If Manafort pursues his self-interest, my bet is that he’ll sing. That then can become a cascade: He testifies against others, who in turn are pressured to testify against still others. And all this makes it more difficult to protect the man at the center if indeed he has violated the law.
.. The Papadopoulos revelation is particularly interesting because it goes precisely to the issue of collusion, and it’s not just an allegation—it’s a guilty plea.
.. So if Trump pardoned Manafort, my bet is that he would be prosecuted for state crimes; from Manafort’s point of view, the essential difference is that he would end up in a state prison rather than a federal prison. And the same is true of others in Trump’s circle.
Erik Prince: Trump’s ‘Instincts Are Good’ on Iran, but ‘He Gets Dragged Back by Some of His Advisers’
Erik Prince joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the Iran nuclear deal, chances that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps will be designated a terrorist organization
.. Prince said failing to apply such a designation to the IRGC would be “ludicrous.”
“These guys have been killing Americans, specifically, since soon after they were formed in the early 1980s,” he pointed out.
- “The Marine barracks in Beirut, 243 Americans in 1983; kidnapped, tortured, videotaped it,
- the CIA station chief in Beirut in the 1980s;
- blew up the U.S. embassy there,
- Khobar Towers, and then even
- the last ten years that the U.S. was in Iraq.”
.. All of the explosive formed penetrators, it’s a very very nasty roadside bomb,” he elaborated on Iraq. “It’s not an improvised explosive. It’s very much a manufactured explosive, designed to cut through even the very expensive armor on an Abrams tank. Literally, the IRGC is responsible for killing and maiming hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers in Iraq.”
.. “And we still don’t designate these guys a terrorist organization. Why? Because they’re worried that this terrorist organization might actually reciprocate and carry out a terrorist attack against America. It’s ludicrous,” he said.
.. “As part of this nuclear deal, they were supposed to make all nuclear facilities open to inspection. They’re cheating on that. They are continuing to develop their ballistic missile technology.”
“You also have to realize that Iran and North Korea, when it comes to nuclear weapons development, are totally in sync and in parallel,” he added. “When the North Koreans crank off a nuke underground, the Iranians are there observing it, and they’ve provided considerable funding for it.”
.. as recently as October 1, 12 days ago, an American soldier was killed in Iraq by an explosive formed penetrator. They have been sticking it to us since 1979 and will continue to do so. What’s announced today will not really reject the Iranian nuclear deal. It will dump it back on Congress, which really won’t do anything on it,” he predicted.
.. “What Congress should have done – what Senator Corker should have forced – is that when the Obama administration pushed the Iran nuclear deal, they should have forced a vote in the Senate,” he said. “If we’re going to treat it like a treaty, vote it up or down like a treaty.
.. If the president went with his initial instincts on this stuff, he’d be hitting it out of the park,” said Prince, who had proposed a plan to President Trump for using private security forces instead of more military personnel in Afghanistan. “Some of these very Establishment foreign policy advisers are giving advice indiscernible from what they’d be giving Hillary Clinton. It’s taken him off track.”
.. Prince described Iran as “a society that puts a thousand stitches into a square inch in a Persian rug.”
“They understand methodical. They are very patient, and very deliberate, and they continue to move the ball in their direction, as this so-called nuclear deal did.
.. “As part of the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, there are supposed to be complete inspections, but secret nuclear sites scattered about the country – it’s a very large country, a lot of remote, rugged terrain – certainly those aren’t being inspected,” he said.
.. “If we make deals with people who are actively trying to kill us, who continue to call the United States the Great Satan, that hasn’t changed. They continue to kill Americans, as recently as October 1. They are not our friends, far from it. If we’re not careful, they will continue to eat our lunch, one bite at a time,” he warned.
.. but will not “sanction the entire IRGC as a terrorist organization.”
“Those are the guys that are driving this nuclear program,” he said. “If you sanction the entire IRGC, you can then go after all of their front companies and money-making apparatus, which trades through the world, through West Africa, money laundering for the drug cartels to front businesses in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East. You can start to crimp off their financing.”
.. “If you don’t do that, if you don’t call a terrorist a terrorist, you can’t really take action against them,”
.. Prince humorously identified it as the “bureaucratic SITS method: Show Interest, Then Stall.”
.. “They are desperately trying to secure the Shia Crescent that goes from Iran all the way to Lebanon, where they can continue to arm Hezbollah, their surrogate there, with larger and larger rockets to dominate Israel, and Jordan for that matter. They’re continuing to advance in their dominance in Yemen and elsewhere.”
.. “We don’t have a beef with the Iranian people, believe me,” Prince added. “The Iranian people want to be Western. They want to have freedom, and drink beer, and listen to rock and roll. They are effectively led by a government that looks more and more like the SS in Nazi Germany – an Iranian Shia fascist government that is far from elected, that imposes itself on every aspect of the Iranian citizen’s life, to the detriment of what should be a very proud and very prosperous country.”
.. Turning to Afghanistan, Prince said President Trump’s decision to send another 4,000 U.S. troops is “unlikely to move the needle.”
.. “When Secretary Mattis traveled to Afghanistan just a couple of weeks ago for an update, he landed in Kabul, and he has to get on a helicopter to fly one mile across the town to where the U.S. base is. He can’t get in a vehicle to drive, just like any person from the U.S. Embassy operating there has to take a helicopter from the Kabul airport into downtown, because it’s not safe to drive,” he observed.
.. “And within two hours of Secretary Mattis landing, 40 rockets hit Kabul airport, in a five-hour firefight to try to secure the airport again,” he added. “This is not what winning looks like.”
.. “I was there on the ball when the president said in his inaugural speech, ‘We’re going to drive Islamic terrorism off the face of the Earth.’ I don’t think he intended that means the terrorists are driving captured U.S. vehicles across the Afghan terrain,” said Prince.
The Morality of Charles Koch
A libertarian billionaire embraces a Catholic business school for its ethics.
the chairman and chief executive officer of Koch Industries finds two aspects of the Washington-based business school highly attractive: at the personal level, its emphasis on character and virtue; at the social level, its message that the right way to get ahead and contribute to your community is by creating wealth and opportunity for others.
.. for his own hires, Mr. Koch ranks virtue higher than talent. “We believe that talented people with bad values can do far more damage than virtuous people with lesser talents,” he says.
.. “Tim always said, ‘You’re a Catholic but just don’t know it,’ ” says Mr. Koch. While he wouldn’t go that far, he will say he is attracted to Catholic University’s effort to put the human person at the heart of business life.
.. or many on the Catholic left, and increasingly on the Catholic right, the idea that free markets might advance Catholic social teaching is anathema.
.. “One can be in business and pursue bad profit,” Mr. Koch explains. “That is, by practicing cronyism—rigging the system to undermine competition, innovation and opportunity, making others worse off. Good profit should lead you to improve your ability to help others improve their lives. But that’s not how many businesses act today.” For Mr. Koch, everything from protectionist restrictions on goods and services to subsidies for preferred industries to arbitrary licensing requirements promote bad profit by unfairly limiting competition.
.. This distinction between good and bad profit illuminates the fundamental difference between how Mr. Koch regards the market and how his critics do. In the view of the critics, free markets treat working men and women as commodities to be bought and sold, and only through strong government intervention can workers hope for a decent standard of living. In Mr. Koch’s view, the most important capital is human, and the truly free market is vital because it’s the only place where the little guy can use his or her own unique talents to offer better a product or service without being unfairly blocked from competing.
.. workers, whose greatest protection is possible only in a dynamic, growing economy: The ability to tell the boss to “take this job and shove it”—secure in the knowledge that there is a good job available somewhere else.
.. The opposite of market competition is not cooperation, as is often assumed. It’s collusion—and almost always the kind that benefits the haves over the have-nots. Which explains why the moral threat to capitalism these days comes not from socialism but from cronyism and corporate welfare.
.. What he wants to encourage, he says, is an economic system open enough so that ordinary people who work hard and have their own unique abilities can build lives of dignity and hope for their families.
Are We Down to President Pence?
Lately, Trump’s stupendous instability has actually been looking like a plus. There he was, telling Democrats that he didn’t want to cut taxes on the rich. Trying to find a way to save the Dreamers
.. Better insane than sorry.
.. Then came the U.N. speech, and the reminder that the one big plus on Pence’s scorecard is that he seems less likely to get the planet blown up.
.. Nikki Haley, our U.N. ambassador, argued that the president’s speech was a diplomatic win because “every other international community” has now started calling Kim “Rocket Man,” too.
.. Does this sound like a triumph to you, people? It’s perfectly possible Kim takes it for a compliment since he does like rockets. And I’ll bet he likes Elton John songs, too.
.. But about the “totally destroy North Korea” part: I believe I am not alone in feeling that the best plan for dealing with a deranged dictator holding nuclear weapons is not threatening to blow him up.
.. We tell ourselves that the president is surrounded by men who are too stable to let him plunge us into a war that will annihilate the planet. But Trump’s U.N. speech was a read-from-the-teleprompter performance, not a case of his just blurting out something awful. People in the White House read it and talked about it in advance.
.. He tried to be super-nice at a luncheon with African leaders, assuring them, “I have so many friends going to your countries trying to get rich.”.. The big takeaway, however, was that the president of the United States had threatened to destroy a country with 25 million people.Comments:
We can survive an ultra conservative president who is not totally insane and who listens to advisors…at least until 2020. It’s not at all clear that we or the rest of the world can survive the insanity of the Child in Chief now in the Oval Office... There’s little doubt that Democrats stand to gain politically from the train-wreck presidency of impulsive and short-sighted Trump. But the Democrats must choose country before party. A sane, hard-line conservative like Pence is better for the nation than an irrational narcissist who could plunge the entire world into war.
.. A president Pence would give the right just what they wanted a twitterless occupant of the Oval Office. If anyone would like to know how a Pence would run the 50 states just look at how he ran the state he was governor of.
.. Trump, while not exactly the devil I know, is at least fairly predictable in that his main concerns are self preservation and self enrichment.
.. It is time for this fantasy of impeachment to stop. An election is not “fraudulent” because a foreign power releases information that persuades Americans to vote one way or another. Absent evidence that Russia actually hacked the voting machines and changed votes, or that Trump personally colluded with Russia to influence the elections, there is no shot at impeachment, and such evidence seems unlikely to emerge. Russia should pay a price for its actions, and the Democrats – and I am one- should forget about Hillary, stop the apocalyptic rhetoric, stop fantasizing and demonstrating, and concentrate on winning state, local, and. Congressional elections in the short term, and the next presidential election after that.
.. Threats like these only ADD to Kim’s determination to escape the fate of Iraq and Libya. The US has a “big stick.” It should “speak softly.”
.. 70 percent of the voters in Pennsylvania were Democrats and yet Pennsylvania is represented by a majority of Republicans.
.. That’s called gerrymandering.
.. In Pence’s favor he does not have a legion of “supporters” who back him no matter what he does or says. Pence doesn’t seem to have won allies either as a governor or a representative from Indiana. Trump supporters seem to tolerate him, but reserve their adoration for Trump himself.
.. there will be no easy end to the Trump/Pence administration. Their crimes against the people of the US will linger for generations. They will not go quietly by vote or impeachment.
.. As awful as he is, I’ll still take Trump over Pence. Trump is so ignorant and unhinged that he’s not helping the Republicans destroy our own country with their selfish, hate-the-people agenda. Pence would be the driving force that would allow the destruction to move ahead unchecked. We’d lose Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, women’s reproductive rights, and religious freedom. (The Republicans and their extreme-right-wing Christian supporters believe in religious freedom only for themselves and want their beliefs turned into law.)