Brezler decided it was great luck that he had downloaded the hard drive from that laptop onto his new one. I immediately typed search and Sarwar Jan and uploaded the document, he would recall in court papers.In the next instant, he sent the report to the email address that Terrell had provided for another Marine in Afghanistan. He gave no thought to the document s classification. Major Jason Brezler s email with the classified information sent to FOB Delhi was meant to be an alarm about Sarwar Jan but, it was ignored. Soon after, three Marines working out at the base s gym were shot and killed by an Afghan teen brought on the base by the same corrupt and double-dealing pedophile police chief whom Brezler had declared to be an immediate threat. Marine Maj. Jason Brezler sent an email to 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines (stationed at FOB Delhi) before the shootings about a corrupt Afghan cop named Sarwar Jan, who was allegedly raping Ainuddin before the 2012 murders. SARWAR JAN IS BACK In 2012 Major Brian Donlon was a captain, serving as 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines operations officer in Afghanistan. According to an email chain obtained by Blue Force Tracker, Donlon sent an email to Captain Andrew Terrell on July 23, 2012 18 days before the FOB Delhi shootings requesting information about Sarwar Jan. Do you remember the Now Zad DCOP, Sarwar Jan? Donlon wrote. If yes, tell me about him. He just showed up. Brian, I sent this request out to Jason Brezler my civil affairs officer for Now Zad. He has some of the detailed reports we submitted on this guy (Sarwar Jan). The short version is he is extremely corrupt, only serves himself, has a proven record of failure [ ] He (Sarwar Jan) has sold out to the Taliban several times before, I would not trust him with anything. After Terrell sent the request for additional information to Brezler, he contacted Donlon to update him on the request:On July 24, 2012, Brezler logged into his Yahoo email account; he was attending graduate school in Oklahoma at the time. He saw an email from Terrell titled: IMPORTANT! Sarwar Jan is back! Brezler hurriedly responded to Donlon with all the information he had on Jan inadvertently including classified information about the Afghan police chief in the email sent from his unsecured Yahoo account.Donlon, in turn, replied to Terrell that he would have to report Brezler for violating the military s rules on classified information spillage. I am going to have to report this to our OPSEC guy, Donlon wrote. Dammit, I know he was just trying to help but shit, he can t have this stuff on there. Donlon s reply to Terrell, however, made no mention of the actual content of Brezler s warning about Jan, nor did he say whether he had forwarded Brezler s warning on to units at FOB Delhi.After Donlon questioned Brezler about sending the classified document over an unsecure network, Brezler reported his offense to his superiors. A Naval Criminal Investigation was launched into the classified data spillage. Brezler cooperated with NCIS investigators, turning over his laptop and materials, which, he claimed he accidently took home following a 2010 deployment to Afghanistan. At that time in Afghanistan, Brezler said, Marines had to use their own personal computers to handle classified material due to limited resourcesBrezler knew the document had been classified, but he figured that had likely changed with the passage of time. And he was only passing on to a fellow Marine what he and Terrell had reported in the first place. But he could tell that the other Marine [who received his email] was taking it as a breach of security. Brezler had still been in class during all this. He continued to live by the Naval Academy honor code, and he used the lunch break to call a Marine higher-up to report himself.Brezler was later referred to a board of inquiry for sending his warning about Jan, which included classified information, over an unclassified network. Although a subsequent Marine Corps investigation determined that Jan did not play a direct role in the 2012 murders, Buckley s family and platoon mates still think Jan was culpable and are pressing to discover whether Brezler s warning was either ignored or overlooked at a time when the threat of green on blue attacks on U.S. and NATO military personnel in Afghanistan was at the highest point of the war.Here s the sick part. The only one who is being punished for that act is U.S. Marine Corps Captain Jason C. Brezler, a decorated Marine officer who has deployed four times, who now faces being discharged from the Corps he loves because he used his personal email to send a single classified report as an urgent warning when lives were at stake and who followed up by self-reporting his breaking of rules.At first, his only punishment was a reprimand, but when the families of the three marines murdered in the gym began to complain that they were being told nothing about the death of their loved ones, Captain Brezler reached out to Rep. Peter King (R-NY) for help.Suddenly, some of the Marine brass decided that a reprimand was not enough. Brezler could not help but notice that nobody was being investigated for failing to act on the report itself. I do not know, and cannot understand, how Jan was ever permitted to operate again with, in proximity to, Marine forces, let alone assume a command on a Marine FOB with an entourage of chai boys, Brezler said in court papers. Had senior Marine commanders paid attention to the dossier we prepared when we expelled Jan from Now Zad, or the Marine commanders responsible for FOB Delhi acted on the warning I sent in response to their urgent request, I believe the Marines murdered on FOB Delhi would be alive today. The commanders who messed up weren t punished, but the Captain who loved being a Marine is being drummed out of the Corps, unless Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus sets the decision aside.Now, compare the case of Captain Brezler to that of Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. As Secretary of State, against the rules, she used a private email server so she could keep all the emails to herself. Over that private server, she sent classified information. When others discovered the private server, she denied it ever held classified information, and she selected which emails to turn over and then had her server wiped clean. After months of refusing, Ms. Clinton finally turned her server over the FBI. So far, she is getting off without even a reprimand and the mainstream media is protecting her.Captain Brezler, on the other hand, sent one classified document in an attempt to save the lives of other Marines. When he realized his mistake, he reported himself. As soon as he was asked, he turned his computer and thumb drive to his superiors. And, when the subject of the three marines who were killed was brought up by their grieving families, he didn t go talk to them, he spoke to a U.S. Congressman who had clearance because he was on the intelligence committee. Now, Captain Brezler is being forced out of the Marine Corps the loves.As the author of the Daily Beast piece concludes:Brezler has continued to serve with distinction as a member of Rescue 2 of the FDNY. A retired firefighter named Jimmy Boyle ran into him the other day and called out a question many are asking. Hey, Jason, what did you do that Hillary didn t?


President Trump turned the power of the White House against the news media on Friday, escalating his attacks on journalists as "the enemy of the people" and berating members of his own F. B. I. as "leakers" who he said were putting the nation at risk. In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump criticized as "fake news" organizations that publish anonymously sourced reports that reflect poorly on him. And in a series of Twitter posts, he assailed the F. B. I. as a dangerously porous agency, condemning unauthorized revelations of classified information from within its ranks and calling for an immediate hunt for leakers. Hours after the speech, as if to demonstrate Mr. Trump's determination to punish reporters whose coverage he dislikes, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, barred journalists from The New York Times and several other news organizations from attending his daily briefing, a highly unusual breach of relations between the White House and its press corps. Mr. Trump's barrage against the news media continued well into Friday night. "FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn't tell the truth," he wrote on Twitter shortly after 10 p. m. singling out The Times and CNN. "A great danger to our country. " The moves underscored the degree to which Mr. Trump and members of his inner circle are eager to use the prerogatives of the presidency to undercut those who scrutinize him, dismissing negative stories as lies and confining press access at the White House to a few chosen news organizations considered friendly. The Trump White House has also vowed new efforts to punish leakers. Mr. Trump's attacks on the press came as the White House pushed back on a report by CNN on Thursday night that a White House official had asked the F. B. I. to rebut a New York Times article last week detailing contacts between Mr. Trump's associates and Russian intelligence officials. The report asserted that a senior White House official had called top leaders at the F. B. I. to request that they contact reporters to dispute the Times's account. "The fake news doesn't tell the truth," Mr. Trump said to the delight of the conservatives packed into the main ballroom at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center just south of Washington. "It doesn't represent the people, it doesn't and never will represent the people, and we're going to do something about it. " In the West Wing less than three hours later, the consequences were becoming clear. Mr. Spicer told a handpicked group of reporters in a briefing in his spacious office that the White House would relentlessly counter coverage it considered inaccurate. "We're going to aggressively push back," he said, according to a recording of the session provided by a reporter who was allowed to attend. "We're just not going to sit back and let, you know, false narratives, false stories, inaccurate facts get out there. " Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, the BBC and The Huffington Post were among those shut out of the briefing. Aides to Mr. Spicer admitted only reporters from a group of news organizations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed. Those organizations included Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Fox News also attended. Reporters from The Associated Press and Time magazine, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the briefing in protest of the White House's actions. The Washington Post did not send a reporter to the session. "Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties," Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. "We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest. " Marty Baron, the Post's editor, called Mr. Spicer's decision to exclude some news organizations from a scheduled briefing "appalling. " "This is an undemocratic path that the administration is traveling," Mr. Baron said. "There is nothing to be gained from the White House restricting the public's access to information. " The White House played down the drama surrounding Friday's briefing. "We invited the pool, so everyone was represented," Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, said in an email Friday afternoon, referring to the small group of reporters on hand at the White House each day to follow the president and send reports to the broader press corps. "We decided to add a couple of additional people beyond the pool. Nothing more than that. " The White House Correspondents' Association, which represents the press corps, also protested the decision. But Jeff Mason, the organization's president, pointed out that the White House had provided briefings and accepted questions from a variety of news outlets since Mr. Trump took office. "We're not happy with how things went today," Mr. Mason said in an interview. "But it's important to keep in mind the context of how things have gone up until now. " He added: "I don't think that people should rush to judgment to suggest that this is the start of a big crackdown on media access. " Still, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which typically advocates press rights in countries with despotic regimes, issued an alarmed statement on Friday about Mr. Trump's escalating language. "It is not the job of political leaders to determine how journalists should conduct their work, and sets a terrible example for the rest of the world," said the group's executive director, Joel Simon. "The U. S. should be promoting press freedom and access to information. " Mr. Trump, in his attack on the news media at the conservative gathering, complained at length about the use of anonymous sources in news stories, charging that some reporters were fabricating unnamed sources to level unfair charges against him. "They shouldn't be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody's name," Mr. Trump said. "Let their name be put out there. " At another point, he said, "A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people because they have no sources — they just make it up. " He added that his "enemy of the people" label applied only to "dishonest" reporters and editors. Those comments came shortly after his own aides had held a briefing for the White House press pool on the condition of anonymity to deny CNN's story suggesting there had been improper contact between the White House and the F. B. I. regarding the Times article on Russian contacts. Later, in the briefing from which the Times was excluded, Mr. Spicer said that it was top F. B. I. officials — first Andrew G. McCabe, the deputy director, and later James B. Comey, the director — who approached Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, the day after the article appeared to say that it was false. Mr. Priebus then asked the two F. B. I. officials what they could do to rebut it publicly. They apologized and said they were unable to issue a statement or otherwise comment on the matter, Mr. Spicer said. "They came to us and said the story is not true. We said, 'Great, could you tell people that? '" Mr. Spicer said, describing the discussions between Mr. Priebus and F. B. I. officials. The F. B. I. on Friday declined to provide its account of those conversations. On Thursday night an F. B. I. official said that the White House had asked last week for the bureau's help disputing the article, and that senior F. B. I. officials had rejected the request, citing the investigation into Russian efforts to affect the election. The article reported that current and former American officials said that phone records and intercepted calls showed that members of Mr. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election. The intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. Last week the White House declined to comment on the Times article and referred reporters back to Mr. Spicer's previous assertions that Mr. Trump's campaign had no contact with the Russian government. Mr. Baquet said on Friday that The Times "had numerous sources confirming this story. " "Attacking it does not make it less true," Mr. Baquet added. Mr. Spicer's Friday session, known as a gaggle, was scheduled as an event, less formal than his usual briefings that are carried live on cable news. But past administrations have not selected outlets that can attend such sessions. Representatives of the barred news organizations made clear that they believed the White House's actions were punitive. "Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don't like," CNN said in a statement. Tensions always emerge between an administration and the reporters who cover it, and it is not unusual for a White House to single out groups of journalists for special briefings outside of the daily session. The Obama White House was harshly criticized by members of the press corps after it tried to exclude Fox News from interviews with top administration officials. But press relations in the Trump White House have taken on a tinderbox dynamic, with journalists and press aides highly suspicious of each other's motives. "The grass is dry on both sides," said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary to George W. Bush, "so it only takes a very small match to light it on fire. "


This is either really funny or a dangerous escalation. A group of armed patriots that have been showing up to mosques to terrorize Muslims going to pray were scared off by a larger group of armed African American counter-protesters:Racial tensions in South Dallas almost exploded at an anti-mosque protest Saturday afternoon before quickly dissolving when the protesters retreated.A few hundred South Dallas residents, mostly black, flooded Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to oppose a planned demonstration by a mostly white group that routinely protests outside mosques.Both sides were armed.The mosque in question was a predominately black one and the counter-protesters were chanting Black Power at the Murikan protesters.Unfortunately, the counter-protesters included members of the New Black Panther Party. If that name doesn t ring a bell, it s a group of pretenders to the legacy of the Black Panthers that spread anti-white bigotry, something the Black Panthers did not do (much). This is why a counter-protest to protect a mosque became racialized. While I have no doubt most of the protesters were racist as well as anti-Muslim, shifting the focus away from the religious bigotry to racism doesn t help Muslims in the long run. It does, however, help the NBPP and their message of anti-white hate.But although I don t approve of the bigotry, I do approve of the counter-protest. Ammosexuals have been terrorizing people for far too long and it was nice to see them show their true colors when their victims have guns, too. Liberals have been not-exactly-joking that black people need to start carrying rifles to push back against the targeting of their communities and, unsurprisingly, it worked.The problem is that Fox News and right wing media is going to explode over this. Nothing gets ratings like scary black people threatening innocent whites just defending their country blablabla. The racism will flow thick and heavy and some people will ask if this is the beginning of Sharia Law in America and the ISIS takeover.The original protesters, BAIR (the Bureau of American Islamic Relations, a silly play on CAIR, a Muslim group) is going to scream persecution and beg for help fighting the evil Muslims/scary black people. The next protest will be far larger, with more guns and filled with people just aching for a gun fight to break out. The potential for bloodshed will be a nightmare for the police.Keep an eye on Texas, this could get real ugly, real quick.Here s the video:


November 1, 2016 Obama's Israel Surprise?  The Middle East has few bright spots these days, but one is the budding rapprochement between Israel and its Sunni Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, thanks to shared threats from Iran and Islamic State. Now the Obama Administration may have plans to wreck even that.


It may be legal to lobby delegates, but will Donald Trump use his luxurious properties to woo delegates leading up to the Republican Convention in July? And if other candidates before him have used the same tactics, should Donald Trump be criticized because his success allows him to offer more 5-star perks?West Virginia looks perfect for Donald Trump: a struggling working-class state filled with the types of voters who have backed him elsewhere and could deliver one of his biggest victories.But a sweep there might not matter. That s because as many as 34 delegates the entire contingent may be free to back whomever they want at the Republican National Convention.Much the same is true in Pennsylvania, home to a hotly contested April 26 primary, where there are 54 uncommitted delegates. Other states and territories, from Colorado to Wyoming to Guam, will also send squads of unbound representatives.These are the swing voters of the GOP nominating contest, nearly 200 activists and elected leaders beholden to nothing except their personal judgment and empowered to make or break candidacies.If Trump arrives at the July convention in Cleveland just shy of the 1,237 delegates required to secure the nomination outright, these unbound delegates could decide to push him over the top or force a contested convention with successive rounds of balloting. It s the wildcatter of delegate selection, said Ed Brookover, a senior adviser to Trump, who drew an analogy to risk-taking oilmen who drill in unexplored land.The three remaining candidates are identifying these delegates, researching their proclivities and beginning to cajole them. The law surrounding them is so unclear that Trump could conceivably fly them to Florida for a weekend of luxuriating at Mar-a-Lago, his gold-adorned and palm-lined private club where, naturally, they could be subjected to personal lobbying to support Trump.Brookover did not rule out the Trump campaign entertaining delegates at one of Trump s properties or paying for their travel costs to Cleveland. But he added: You certainly can t offer anything which would be considered a bribe. We can t give them $100,000. Charlie Black, who is helping lead Ohio Gov. John Kasich s delegate strategy, recalled working on Ronald Reagan s insurgent campaign in 1976 and struggling to court delegates as industriously as then-President Gerald Ford. People got to stay at the White House, fly on Air Force One and meet Queen Elizabeth, Black said.Federal rules do not provide clear guidance about whether delegates can accept items of value from a campaign, other than reimbursement for their travel expenses. Campaign finance lawyers are divided over whether federal or state anti-bribery statutes would apply to delegates who are not elected officials and if so, what kinds of perks or inducements could be illegal.


0 5 0 0 Field tests on the device are expected to begin in 2017.  WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — A device being developed will attach to a soldier's upper and lower legs to generate electricity that is needed to power a growing array of high-tech gadgets in a soldier's backpack, the US Army announced in a press release on Wednesday. "Just by walking, soldiers could generate power," the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center's Project Engineer Noel Soto said in the release. "We are converting the movement of the knees when you walk into useful power."  Field tests on the device are expected to begin in 2017, the release explained. Progressive Soft Exoskeleton: as Comfortable as Everyday Pants (VIDEO) "The goal is to reduce the amount of batteries used by soldiers, or to be able to extend the mission with the same load," Soto noted. "Soldiers are carrying a heavy load and a lot of that weight, 16 to 20 pounds for a 72-hour mission, is due to batteries." Soldiers now carry multiple electronic devices that aid in strategy, communication and navigation, including computers, radios, mobile phones, battlefield situational displays and navigation tools, according to the release. ...


In the simplest of terms, one way to describe Donald Trump supporters would be to call them interesting. However, not interesting in a way where they have profound things to say and should be respected for all the things they do, but rather interesting in a way like when you visit a circus and wonder how so many clowns can fit into one car. That would, in fact, be interesting to find out.Catching up with a few of these interesting people was none other than Jimmy Kimmel s team on his late night show. He interviewed a number of them on the street in Hollywood and told them that it s Hillary Clinton s birthday. He then asked if they could say at least one nice thing about her for her birthday. The replies were, let s just say, less than kind.One woman said: I can t say anything positive. I d ask her if it s truly her birthday or if she s lying about that too. Another guy said: Happy birthday, Hillary. I hope you get arrested. One woman did muster up the strength to compliment Hillary s hair, but she wasn t happy about saying it.It definitely seems like there s a lot of anger coming out of the Trump campaign and their supporters, along with a lot of false information. Here s hoping they will be able to find happiness in life even when Hillary becomes president.Watch the segment and all their weird hatred towards Hillary here:


"Hey Rhona!" Donald J. Trump screamed from behind his desk on the 26th floor of Trump Tower one day last summer, before he won the presidency. Moments later, Rhona Graff, Mr. Trump's longtime executive assistant, popped in from her adjacent corner office. "How long have you worked for me, Rhona?" Mr. Trump asked. "A couple of dozen years — I was 10 years old at the time — I was a child prodigy," Ms. Graff joked. "Mr. Trump discovered me. " "Many of the people who are with me have been with me for a long time," Mr. Trump explained. In business, as a candidate and now as president, Mr. Trump has valued loyalty as the defining attribute in family, aides or Republicans in Congress. He does not always get it, as the defection of the Freedom Caucus last week on the health bill he was trying to pass made abundantly clear. But Mr. Trump can always count on Ms. Graff's allegiance, and that has made Ms. Graff, from her office in Trump Tower, a major figure in the operations of the White House for a simple reason: She is believed to have a direct line to the president. With her deep Queens accent and unerring deference to her boss (she has always referred to him as Mr. Trump or, usually, as Mr. T) Ms. Graff, 64, is a familiar voice to New York's business leaders, the nation's political reporters and now old associates hoping to circumvent the normal channels of communication to reach Mr. Trump. Ms. Graff is a senior vice president of the Trump Organization, and her unofficial role as a back channel to the president raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is skirting the Federal Records Act, which governs the preservation of schedules and correspondence from the president, something the White House denied in response to questions about her role from Politico. Reached on Sunday, Ms. Graff declined to comment. "I like staying behind the scenes," she said in a conversation last year in which she rejected a reporter's proposal to shadow her for a day because so much private campaign, business and personal information crossed her desk. "We're so intertwined when he's here," she said. Or, as she once put it to Real Estate Weekly, "Everybody knows in order to get through to him they have to go through me. " Ms. Graff, a Queens College graduate with a master's degree in psychology, left a sports marketing job after college to spend more time at home with her ailing mother. Eventually in search of another job, she heard about an opening in Mr. Trump's office, and in 1987 called cold. They hit it off. Since entering the Trump Organization's secretarial pool, Ms. Graff has acted as Mr. Trump's media liaison, scheduler, sometimes spokeswoman, planner, "Apprentice" and Miss Teen USA judge. And regardless of who is taking Mr. Trump's calls in Washington, it is Ms. Graff who occupies a more central space in the Trump orbit. In 1991, during Mr. Trump's brush with going broke, it was Ms. Graff, "my very loyal secretary," as he put it in "The Art of the Comeback," who came into his office to tell him that his estranged wife, Ivana, was on the phone with the message, as he put it in the book, "I vant my money now. " In 1993, Mayor David N. Dinkins presided at the wedding of Ms. Graff to Lucius Joseph Riccio, the city's transportation commissioner, and later nicknamed Professor Pothole by The New Yorker for pioneering the field of pothole analytics at Columbia University. For decades, Ms. Graff worked under the tutelage of Mr. Trump's longtime personal assistant, Norma Infante Foerderer, who died in 2013 from a heart attack after a difficult eye surgery. "She'd still be here if she didn't have that problem," Ms. Graff lamented in Mr. Trump's office last year. "A disaster," Mr. Trump agreed. But by 2005, the year Ms. Foerderer retired, Ms. Graff was already ascendant in an office that loomed large among the nation's secretaries. (A poll of secretaries by a staple company showed that Mr. Trump trailed only President George W. Bush when it came to the country's imagined toughest bosses.) In 2004, Ms. Graff became a recurring character on "The Apprentice," and in 2008, she was briefly listed as the secretary for a luxury golf course in Scotland before a Trump confidant, George Sorial, replaced her. In 2013, she attained boldfaced name status in Page Six of The New York Post as "Donald Trump's right hand. " Since Mr. Trump has technically stopped running the Trump Organization, Ms. Graff now forwards messages to Mr. Trump's personal assistant in the White House, Madeleine Westerhout, whom Ms. Graff helped train. Sometimes she forwards messages to Katie Walsh, one of the deputy chiefs of staff a White House spokeswoman maintained that messages are routinely sent to an official point of contact, instead of directly to the president. Mr. Trump's dedication to his secretary and hers to him is much like the relationship Fred C. Trump, his father, had with his secretary, Amy Luerssen, treating her like family. He once had workers carry her up 12 flights of stairs when her elevator stopped working, lent her nephew his wife's pink Cadillac when his car was stolen and would see her off at the airport when she went on a trip. When Ms. Luerssen's niece, Kathy Quigley, tried to bring her aging aunt down to Florida, she said Donald Trump and his brother, Robert, insisted that Ms. Luerssen stay until she was senile. "It was a little bit of a battle because I was thinking, 'Gee, I'd really like her to be down here with me,'" Ms. Quigley said. "But she was very happy. " When her aunt died in 2006, a death notice appeared in The New York Times that read, "The Trump family mourns the passing of our beloved Amy, a trusted and loyal friend and employee for over 65 years. " Mr. Trump compared his father's dedication to Ms. Luerssen to his own loyalty to Ms. Graff. "My father was very loyal to people," he said last summer. "I think I am too. " Ms. Graff was clearly touched. "Well thank you boss," she said. "Well it works both ways obviously. I'd never leave him. "


House Speaker Ryan should resign his post, says Lou Dobbs, the radio host, and anchor of Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox Business Network. [Dobbs Tweeted his resignation call Tuesday morning after Breitbart posted a recording of Ryan saying he would never defend President Donald Trump, and as multiple GOP legislators walked away from Ryan's Obamacare replacement proposal, the American Health Care Act. Ryan Should Resign: Exclusive — Audio of Ryan Abandoning @realDonaldTrump https: . #MAGA @POTUS #TrumpTrain #Dobbs, — Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) March 14, 2017, In the audiotape, recorded Oct. 10, 2016, Ryan told his fellow GOP legislators that ""I am not going to defend Donald Trump — not now, not in the future. " Ryan spoke shortly after the public heard the Access Hollywood tape of Trump's conversation in which he said about women that "when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. " Dobbs followed up his call for Ryan's resignation with two Tweets calling for the full repeal of Obamacare. One Tweet describes Ryan's proposed alternative as "RyanCare," and said it is failing. RyanCare Fail: Ryan's Obamacare replacement bill could die on Thursday https: . #MAGA @POTUS #TrumpTrain #AmericaFirst #Dobbs, — Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) March 14, 2017, We Must Keep Our Promise to Fully Repeal Obamacare https: . — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 14, 2017, According to the leaked audiotape, Ryan said about his reaction to Trump's comments: There are basically two things that I want to make really clear, as for myself as your Speaker. I am not going to defend Donald Trump — not now, not in the future. As you probably heard, I disinvited him from my first congressional district GOP event this weekend — a thing I do every year. And I'm not going to be campaigning with him over the next 30 days … I talked to a bunch of you over the last 72 hours and here is basically my takeaway. To everyone on this call, this is going to be a turbulent month. Many of you on this call are facing tough reelections. Some of you are not. But with respect to Donald Trump, I would encourage you to do what you think is best and do what you feel you need to do. Personally, you need to decide what's best for you. And you all know what's best for you where you are.