In Mexican culture we have songs called "corridos" which are basically folk songs about "heroes" and cartel bosses, and Donald Trump has been immortalized in norteño music! 🇺🇲
— J Marie (@JMarieThesisPod) July 21, 2024
(english subtitles) pic.twitter.com/GcOkDHOels
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Latinos Sing Songs About Their Hero, Donald Trump
When Kamala Met The Truth
Dems Outraged Over Vice President Chosen For Her Race And Gender Being Labeled ‘DEI Hire’ https://t.co/SR07H6uCAL pic.twitter.com/Rlk1BEkAiy
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 24, 2024
DS_We Spend Your Tax Dollars Researching Something That Doesn't Exist
A U.S. congressman said he believes there's a government UFO "cover-up" and is fed up with what he characterized as diversion tactics and stonewalling while millions of dollars seemingly vanish into a black hole.
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who's been a leading voice trying to get to the bottom of the UFO debate, expressed his frustration with the government on this topic in an interview with Fox News Digital.
"I think there is a cover-up," he said. "I mean, it's a cover-up when you release a file, and it's just half blacked out. And there's a cover-up when one group says one federal authority says something exists, and then another federal authority says it doesn't exist. That's a cover-up.
"So, yeah, it exists. The cover-up is real, for whatever reason. And you're spending tens of millions of dollars on it on something that you say doesn't exist, yet you continue spending the money on it. It makes you wonder."
UNDERWATER UFOS DISPLAY CAPABILITY THAT ‘JEOPARDIZES' US MARITIME SECURITY,’ EX-NAVY OFFICER SAYS
Last week, Burchett was one of about a dozen people in a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, about UFOs, which is a highly classified briefing, and he left feeling "discouraged, as all this other stuff is."
Instead of releasing classified files to the public that a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers had been calling for, federal government officials "bring you in a secure setting, even for the most mundane so-called facts. And, to me, that just reeks of a cover."
PENTAGON UFO REPORT FINDS NO ALIEN EVIDENCE: ‘IF US WON’T FESS UP, OTHER NATIONS WILL,' EXPERT WARNS
Because the meeting was classified, Burchett couldn't discuss the details, but he said he didn't learn anything new and wondered why it couldn't be discussed in public.
"I really think the whole thing is so compartmentalized that we'll never get to the bottom of it until you have a commander-in-chief who says enough is enough. We just got to put this stuff out. Let's clear the air. And let's move on," Burchett said.
"Like I said before, it's not about little green man or flying saucers, it's about tens of millions of dollars that our federal government is spending on something that at least some of the members of the federal government say does not exist. Yet they will not release all the files."
At times, Burchett said he felt like they were close to getting answers, but then they're told they have to ask someone else.
"And that person isn't in the SCIF, and then you start all over again. We need a coliseum to put everyone in one place, so we get all the questions answered."
As recently as 2021, an Intelligence Community Control Access program "was expanded to protect UAP reverse-engineering … without sufficient justification," the Pentagon's February report on UFOs (or UAP, unidentified anomalous phenomena) said.
"This program never recovered or reverse-engineered any UAP or extraterrestrial spacecraft. This IC (intelligence community) program was disestablished due to its lack of merit," according to the report.
But it doesn't say the cost of the project or how much was spent.
"If they (federal government) don't have anything to hide, they sure are doing a great job of hiding it," Burchett said with a smirk. "And also, if (UFOs) don't exist, why do they keep spending tens of millions of dollars researching? And why do they not declassify the documents?
"And when they do declassify them, they're so redacted it just looks like blotches of blacked out ink."
A representative of AARO, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which is the Pentagon's office that studies UFOs, didn't immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. [SOURCE]
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
DS_Ideas & Trends: Iran and Guatemala, 1953-54; Revisiting Cold War Coups and Finding Them Costly
By Stephen Kinzer
Nov. 30, 2003
SOON after the C.I.A. installed him as president of Guatemala in 1954, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas visited Washington. He was unusually forthright with Vice President Richard M. Nixon. ''Tell me what you want me to do,'' he said, ''and I will do it.''
What the United States wanted in Guatemala -- and in Iran, where the C.I.A. also deposed a government in the early 1950's -- was pro-American stability. In the long run, though, neither Colonel Castillo Armas nor his Iranian counterpart, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, provided it. Instead, both led their countries away from democracy and toward repression and tragedy.
How did this happen? From the perspective of half a century, what is the legacy of these two coups?
Several dozen scholars, including leading experts on Iran and Guatemala, gathered in Chicago this month to consider those questions. Their conclusions were grim. All agreed that both coups -- the first that the C.I.A. carried out -- had terrible long-term effects.
''It's quite clear that the 1953 coup cut short a move toward democracy in Iran,'' said Mark J. Gasiorowski, a historian at Louisiana State University who began studying that coup in the 1980's. ''The United States bears responsibility for this.''
Iranians wrote a constitution and elected a parliament early in the 20th century. Their progress toward democracy stopped after the Pahlavi dynasty took the throne with British help in 1921, but resumed after World War II. By the time of the 1953 coup, Iran was more free than at any time before or since.
The verdict on Guatemala was even harsher. Within a few years after the 1954 coup, Guatemala fell into a maelstrom of guerrilla war and state terror in which hundreds of thousands of people died.
''The C.I.A. intervention began a ghastly cycle of violence, assassination and torture in Guatemala,'' said Stephen G. Rabe, a historian from the University of Texas at Dallas and author of ''Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism.''
''The Guatemalan intervention of 1954 is the most important event in the history of U.S. relations with Latin America,'' Mr. Rabe said. ''It really set the precedent for later interventions in Cuba, British Guiana, Brazil and Chile. The tactics were the same, the mindset was the same, and in many cases the people who directed those covert interventions were the same.''
President Harry S. Truman authorized creation of the C.I.A. in 1947, and during his administration it carried out covert actions. Truman refused, however, to authorize the overthrow of governments. That changed when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953.
On Aug. 19, 1953, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran became the first victim of a C.I.A. coup. Ten months later, on June 27, 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala became the second.
The recent Chicago meeting, at Northeastern Illinois University, was the first time scholars have considered these two coups together. Some of the participants have taken anti-interventionist positions in the past, but all are respected scholars in their fields. Several have devoted years to studying either the Guatemala coup or the one in Iran. Some now see them as constituting a single historical moment, the beginning of an era of C.I.A.-backed coups around the world.
Eisenhower ordered these coups for a combination of economic and political reasons. Elected Iranian and Guatemalan leaders had challenged the power of large Western corporations, Mr. Mossadegh by nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and Mr. Arbenz by forcing the United Fruit Company to sell some of its unused land for distribution to peasants. American officials charged that both were leading their countries toward Communism, but recent research suggests that the likelihood of Communist takeovers in Iran and Guatemala was exaggerated.
Mr. Mossadegh pursued a neutralist foreign policy and cooperated with Communist members of parliament to win approval of social reforms, but was not inclined to socialism. American officials who were assigned to monitor Communist movements in Iran during the 1950's admitted years later that they had routinely overstated the strength of these movements.
Mr. Arbenz was more sympathetic to socialist ideas, and bought weapons from Czechoslovakia after Washington blocked access to other sources. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sought to link him to a Soviet bid for influence in the Americas. ''Fifty years later,'' Mr. Rabe said, ''still no link has been established.''
After installing friendly leaders in Iran and Guatemala, the United States lost interest in promoting democracy in either country. ''There was no democratic agenda,'' asserted Cyrus Bina, an economist from the University of Minnesota at Morris. Both countries fell into dictatorship and bloody upheaval.
In Iran, the shah's regime imprisoned dissidents and alienated religious leaders by imposing secular reforms. Many democrats and leftists made common cause with fundamentalist clerics. ''The only way they were able to develop was in the mosque,'' Mr. Bina said.
Fariba Zarinebaf, a historian at Northwestern University, said the most profound long-term result of the 1953 coup may be that it led many Iranian intellectuals to conclude that although Western leaders practiced democracy at home, they were uninterested in promoting it abroad. ''The growing disillusion of Iranian intellectuals with the West and with Western-style liberal democracy was a major development in the 1960's and 70's that contributed to the Islamic revolution,'' she said.
IF the overthrows in Iran and Guatemala marked the beginning of the coup era 50 years ago, this year's invasion of Iraq suggests that the era has ended. Governments like Saddam Hussein's learned to protect themselves against coups, participants at the conference said. ''Conditions in the world are more constricting today and it is more difficult, I believe, to pull off coups,'' said Douglass Cassel, a Northwestern University law professor. In Iraq this year, the United States invaded instead. That option would probably have been closed during the cold war, when the Soviet Union was likely to have opposed it.
During the Clinton administration, American leaders expressed regret for past actions in Iran and Guatemala. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright conceded that the 1953 coup ''was clearly a setback for Iran's political development,'' and that ''many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America.'' President Clinton said the United States had been wrong to support Guatemalan ''military forces and intelligence units engaged in widespread repression,'' and pledged that it would ''never repeat'' this mistake.
Susanne Jonas, a professor of Latin American studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz, said the United States should help Guatelamans implement the ''truly visionary'' peace accords signed there seven years ago after talks sponsored by the United Nations, with American support.
Ms. Jonas urged the Bush administration to give more financial and moral support to the United Nations mission in Guatemala, which oversees the peace process, and to use its influence over Guatemala's military ''to push along the agenda of replacing the old repressive apparatus with a new kind of security system.''
''This is the only opportunity Guatemala has had since 1954,'' she said, ''and the best one it will have over the next half century.'' [SOURCE]
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 30, 2003, Section 4, Page 3 of the National edition with the headline: Ideas & Trends: Iran and Guatemala, 1953-54; Revisiting Cold War Coups and Finding Them Costly. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: National Intelligence Estimates, Dwight David Eisenhower
Chairman Ann Reminds Us: What American Political Violence From The Right?
Hey! Are Those Bullets in Your NPR Tote?
If you were worried that liberals would tone down the apocalyptic rhetoric about Donald Trump after Saturday’s assassination attempt — He’s an existential threat to democracy! a fascist! an aspiring dictator! an authoritarian! Hitler! — you can rest easy.
Apparently, the left has concluded that the best way to avoid political violence in the future is to ratchet up their dire warnings about the end of democracy presaged by a second Trump presidency. (That’s almost as good as their plan to lower deficits by spending more.)
Two days after the shooting, Vox announced in a headline, “Yes, it’s still fair to call Trump a threat to democracy.”
President Joe Biden agreed, telling NBC’s Lester Holt, “How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when [Trump] says things like he says.” (Otherwise, it was a great interview except that the president kept calling Lester “Bryant.” Amazingly, it’s necessary to add: That’s a joke.)
MSNBC’s Joy Reid called Trump “the greatest purveyor and promoter of political violence, really, since anyone can remember.” Pro tip for Biden defenders: Maybe don’t bring up people’s ability to remember things.
I’m not sure how to measure who the biggest “purveyor and promoter of political violence” is, but I can do a body count. And when it comes to political violence, the left beats the living daylights out of the right, so to speak,
Granted, we’re only 248 years into this experiment, but so far, every single shooting of a national politician in the U.S. has been committed by a person on the left — or someone even more deranged than a liberal.
A few would-be assassins were simply delusional nuts. Richard Lawrence, for example, was a house painter who thought he was King Richard III of England. He tried to shoot President Andrew Jackson because he thought the United States owed him money.
The rest were political activists who may have been crazy enough to be left-wingers but were not so crazy as to believe they were King Richard III.
Democrat, actor and peace activist John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, because, as he explained in a letter to his family, he loved “peace more than life.” (But he really wanted to direct.)
Charles J. Guiteau, who shot President James Garfield in 1881, had a long relationship with a utopian commune, the Oneida Community, where free love and communal child-rearing were practiced — and this was before Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village”!
Leon Czolgosz, who killed President William McKinley in 1901, was a socialist and anarchist inspired by socialist radical Emma Goldman.
Giuseppe Zangara plotted to kill both Republican President Herbert Hoover and President-elect Franklin Roosevelt, intending to assassinate “all capitalist presidents and kings.” He just missed Roosevelt, killing Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who shot President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, was a stone-cold communist since reading Communist propaganda as a teenager. He moved to the USSR, and when his application for Soviet citizenship was denied, slit his wrists. He then moved with his Russian wife and child back to the U.S., planning to move to Cuba and biding his time passing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets.
Inspired by Communist and Socialist Party literature, Oswald first tried to kill Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, a John Bircher; then former Vice President Richard Nixon; and finally did kill President Kennedy — or so the mafia and the CIA would have us believe!
Upon his arrest, Oswald immediately called John Abt, lawyer for the American Communist Party, saying he wanted Abt to defend him so he could use the trial to showcase his Marxist beliefs.
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who shot at President Gerald Ford in 1975, was part of Charles Manson’s countercultural hippie cult. She pulled a gun on Ford because she was upset about the plight of the California redwood — which put her on the shortlist for aMacArthur “genius” grant. Sadly, a woman has to do twice as much as a man …
Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore tried to kill Ford because, she said, “the government had declared war on the left.”
(Remarkably, these two assassination attempts on her husband didn’t lead Betty Ford into any sort of self-destructive behavior, thank goodness!)
In the entire history of the nation, only two senators and two congressmen have been assassinated. Three of the four were killed by “progressives” for political reasons.
The first member of Congress to be assassinated was Republican James M. Hinds of Arkansas. He was killed in 1868 by secretary of the Democratic Committee of Monroe County George A. Clark.
Sen. Robert Kennedy was killed on June 5, 1968, by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian extremist angry with Kennedy for his support of Israel. (Luckily, that was the last recorded incident of extremist political violence by a Palestinian ever since, as far as I know.)
The most recent assassination of a member of Congress was in 1978, when Rep. Leo Ryan was killed by members of Jim Jones’ left-wing cult in Guyana.
There are other, less homicidal comparisons to be made.
No conservative has ever run at a secretary of State, waving bloody hands in her face (Code Pink’s Desiree Anita Ali-Fairooz at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she was testifying before Congress).
No conservative has ever hit a Democratic politician in the face with a stupid sign, or attacked him as he mowed his lawn, breaking his ribs. (GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul in 2010; and again Sen. Paul in 2017).
No conservative has ever sneaked into a Democratic National Convention and heckled the speaker (Obama bundler Jodie Evans at Sarah Palin during the 2008 Republican National Convention).
No conservative has ever shot up the Democratic congressional baseball team to protest a Democratic president, as a Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter did to Republicans in 2017 (James T. Hodgkinson, wounding five, Rep. Steve Scalise critically).
Before you start wailing about how we “almost lost our democracy on Jan. 6,” that was the only right-wing mob violence in U.S. history. And we’ll never hear the end of it. Your grandchildren will be in nursing homes and Jan. 6 will still be at the top of the news feed.
Pretty weak tea, compared to the epic violence exhibited the previous year by BLM protesters, ginned up by the police-hating media.
Jan. 6 carnage: One person died — protester Ashley Babbitt, who was killed in cold blood by a black Capitol Police officer for trespassing; and $2.7 million in property damage.
BLM carnage: 25 deaths, thousands of injured law enforcement officers, hundreds more hospitalized, $2 billion worth of property damage, and torched stores, neighborhoods and police precincts.
Liberals accusing the former president of inciting political violence
is factually incorrect, deeply ironic and slightly silly. (Other than
that, good point!) Trump needs to hear Biden’s thoughts on political
violence like he needs another hole in the head. [SOURCE]
Kamala Harris Still Raising Money for ‘Freedom Fund’ That Busts Murderers and Rapists Out of Jail
Minnesota Freedom Fund posted bail for rapists and other violent criminals
July 22, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris is actively raising money for a bail fund that busts violent criminals from jail as her nascent presidential campaign signals her candidacy will lean heavily on her roots as a tough-on-crime former prosecutor.
Harris urged her followers to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund in June 2020 as Black Lives Matter rioters wreaked havoc in Minneapolis in the days following George Floyd’s death. Harris’s fundraising efforts helped the fund raise more than $41 million in 2020, but the group only used a small fraction of that bounty—$210,000—to bail rioters out of jail. The remaining funds helped post bail for violent criminals such as Christopher Boswell, a twice-convicted rapist who was freed from jail in 2020 pending kidnapping and sexual assault charges after the Minnesota Freedom Fund paid $350,000 for his release.
"The last time we were down there, the clerk said, ‘we hate it when you bail out these sex offenders, that is what they said,’" former Minnesota Freedom Fund interim executive director Greg Lewin told Fox9 in August 2020.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund continues to reap dividends from Harris’s fundraising efforts well into 2024. The vice president’s fundraising page for the group, which contains a photo of a triumphant Harris before a crowd of supporters alongside her 2020 campaign logo, is active and accepted a contribution from this reporter on Monday morning.
Harris criticized the cash bail system as a major contributor to systemic racism during her failed 2020 presidential campaign. But Harris sang a different tune about cash bail when she served as San Francisco district attorney in 2004. Back then, Harris touted cash bail as an invaluable tool to reduce violent crime in her city and pledged to increase rates to dissuade people from coming to San Francisco "to commit crimes because it’s cheaper to do it," the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Top Harris aides signaled Monday that Harris will adopt a "prosecutor for president" framework for her 2024 campaign, CNN reported. Former president Donald Trump’s campaign said Monday it will highlight Harris’s support of the Minnesota Freedom Fund to counter her tough-on-crime persona.
"Kamala Harris encouraged people to contribute to a bail fund to free violent rioters. One of those freed ended up being charged with murder," Trump super PAC MAGA Inc posted on X. "Kamala Harris bails out criminals, and Americans pay the price."
The Minnesota Freedom Fund was a small charity with a $230,000 budget before Harris and other prominent Democrats helped transform the fund into a $41 million powerhouse in 2020. Before Floyd’s death, the fund could only afford an average bail of $342. After receiving its financial windfall, its average bail ballooned to over $13,000, Fox9 reported, enabling it to free hardened criminals from jail.
Lewin, the fund's former interim executive director, said in August 2020 that a defendant's charges had no bearing on whether or not he would fork over donated funds to secure their release, a policy that had deadly consequences for Minnesotans.
"I often don’t even look at a charge when I bail someone out," Lewin said. "I will see it after I pay the bill because it is not the point. The point is the system we are fighting."
Career criminal George Howard shot and killed a man during a road rage incident in August 2021, just three weeks after the Minnesota Freedom Fund bailed him out of jail, the Free Beacon reported.
Later, in May 2022, repeat felon Shawn Michael Tillman shot and killed a passenger on a St. Paul light rail platform after the Minnesota Freedom Fund posted his bail the month prior on an unrelated indecent exposure charge.
The Harris campaign did not return a request for comment. [SOURCE]
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