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~ Featuring ~
Why Russia Is in a World of Geopolitical Hurt
Harold Hutchison
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Thursday Top News Executive Summary
Media Editors: DEBT CRISIS: “Washington posted a $208 billion budget deficit in May as a modest increase in revenues failed to make up for higher spending on the military and social welfare programs like Medicare, according to data released on Wednesday by the Treasury Department. The deficit was the highest ever for the month of May… Government spending rose to $440 billion, up 21% from May of 2018. Receipts increased to $232 billion, up 7% from the same month last year.” (Reuters)
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BORDER CRISIS: “The federal government has chosen a military base in Oklahoma as the location for a new temporary shelter to house migrant children and is considering a customs port in southern New Mexico as another option as existing shelters are overwhelmed. The Office of Refugee Resettlement said Tuesday it’s dealing with a dramatic spike in the number of children crossing the border without parents.” (NBC News)
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CONTEMPTIBLE DEMS: “The House Oversight and Reform Committee voted largely along party lines Wednesday afternoon to hold Attorney General William Barr and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross in contempt over their refusal to comply with lawmakers’ subpoena-backed demands for documents related to the inclusion of a citizenship question on the upcoming census,” reports National Review. The contempt resolution passed 24–15, with Representative Justin Amash of Michigan the only Republican to join Democrats in support.“
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COLLUSION IS ALIVE: "House Intelligence Committee Chair scumbag-Adam Schiff, D-Calif., sought Wednesday to keep the fire burning over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report with the latest in a series of hearings on the Russia controversy — as Republicans voiced frustration over what they described as a "grotesque spectacle” on Capitol Hill.“ (Fox News)
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TRUMP ON FOREIGN DIRT ON POLITICAL FOES "President Donald Trump may not alert the FBI if foreign governments offered damaging information against his 2020 rivals during the upcoming presidential race, he said, despite the deluge of investigations stemming from his campaign’s interactions with Russians during the 2016 campaign.” (ABC News)
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commie-SANDERS TOUTS SOCIALISM: “Sen. commie-Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Wednesday gave what was billed as a major speech outlining his sweeping vision for ‘democratic socialism’ that he said would require nothing short of ‘political revolution,’” reports the Washington Examiner.
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SOCIAL SECURITY: “Baby boomers are often blamed for putting a strain on Social Security, but a new study has found that the generation may not actually be responsible. A new report from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has found that the problems facing Social Security today are a result of the way the program was developed in the late 1930s.” (Fox Business)
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CULTURE OF DEATH: Just days after a troubling study about the drastic rise of deaths of despair nationwide, the Associated Press reports, “Maine legalized medically assisted suicide on Wednesday, becoming the eighth state to allow terminally ill people to end their lives with prescribed medication.”
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POLICY: “A new study by the Institute for Justice says federal asset forfeiture funds have little to no impact on solving crimes, suggesting police are more interested in the revenue it generates.” (Reason)
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HUMOR: Homophobic bigot changes his ways after stumbling across rainbow-colored corporate logo on Facebook (The Babylon Bee)
~The Patriot Post
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Deoband Attacks in San Bernardino, Sri Lanka
by Philip Haney.
Iran-Linked Terrorists Were Caught Stockpiling
Tons of Explosives and Authorities Covered It Up
by Jack Davis
{ westernjournal.com } ~ In the fall of 2015, shortly after Congress failed to pass two resolutions disapproving the Iran nuclear deal... British authorities found evidence that an Iran-backed militia group was stockpiling bombs in London. But, according to a new report in the Telegraph, not a word was said to the public or lawmakers about the matter. In a story that was published Sunday, the British newspaper questioned why there was such secrecy in light of the major development. “It raises questions about whether senior UK government figures chose not to reveal the plot in part because they were invested in keeping the Iran nuclear deal afloat,” the report read. Though the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was not designated a treaty by the U.S. State Department and therefore not subject to Senate confirmation, under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 Congress was given the authority to approve or disapprove of the deal, or to do nothing. Two resolutions to disapprove the deal — one in the House and one in the Senate — failed during the 60-day review period mandated by that act. According to the outlet, a tip from a “foreign intelligence agency” prompted Britain’s MI5 and the Metropolitan Police to raid four Hezbollah-associated locations in north London that fall — months after British lawmakers threw support behind the nuclear deal. The raids discovered thousands of disposable ice packs filled with ammonium nitrate, the same chemical used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Overall, more than 6,000 pounds of the substance was found and one man was arrested, the Telegraph reported... https://www.westernjournal.com/iran-linked-terrorists-caught-stockpiling-tons-explosives-authorities-covered/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=conservativevideos&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=libertyalliance .
Fear of a blue Texas: New GOP group
to spend millions registering Republicans
by David M. Drucker.
Israel scrambles jets as drone from Lebanon
enters Israeli airspace, turns back
by Judah Air Gross
{ timesofisrael.com } ~ A small drone penetrated Israeli airspace from Lebanon on Wednesday afternoon, the army said, prompting the air force to scramble fighter jets... According to the Israel Defense Forces, the aircraft quickly returned to Lebanese territory.“Moments ago, IDF troops spotted a drone from Lebanese territory that entered the airspace of the State of Israel and then returned to Lebanese territory. The drone was tracked by the troops,” the army said in a statement. The incident came hours after Israel reportedly targeted sites in Syria controlled by the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist group. The Iranian ally Hezbollah maintains a significant presence in southern Lebanon, despite a United Nations resolution meant to keep it out of the area. According to Syrian and Lebanese reports, the target of the predawn strike by Israel was infrastructure set up by Hezbollah in the area of Tel al-Harra in recent months, following Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s conquering of the area last summer. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-drone-from-lebanon-enters-israeli-airspace-turns-back/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2019-06-12&utm_medium=email .
Linda Sarour & CAIR’s Disingenuous
Campaign Against US Army War College
by Meira Svirsky
{ clarionproject.org } ~ Linda Sarsour and her platform MPower Change has joined the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in an hysterical campaign to get Islamic scholar Raymond Ibrahim disinvited... from a speaking engagement at the US Army War College. Sarsour, one of the founders and organizers of the Women’s March is an apologist for sharia law. CAIR, a Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamist organization, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror funding case in American history. Ibrahim is scheduled to lecture at the college on his book Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. As Ibrahim notes, “The reason CAIR cites to disinvite me is that ‘Raymond Ibrahim’s book … advances a simplistic, inaccurate and often prejudicial view of the long history of Muslim-West relations which we find deeply troubling.’“Yet although my book is 352 pages, and covers nearly fourteen centuries, certain epochs in great detail, not once does CAIR highlight a certain passage or excerpt in its lengthy complaints to support its accusation that the book “is based on poor research.” Sarsour and CAIR choose to present Ibrahim as a “well-known Islamophobe.” Sarsour’s organization also manages to connect Ibrahim, who is an Coptic Christian of Egyptian descent, to the white nationalist movement, saying, “In a time of rising white nationalism, Islamophobia, and violence, this invitation endorses and fosters anti-Muslim hate within the military and beyond.” Ibrahim, who appears in Clarion Project’s latest film Faithkeepers, has a reputation of being an outstanding historian....
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Why Russia Is in a World of Geopolitical Hurt
Harold Hutchison: The near-collision between a Russian Navy Udaloy-class destroyer and the United States Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG 62) has generated a lot of media coverage. It should have — this was an incident where a lot of sailors on both ships could have been killed. So, in light of this, how much should we worry about Russia?
This is not an idle question, given some very real issues that have cropped up with NATO’s military readiness — which is why Canada and Germany were called out last year by President Donald Trump. Canada required a bailout from Chile due to a lack of underway replenishment vessels. Germany’s force of Tornados was grounded thanks to bad biofuel. This sort of stuff tends to make discouraging bad Russian behavior even harder.
You may have heard by now that Russia isn’t exactly friendly to the United States. Russia also has a lot of nukes. That said, this is a country that really has only two major export commodities upon which it can rely. One is weapons systems, and the other is oil and gas. The latter, can be more easily affected by American policy.
Hitting Russia’s oil and gas profitability has been done before. In Peter Schweizer’s book Victory and from a Twitter thread by historian Larry Schweikart, who recently released a biography of Ronald Reagan, we learn that President Reagan worked with the Saudis to cause oil prices to drop, and thus cripple the Soviet Union’s economy in the 1980s as part of a comprehensive strategy. Well, Trump is doing the same thing with American natural-gas exports that Reagan did via deals with the Saudis.
When we discussed why Russia obtained geopolticial kompromat over Germany, natural gas was a big part of it. With relatively high gas prices, Russia can not only rake in a lot of hard currency via exports to Europe, it also gains leverage on policy — simply by cutting off the gas.
This is why Trump was celebrating natural-gas exports not so long ago. Think about this: By exporting natural gas to Europe (or around the world), the price is going to drop. Now, Vladimir Putin can no longer guarantee that Russia is going to supply that whole natural-gas pie. Poland can instead buy its gas from America.
This also costs Putin leverage. Earlier, he could just cut off sales and cudgel European countries into submission. Now, since they can buy gas from America, these European nations are less vulnerable to Russia messing with their energy supply. Oh, and Russia’s lower earnings from gas exports will hurt its efforts to upgrade its military with things like the Armata armored fighting vehicle and fifth-generation fighters.
So Russia now has to play catch-up in terms of weapons technology (the United States has operational squadrons of F-35s), build up numbers (if you think our Navy has declined, look at Russia’s), and it has a much smaller budget to do so. The big reason is Donald Trump’s work at promoting American energy — not just for our use, but for the rest of the world. That is a big reason why Russia is in a world of geopolitical hurt. ~The Patriot Post
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