Friday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY!

Memo to Trump: Declare an Emergency

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The Democrats routine retort, that native-born Americans have a higher crime rate, will not suffice as new atrocities, like those Trump related, are reported and repeated before November 2020.

What should Trump do now? Act. He cannot lose this battle with Pelosi without demoralizing his people and imperiling his presidency.

Since FDR, we have had presidential government. And when U.S. presidents have been decisive activists, history has rewarded their actions.

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. On taking office, FDR declared a bank holiday. When Britain was barely hanging on in World War II, he swapped 50 destroyers for British bases. He ordered U.S. ships to chase down German submarines and lied about it. Truman fired General MacArthur.

Reagan fired the striking air controllers and ordered the military to occupy Grenada to stop Marxist thugs who had taken over in a coup from taking 500 U.S. medical students hostage.

Critics raged: Reagan had no right to invade. But the American people rewarded Reagan with a 49-state landslide.

Trump should declare a national emergency, shift funds out of the Pentagon, build his wall, open the government and charge Democrats with finding excuses not to secure our border because they have a demographic and ideological interest in changing the face of the nation.

Read the entire article HERE.

Fusion GPS-Linked Group Worked With Tech Company Tied To Russian ‘False Flag’ Operation

Via The Daily Caller

A nonprofit group linked to Fusion GPS and partially funded by George Soros worked in recent months with a technology company implicated in a scheme to use fake Russian bots during Alabama’s special Senate election.

The groups, the Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) and New Knowledge, partnered before the 2018 midterms to track alleged Russian disinformation networks, a website the organizations collaboratively run shows.

Both organizations have links to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), which is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, as well as possible Trump campaign collusion.

SSCI provided New Knowledge with data from various social media companies as part of an investigation into Russian disinformation networks, according to a report New Knowledge released Dec. 17. Two days later, news broke that New Knowledge’s chief executive was involved in a self-described “false flag” operation in the special election for a Senate seat in Alabama, as was another staffer who was the lead author on the Senate report.

Read the entire article HERE.

New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics

By Max Blumenthal and Mark Ames

The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive “political smear unit” is infiltrating the US.

A bombshell domestic spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after hacked internal communications exposed a covert UK state military-intelligence psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting “Russian disinformation.”

Until now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly involved British names. But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US. Hacked documents reveal that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating powerful allies inside the State Department, top DC think tanks, the FBI and the DHS, where it has gained access to Katharine Gorka and her husband, the fascist-linked cable news pundit Sebastian Gorka.

The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US, meddling in American politics and recruiting “a new generation of Russia watchers” behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has hired one of the most notorious American “perception management” specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships with the media.

In a recent editorial, Williamson drew a direct parallel between the group’s collaboration with journalists and surreptitious payments the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.

“These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool,” Williamson wrote.

Read the entire article HERE.

The shameful insubordination of John Bolton

Via The Week

“Don’t upstage the boss” is a powerful maxim in Washington, and usually it applies to President Trump’s White House. But National Security Adviser John Bolton doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

“Bolton puts conditions on plan for withdrawal from Syria,” reads one recent headline. “Contradicting Trump, Bolton says no withdrawal from Syria until ISIS destroyed, Kurds’ safety guaranteed,” blares another. “John Bolton says certain conditions must be met before U.S. withdraws from Syria,” states a third.

Trump has been talking about U.S. troops leaving Syria for months. “We’re coming out of Syria very soon,” he said in March. “Let the other people take care of it now — very soon, very soon, we’re coming out.” By December, he’d lost his patience with those inside the government resistant to the move and abruptly announced a change in policy.

While there are certainly good reasons to proceed more methodically — and with less deference to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — than Trump’s Twitter speed, the exhaustive conditions laid out by Bolton, and perennial hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), would likely mean no Syria withdrawal at all for the duration of Trump’s presidency. On top of that, by slow-walking the withdrawal from Syria, which the president publicly ordered, Bolton appears to be overruling his boss.

Read the entire article HERE.

Mexico investigates battle between drug gangs that left at least 20 dead

Via The Guardian

Mexican authorities are investigating a battle between two suspected gangs that left at least 20 bodies, 17 of them burned, in a border town near where Donald Trump will visit on Thursday to win support for his plan to build a wall.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at his daily morning news conference that initial information pointed to a “battle between two groups”, and that security officials would later provide further information.

A Mexican security official said that authorities discovered 20 bodies on Wednesday, 17 of them burned, outside Ciudad Miguel Alemán, which is about 90km (56 miles) from McAllen, across the Rio Grande river. Five burned vehicles were also found near the bodies, the security official said.

Photos shared with Reuters by a state official show charred bodies scattered along a dirt track in scrubland, alongside burned-out vehicles.

One body was wearing the remains of a baseball cap bearing the letters and logo of the local Gulf cartel, while others wore the remains of bullet-proof vests with the same insignia.

Read the entire article HERE.

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