Some serious breaches of journalistic ethics here, by the reporter and the NYT and Buzzfeed. All were aware of the conflict, yet they never informed the public or took her off the story. Ben Smith knows this,but he’s in damage control mode, for obvious reasons.
“Questions remain over whether BuzzFeed News acted ethically with a former employee, Ali Watkins, who had a romantic relationship with an indicted former security director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Watkins told her BuzzFeed editors about her relationship with the individual, James Wolfe, who the Department of Justice has charged with lying to investigators during a leak probe, according to The New York Times, where Watkins now works as a national security reporter.
BuzzFeed Editor-In-Chief Ben Smith said he would “not comment at all on a reporter’s sources in the middle of an unjustifiable leak hunt” when The Daily Caller News Foundation asked about the extent the organization knew about Watkins’ behavior to corroborate The Times’ reporting.
“I am baffled that the FBI and Justice Department are going to these dangerous lengths over a story that points to public court documents that describe Russian spies approaching a Trump adviser, who himself is quoted confirming his role in the episode. I’d like to know why that should be secret,” Smith added.
Later, a BuzzFeed spokesman told TheDCNF that the company does not dispute The Times’ reporting on Wolfe’s indictment, meaning that at least some BuzzFeed editors were aware of Watkins’ relationship with the Senate Intelligence aide.
It was never disclosed in any of the pieces Watkins wrote for BuzzFeed that she had a conflict of interest with an individual that provided her with information. If her editors knew about this relationship, it remains unclear why they did not make this known to readers or prohibit her from covering the Senate Intelligence committee. “
“Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was the primary target of a Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSIC) staffer indicted for lying about his contacts with reporters, according to an indictment released on Thursday.
James Wolfe, the former director of security for the SSIC panel, was in contact with at least three reporters at around the time they published articles about Page, an energy consultant who is a central player in the investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
Wolfe, 57, is charged with lying to the FBI during a Dec. 15, 2017 interview about whether he knew the journalists and had contact with them on certain dates. In one case, Wolfe denied knowing a reporter with whom he had been in a romantic relationship for four years. He is also charged with lying about giving that reporter, Ali Watkins, information about Page.”
I say do it. It’s way past time to decriminalize it and stop putting certain groups of young men in prison for small amounts and saddling them with a lifetime criminal record they’ll never recover from. It’s one of the few topics I agree with liberals and libertarians on. Not for all drugs mind you, just marijuana.
“.President Trump said he likely will support a congressional effort to end the federal ban on marijuana, a major step that would reshape the pot industry and end the threat of a Justice Department crackdown.
Trump’s remarks put him sharply at odds with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions on the issue. The bill in question, pushed by a bipartisan coalition, would allow states to go forward with legalization unencumbered by threats of federal prosecution. Sessions, by contrast, has ramped up those threats and has also lobbied Congress to reduce current protections for medical marijuana.
Trump made his comments to a gaggle of reporters Friday morning just before he boarded a helicopter on his way to the G-7 summit in Canada. His remarks came the day after the bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed their measure.
One of the lead sponsors is Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who is aligned with Trump on several issues but recently has tangled with the administration over the Justice Department’s threats to restart prosecutions in states that have legalized marijuana.
“I support Sen. Gardner,” Trump said when asked about the bill. “I know exactly what he’s doing. We’re looking at it. But I probably will end up supporting that, yes.”
The legislative proposal, which is also championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), would reshape the legal landscape for marijuana if it becomes law.”
“Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.
A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.” Programs to boost diversity in STEM pour forth from its coffers in wild abundance. The NSF jump-started the implicit-bias industry in the 1990s by underwriting the development of the implicit association test (IAT). (The IAT purports to reveal a subject’s unconscious biases by measuring the speed with which he associates minority faces with positive or negative words; see “Are We All Unconscious Racists?,” Autumn 2017.) Since then, the NSF has continued to dump millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism. In July 2017, it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions to develop a “bias-awareness intervention tool.” Another $2 million that same month went to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University to “remediate microaggressions and implicit biases” in engineering classrooms.
The tortuously named “Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science” (INCLUDES) bankrolls “fundamental research in the science of broadening participation.” There is no such “science,” just an enormous expenditure of resources that ducks the fundamental problems of basic skills and attitudes toward academic achievement. A typical INCLUDES grant from October 2017 directs $300,000 toward increasing Native American math involvement by incorporating “indigenous knowledge systems” into Navajo Nation Math Circles.
The INCLUDES initiative has already generated its own parasitic endeavor, Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER). The purpose of EAGER funding is to evaluate INCLUDES grants and to pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research. The ultimate goal of such programs is to change the culture of STEM so that “inclusion and equity” are at its very core.
Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on “diversity.” Those “un-diverse” scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses. Now that academic victimology has established a beachhead at the agency, however, it remains to be seen whether the pace of such breakthroughs will continue. The NSF is conducting a half-million-dollar study of “intersectionality” in the STEM fields. “Intersectionality” refers to the increased oppression allegedly experienced by individuals who can check off several categories of victimhood—being female, black, and trans, say. The NSF study’s theory is that such intersectionality lies behind the lack of diversity in STEM. Two sociologists are polling more than 10,000 scientists and engineers in nine professional organizations about the “social and cultural variables” that produce “disadvantage and marginalization” in STEM workplaces.”
“MacDonald surveys the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and accrediting organizations such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and finds the quota police alive and well within them.
The NSF, for instance, “dumps millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism,” a pseudo-scientific effort to explain lack of proportionate numbers of women and certain minorities in STEM fields on the grounds of racism and sexism. It has other programs that “pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research.” Such programs aim to set “inclusion and equity” at “the very core” of STEM science.
The NIH puts similar burdens on the field. Its training grants for postdoctoral education for physicians are threatened with funding cuts if the programs don’t support “a sufficient number of ‘underrepresented minorities.’” It also wants to see proportionate representation in the sample of medical subjects, so that (in MacDonald’s example) the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota must reach out well beyond its surroundings to draw in different identities, a costly and time-consuming practice.
Accreditors play their part by criticizing academic departments if they don’t have enough underrepresented groups. They don’t bother, however, to consider the number of available job candidates in those groups. MacDonald doesn’t mention this, but the percentage of doctorates in STEM fields granted to African Americans each year is under four percent. The applicant pool isn’t nearly large enough for departments to reach proportionality in the demographic make-up of the professors (using the population of the surrounding geographic area as a base measure).
MacDonald summarizes the problem perfectly: The use of a school’s immediate surroundings as a demographic benchmark for its faculty is a significant escalation of the war between the diversicrats and academic standards.
Escalation is the right word. It’s as if the official bodies that monitor scientific research are searching for mechanisms that will ramp up the pressure on individuals and institutions to include underrepresented minorities in their work in one way or another.
These tactics are backed by funders who explicitly set aside money for “gender- and race-exclusive science training.” University departments and schools, too, are creating their own diversity enforcers.” Schools are adjusting the way they teach and evaluate minority students and job candidates, for instance, developing “culturally sensitive pedagogies” that downplay knowledge and skills and upgrade, in the words of one program, awareness of the “racialized and gendered construct of scientific brilliance.””
“The former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer indicted for lying to the FBI about his leaks to the media was charged in 2004 with domestic violence, court documents show.
James A. Wolfe, 57, was charged on June 25, 2004 in a Maryland domestic violence case involving his wife. Maryland court records also show that Wolfe is listed in a June 2003 case that resulted in a protective order being placed against him.
Wolfe was also a defendant in a 2006 civil claim from Tower Federal Credit Union. Maryland court documents show list the U.S. Senate Hart office building as Wolfe’s mailing address.
The 29-year Senate veteran’s criminal history raises numerous questions about his Senate work, which allowed him access to Top Secret information.
A spokesperson for the Senate Intelligence panel acknowledged that Wolfe was charged in the case but said that the FBI likely investigated the allegations.”
—————————–
“Johnson says that he recorded his conversations with Wolfe because he had a suspicion that the staffer was leaking information to the media.
“I purposely recorded the phone call because I knew that Wolfe and the commitee were leaking and I knew that I would catch them in a leak,” Johnson told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
In the phone conversation, audio of which Johnson gave TheDCNF, Johnson battles with Wolfe over a committee request for documents related to Peter Smith, a longtime GOP operative who attempted to track down Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails during the campaign.
Smith, who committed suicide last year, worked with Johnson to find the emails, which he believed were on the so-called Dark Web.
Johnson, who has denied any wrongdoing in his relationship with Smith, said that he believed that Wolfe and the committee was setting him up for a “perjury trap.””
“The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest evangelical denomination, is headed for a showdown over its treatment of women that could not only have far-reaching ramifications for the church but also influence the broader secular #MeToo movement.
At its annual meeting next week in Dallas, delegates called “messengers” will decide whether to approve a resolution acknowledging that, throughout the church’s history, male leaders and members of the church “wronged women, abused women, silenced women, objectified women.”
“The #MeToo moment has come to American evangelicals,” Albert Mohler, president of the flagship Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote last month. “And I am called to deal with it as a Christian, as a minister of the Gospel, as a seminary and college president, and as a public leader.”
The convention is meeting in the wake of several widely publicized scandals in which prominent Southern Baptist leaders have been accused of or have admitted inappropriate behavior toward women.
“Many women have experienced horrific abuses within the power structures of our Christian world,” Beth Moore, a prominent evangelical teacher in Houston, wrote in an open letter last month.”
Back in the Dark Ages when I trained as a journalist, I went to extraordinary lengths to avoid conflict of interest–and told my editor when I thought I had crossed a line.
Perhaps this is why we need religious people in the media–so they, at least, will feel guilty when they bend ethical rules.
Chuck Colson pointed out maybe ten years ago that Harvard Business School did not have an ethics course. If people are not raised in a religious tradition, perhaps they should be obligated to take an ethics class or two–maybe they simply don’t know lying is wrong?
Certainly they’re not seeing unethical behavior being censured or punished in the public square. 😦
There are a dozen or so pundits whose views I’m interested in reading across a range of subjects. Charles Krauthammer was the one pundit whose views I needed to read. It’s strange to think of any pundit as indispensable, but Krauthammer was for me. …
In my view, Krauthammer was in a league of his own when it came to commentary. His enforced absence has left a huge void — one that we now know will not be filled.
_____________________________
Though technically still illegal, I live within two blocks of four marijuana dispensaries. They openly sell various forms of marijuana and hash with a sandwich board in the street listing daily specials. Prohibition has little support even amongst law enforcement and when one law is so disrespected its time to change it before law in general becomes disrespected.
A philosophy professor I knew spent several years teaching business ethics to MBAs. It was a depressing time which reinforces his pessimism on humanity. The vast majority felt free market economics meant there were no rules. They heard of Wealth of Nations but not its companion piece Theory of Moral Sentiments.
As Roscuro mentioned earlier, the Conservatives won the Ontario election in a far more convincing fashion than I predicted. Liberals either stayed home or mostly moved to right instead of voting for the left wing NDP.
The Liberal implosion was so bad that for the first time this century in both provincial or federal elections, the Liberals were in third place in my district. The NDP won in my district with 66%, the Conservatives 17% and Liberals 11%. The NDP is so secure here that they don’t bother to campaign ….few signs, no pamphlets, no door knocking ….its hard to tell there ever is an election here. And this isn’t a gerrymandered district, the borders are a highway and three natural barriers.
It’s quite the bubble to live here. My daughter and her friends think of a conservative voter as a strange alien. Even a Liberal is though of as too conservative.
“Meet Virginia Hall, One Of The Unsung Heroes Of D-Day
Hall had a rather unorthodox origin for a spy. She was a socialite from Baltimore, who had a penchant for writing, and the means to live any life she wanted.”
“A total of 39 law enforcement agencies conducted a massive sex-trafficking sting operation which concluded this week and resulted in hundreds of arrests and hundreds of children rescued.
WSB-TV reports:
Operation Safe Summer was a collaborative effort between the FBI’s Atlanta field office and 38 law enforcement agencies in six metro counties. …
The sting ended with nearly 160 children rescued, including one as young as 3 years old, and nearly 150 arrests, convictions or sentences, officials said.”
I’m surprised it didn’t happen last election. Why they let an Indie run on their ticket was always a mystery. Perhaps to supply the illusion that they had a choice besides Hillary. All this will do is further alienate his supporters. Good for R’s, bad for D’s.
“The Democratic National Committee is looking ahead to unseating President Trump in 2020 but their latest rule change may actually narrow the field of contenders.
A new rule, adopted at a DNC meeting in Providence, R.I. on Friday, requires all candidates for the party’s nomination to “run and serve” as Democrats, Yahoo News reported.”
Maybe it will force Bernie to run as a true independent. Probably bad for both parties.
AJ , you post a lot on the Mueller investigation and related matters but I’m curious how the G7 mtg was perceived, particularly the unity showed by the allies and Trump’s insistence that Russia be readmitted.
The picture of Trump sitting down with his arms folded looking like petulant child being lectured by Merkel while the others watch is destined to be a classic
That trump pic came up at the dog park last night (I hadn’t seen it yet). One of the guys vowed to volunteer for Bernie’s campaign should he run again. How old is Bernie now, though?
“President Trump’s chief economic adviser accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of stabbing the U.S. and fellow G-7 negotiators in the back with “amateurish” verbal attacks during a domestic press conference.
Larry Kudlow said Mr. Trump negotiated in good faith with fellow global powers in Quebec.
But the president also felt he couldn’t be pushed around by the Canadian leader on the cusp of a major summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
“He really kind of stabbed us in the back,” Mr. Kudlow told CNN’s State of the Union. “He did a great disservice to the whole G-7.”
Mr. Trudeau, along with other leaders of the G-7, have criticized Mr. Trump’s proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum to stop the allies from taking “advantage” of the U.S.
After Mr. Trump’s departure from the G-7, Mr. Trudeau held a press conference Saturday stating that all of the member nations, including the U.S., had signed a communique pledging to lower tariffs and other trade barriers.”
—————————-
“”He really kinda stabbed us in the back,” top US economic advisor Larry Kudlow said of Trudeau on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“He did a great disservice to the whole G7.”
“We went through it. We agreed. We compromised on the communique. We joined the communique in good faith,” Kudlow said.
US trade advisor Peter Navarro, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” reinforced that message.
“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door,” he said.
“That’s what bad-faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference. That’s what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did.””
And speaking of the boy blunder, reality continues to instruct him in the error of his ways.
” “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.”
———————-
“Canada was busy welcoming leaders from around the world to the G-7 summit this weekend and, aside from the United States president, everyone seemed to receive the standard, polite greeting from their Canadian hosts. But there are some other foreigners who aren’t getting such a warm reception anymore. Those would be the illegal aliens pouring over the border into the Great White North now that U.S. immigration forces have been cracking down.
Despite Canada’s legendary niceness and previous offer to take in the huddled masses fleeing from President Trump, that attitude is quickly changing. This week they put the word out that they simply can’t keep taking people in and deportations from Canada are on the rise. ”
———————–
“For all the lecturing that Justin Trudeau and European leaders regularly deliver to the White House, Canada’s actions don’t seem to match the criticism they’re dishing out. The “education” that Canadian officials are offering sounds awfully similar to U.S. immigration policy, though perhaps phrased in more polite terms. Liberal Canadian MP Randy Boissonnault, visiting Florida to get the word out, said the following:
“People seem to think that if they cross the border there’s this land of milk and honey on the other side,” Boissonnault said from the Canadian consulate in Miami on Thursday. “What we want is for people to have the right information. We want them to do the right thing for their families.”
Turns out Canada really isn’t the “land of milk and honey” for illegal aliens at all. In just the month of August last year, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police nabbed over 5,500 people (mostly Haitians) crossing into Quebec, primarily from upstate New York. As we’ve discussed here previously, the Canadians made a big show of welcoming them, setting up trailers and tents where the incoming migrants were processed. But here’s the part they didn’t tell you. On average, only 8% of their applications were approved. The rest were deported back to Haiti or are in the process of being removed. So out of those 5,500 who crossed the border last August, more than 5,000 have been deported.
That would be a month’s work that even ICE would envy.”
“Mon Dieu! The globalists among us are all in a snit that President Trump attended the G7 Summit in Quebec and he didn’t play nice. Trump made himself perfectly clear before he left Washington Friday that he intends to make America’s trade deals great again. He will not allow other countries to impose higher tariffs on the U.S. without responding in kind. Why is this a surprise?
When Trump arrived in Quebec, he started off cordially enough with the others in the G7, our closest allies. There were handshakes and bon mots all around. Then as the meetings took place, things got a bit testy. It seems that Trump stood his ground and the other six leaders were none too pleased. He even told Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the host, that foreign automobile imports would be penalized. This president is different than previous ones who just wanted to go along to get along. Trump fancies himself a master dealmaker and a disrupter.”
————–
“Trump used the Singapore Summit as a convenient excuse to leave Quebec early. He avoided having to sit through lectures by our European betters on the topic of climate change as he left late Saturday morning. It is reported that he did agree to sign off on the communique, the joint statement with the European leaders and Canada at the conclusion of the summit. After Trump left, though, Trudeau held a press conference and trashed Trump.
Earlier Saturday, Trudeau criticized Trump’s recent decision to place tariffs on steel and aluminum from the European Union, Canada and Mexico, saying it was “insulting” that Trump cited U.S. national security as his reason for doing so.
“Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around,” Trudeau said at his own, separate news conference at the meeting’s end.
“I highlighted directly to the president that Canadians did not take it lightly that the United States has moved forward with significant tariffs on our steel and aluminum industry,” Trudeau said. “Particularly, [they] did not take lightly that it’s for a national security reason that for Canadians . . . who stood shoulder to shoulder with American soldiers in far off lands in conflicts from the First World War onward, it’s kind of insulting.”
Guess what happened next. That’s right. Trump took to Twitter and said, oh, by the way, the U.S. representatives won’t be signing off on that communique after all. Earlier Trump warned that he’d be willing to see America to go it alone if needed. ”
—————————
The national economy of the US is 20T GDP. The rest of the attendees combined? 19T GDP.
They can complain all they like, it’s irrelevant…….
“President Trump used a press conference at the G7 summit in Canada to double down on his tough stance on trade, telling reporters that the United States is like “the piggy bank that everybody is robbing” but promising that that is ending under his leadership.”
———————
“Trump said he didn’t blame the other leaders for what he saw as an unbalanced trade relationship which hurts the U.S.
“People can’t charge us 270 percent and we charge them nothing, that doesn’t work anymore,” he said.
He said he believes other countries are now more committed to a fairer trade relationship.
“I don’t blame them, I blame our leaders,” he said. “In fact, I congratulate leaders of others for so crazily being able to make those trade deals that were so good for their country and bad for the United States.”
But he promised an end to the situation, and even warned of penalties for countries that do not remove trade barriers. He also said that the North American Free Trade Agreement could either be renegotiated, split up into separate trade deals, or the U.S. could pull out entirely.
“We are like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,” he said. “And that ends.”
He warned that the U.S. will take any action necessary to defend Americans from unfair trade practices.”
The picture has been photoshoped to have Trump sitting in a high chair.
AJ, even in the original its humorous given Merkel’s stereotype reputation as the stern school marm of the G7. If it was any other world leader it would not have gone viral but Merkel’s presence completes the picture. It makes fun of Merkel as much as It does Trump.
You have to be a special guide of insecure snowflake if a blase communique upsets you. I highly doubt it will have any impact on the mtg with Kim. The Trump administration is more easily offended than any leftist. They need to relax …..you can’t bully everyone to agree with you its not like the Republican Congress.
The Trump administration misunderstands how trade surplus and deficits work. It has nothing to do with the US treasury or any bank. It’s simply a value of the goods exchanged. And even then it’s still misleading. Pass through goods are counted 2x. That is a Chinese washing machine unloaded in Vancouver and transported to Seattle counts as both a Canadian and Chinese good.
For that matter, Ricky’s stats are also misleading since it doesn’t count subsidies as a trade barrier. Fighting over trade between allied nations over trade is dumb. Unless you have an economic or military plan to promote, you should let comparative advantage and individual corporations sort it out. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a deficit.
It’s true the US has a large domestic market but that doesn’t mean it’s economy can exist within a vacuum. It does need things other nations can provide…..and it may need to sell its surplus elsewhere. Limiting yourself to an internal market has costs and creates inefficiencies. For example Canadian aluminum is far cheaper and probably better, to place a tariffs on it will protect smaller more expensive US firms. Unless there’s a compelling reason to do it, why burden the economy with extra costs.
Now I’m not a total free trader. Canada has a supply managed dairy and egg system which provides stable pricing to producers and consumers. It also maintains health standards and provides a solid income to family farms. However the price of dairy products in Canada is higher. In my opinion its worth it. Any modification or regulation that maintains health, safety or stability should not be treated similar to a tariff.
“Fighting over trade between allied nations over trade is dumb.”
You know who always says that?
The people benefiting most from the current status quo, which is everyone but US, that’s who. The US workers on the receiving end of said economic shaft would disagree of course.
I failed to see how it’s pathetic or low. As I said, its funny only in the context of Merkel’s relation to other world leaders. There’s another picture floating around in which Merkel is rolling her eyes while Putin is talking.
The snowflake comment is directed towards Kudlow. Trudeau issues a simple press release and the admin is all upset…..
The refugee flow across the border. See you can be nice and generous and still maintain rule of law. You don’t need to separate parents ftom their children and throw kids in mass detention centers. Give them food, shelter and health care but at the end of the day still enforce your country’s rules…..perhaps ICE can learn from us.
I fail to see how the US worker is bring shafted by international trade. Stuff is cheaper than ever. Fresh fruit and vegetables available 12 months a year at affordable price.
In reality, the US worker is bring shafted by the US corporate and political class. Blaming foreigners is a distraction, the solution is at home. Raise the min wage, empower unions, maintain strict health and safety standards, universal heslth care etc.
No thoughts on your favorite paper and their reporter getting caught with/being the leaker? You know, the leaks you and they blamed Trump for repeatedly? No comment on that?
“Government documents were leaked to the press. A reporter’s communications were seized by the government without her knowing about it. And a former Senate aide was charged with “lying repeatedly to investigators about his contacts with three reporters.”
It sounds like the makings of the next Hollywood production about the news media’s war against President Trump. There’s only one problem. The reporter wasn’t just involved with her stories. She was involved for three years with the man the feds charged.”
———–
“Wolfe and Times reporter Ali Watkins “exchanged tens of thousands of electronic communications, often including daily texts and phone calls,” according to The Washington Post.
The Post described it this way: “How a reporter’s romance with her source muddies the FBI’s seizure of her records.”
“President Trump’s administration excels at muddying the water, and the arrest of a former Senate aide, following an inquiry in which federal agents seized records from a New York Times reporter, might be its best work yet,” wrote Callum Borchers in The Post.
Most outlets weren’t that obvious. Especially The Times. Here are just a few of its headline choices: “Press Groups Criticize the Seizing of a Times Reporter’s Records.” Or “Times Says Justice Seized Reporter’s Email, Phone Records.” Perhaps, even, “Former U.S. Senate Staffer Charged With Lying to FBI Over Contacts With Media.”
Notice the difference? The Times practices the CYA strategy known as “hide in plain sight.” It addresses the issue, but not until several paragraphs into the story, where only true news junkies read. A couple of those stories were written by The Associated Press and Reuters. In the Times version, we don’t learn until the seventh paragraph that “She and Mr. Wolfe had been in a three-year relationship.””
As HRW noted, there were many comic versions of the G7 photo posted. However, these three different photos from completely different perspectives give a real feel for what was going on. It appears they were drafting (probably the closing statement) and Merkel did seem to be taking the lead.
May, Macron and Trudeau are green. Merkel will be leading the West for a while, but the youngsters have promise. The choices made by the remaining G6 in dealing with Russia and China while the US is AWOL are going to be interesting.
Trump’s insistence on letting Russia back in the G8 is strange. They were kicked out after annexing the Crimea. They still have the Crimea and support rebels in eastern Ukraine so why let them back in? It’s as if Trump wants to support Russia over his NATO allies…..I wonder how much intelligence cooperation is still going on at NATO HQ.
China is trying to get the EU and other nations to work together to combat Trump’s tariff policies. This is getting fun….a supposed communist nation leading the defense of free markets.
Watched Larry Kudlow on CNN. What a drama queen. I can hardly take the Trump admin seriously…..if Canada offends them this much, they can’t criticise social justice warriors and political correctness as snowflakes as Kudlow was melting on the screen. Kim was probably watching in Singapore and thought Trump can’t this easy.
May is too occupies by Brexit to takeover from Merkel. Trudeau is a lightweight more form than substance and I don’t have much confidence in Macron. The President of the EU is Donald Tusk a former Polish president who isnt liked by the current Polish govt but has the confidence of the rest of the EU. He’s a solid elder statesmen.
“hwesseli | June 10, 2018 at 2:04 pm
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a deficit.”
and again
“hwesseli | June 10, 2018 at 2:44 pm
Raise the min wage, empower unions, maintain strict health and safety standards, universal heslth care etc.”
My answer to the first quote, 20 Trillion National Debt
My answer to the second quote,
“It took us 30 years to save $200,000 in an annuity and over 5 years we will lose 50% of buying power because of the raise in minimum wages. ($10 an hour to $15 an hour) ”
Our union was forced upon us. They voted to support killing babies.
Our State has plenty of “strict health and safety standards…”
“universal health care etc.” British National Health care
Wandering Views 
Some serious breaches of journalistic ethics here, by the reporter and the NYT and Buzzfeed. All were aware of the conflict, yet they never informed the public or took her off the story. Ben Smith knows this,but he’s in damage control mode, for obvious reasons.
http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/08/exclusive-buzzfeed-confirms-it-knew-about-ali-watkins-relationship-with-indicted-senate-official/
“Questions remain over whether BuzzFeed News acted ethically with a former employee, Ali Watkins, who had a romantic relationship with an indicted former security director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Watkins told her BuzzFeed editors about her relationship with the individual, James Wolfe, who the Department of Justice has charged with lying to investigators during a leak probe, according to The New York Times, where Watkins now works as a national security reporter.
BuzzFeed Editor-In-Chief Ben Smith said he would “not comment at all on a reporter’s sources in the middle of an unjustifiable leak hunt” when The Daily Caller News Foundation asked about the extent the organization knew about Watkins’ behavior to corroborate The Times’ reporting.
“I am baffled that the FBI and Justice Department are going to these dangerous lengths over a story that points to public court documents that describe Russian spies approaching a Trump adviser, who himself is quoted confirming his role in the episode. I’d like to know why that should be secret,” Smith added.
Later, a BuzzFeed spokesman told TheDCNF that the company does not dispute The Times’ reporting on Wolfe’s indictment, meaning that at least some BuzzFeed editors were aware of Watkins’ relationship with the Senate Intelligence aide.
It was never disclosed in any of the pieces Watkins wrote for BuzzFeed that she had a conflict of interest with an individual that provided her with information. If her editors knew about this relationship, it remains unclear why they did not make this known to readers or prohibit her from covering the Senate Intelligence committee. “
LikeLike
And we now know the leaker was targeting the Trump campaign.
http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/08/senate-leak-carter-page/
“Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was the primary target of a Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSIC) staffer indicted for lying about his contacts with reporters, according to an indictment released on Thursday.
James Wolfe, the former director of security for the SSIC panel, was in contact with at least three reporters at around the time they published articles about Page, an energy consultant who is a central player in the investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
Wolfe, 57, is charged with lying to the FBI during a Dec. 15, 2017 interview about whether he knew the journalists and had contact with them on certain dates. In one case, Wolfe denied knowing a reporter with whom he had been in a romantic relationship for four years. He is also charged with lying about giving that reporter, Ali Watkins, information about Page.”
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I say do it. It’s way past time to decriminalize it and stop putting certain groups of young men in prison for small amounts and saddling them with a lifetime criminal record they’ll never recover from. It’s one of the few topics I agree with liberals and libertarians on. Not for all drugs mind you, just marijuana.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-marijuana-20180608-story.html
“.President Trump said he likely will support a congressional effort to end the federal ban on marijuana, a major step that would reshape the pot industry and end the threat of a Justice Department crackdown.
Trump’s remarks put him sharply at odds with Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions on the issue. The bill in question, pushed by a bipartisan coalition, would allow states to go forward with legalization unencumbered by threats of federal prosecution. Sessions, by contrast, has ramped up those threats and has also lobbied Congress to reduce current protections for medical marijuana.
Trump made his comments to a gaggle of reporters Friday morning just before he boarded a helicopter on his way to the G-7 summit in Canada. His remarks came the day after the bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed their measure.
One of the lead sponsors is Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who is aligned with Trump on several issues but recently has tangled with the administration over the Justice Department’s threats to restart prosecutions in states that have legalized marijuana.
“I support Sen. Gardner,” Trump said when asked about the bill. “I know exactly what he’s doing. We’re looking at it. But I probably will end up supporting that, yes.”
The legislative proposal, which is also championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), would reshape the legal landscape for marijuana if it becomes law.”
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How political correctness is harming science.
Alternate title: The law of unintended consequences strikes again.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-identity-politics-harming-sciences-15826.html
“Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness.
A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), a federal agency that funds university research, is consumed by diversity ideology. Progress in science, it argues, requires a “diverse STEM workforce.” Programs to boost diversity in STEM pour forth from its coffers in wild abundance. The NSF jump-started the implicit-bias industry in the 1990s by underwriting the development of the implicit association test (IAT). (The IAT purports to reveal a subject’s unconscious biases by measuring the speed with which he associates minority faces with positive or negative words; see “Are We All Unconscious Racists?,” Autumn 2017.) Since then, the NSF has continued to dump millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism. In July 2017, it awarded $1 million to the University of New Hampshire and two other institutions to develop a “bias-awareness intervention tool.” Another $2 million that same month went to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University to “remediate microaggressions and implicit biases” in engineering classrooms.
The tortuously named “Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science” (INCLUDES) bankrolls “fundamental research in the science of broadening participation.” There is no such “science,” just an enormous expenditure of resources that ducks the fundamental problems of basic skills and attitudes toward academic achievement. A typical INCLUDES grant from October 2017 directs $300,000 toward increasing Native American math involvement by incorporating “indigenous knowledge systems” into Navajo Nation Math Circles.
The INCLUDES initiative has already generated its own parasitic endeavor, Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER). The purpose of EAGER funding is to evaluate INCLUDES grants and to pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research. The ultimate goal of such programs is to change the culture of STEM so that “inclusion and equity” are at its very core.
Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on “diversity.” Those “un-diverse” scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses. Now that academic victimology has established a beachhead at the agency, however, it remains to be seen whether the pace of such breakthroughs will continue. The NSF is conducting a half-million-dollar study of “intersectionality” in the STEM fields. “Intersectionality” refers to the increased oppression allegedly experienced by individuals who can check off several categories of victimhood—being female, black, and trans, say. The NSF study’s theory is that such intersectionality lies behind the lack of diversity in STEM. Two sociologists are polling more than 10,000 scientists and engineers in nine professional organizations about the “social and cultural variables” that produce “disadvantage and marginalization” in STEM workplaces.”
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More here….
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2018/05/30/how-threats-of-bias-are-corrupting-the-sciences/
“MacDonald surveys the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and accrediting organizations such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and finds the quota police alive and well within them.
The NSF, for instance, “dumps millions of dollars into implicit-bias activism,” a pseudo-scientific effort to explain lack of proportionate numbers of women and certain minorities in STEM fields on the grounds of racism and sexism. It has other programs that “pressure actual science grantees to incorporate diversity considerations into their research.” Such programs aim to set “inclusion and equity” at “the very core” of STEM science.
The NIH puts similar burdens on the field. Its training grants for postdoctoral education for physicians are threatened with funding cuts if the programs don’t support “a sufficient number of ‘underrepresented minorities.’” It also wants to see proportionate representation in the sample of medical subjects, so that (in MacDonald’s example) the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota must reach out well beyond its surroundings to draw in different identities, a costly and time-consuming practice.
Accreditors play their part by criticizing academic departments if they don’t have enough underrepresented groups. They don’t bother, however, to consider the number of available job candidates in those groups. MacDonald doesn’t mention this, but the percentage of doctorates in STEM fields granted to African Americans each year is under four percent. The applicant pool isn’t nearly large enough for departments to reach proportionality in the demographic make-up of the professors (using the population of the surrounding geographic area as a base measure).
MacDonald summarizes the problem perfectly: The use of a school’s immediate surroundings as a demographic benchmark for its faculty is a significant escalation of the war between the diversicrats and academic standards.
Escalation is the right word. It’s as if the official bodies that monitor scientific research are searching for mechanisms that will ramp up the pressure on individuals and institutions to include underrepresented minorities in their work in one way or another.
These tactics are backed by funders who explicitly set aside money for “gender- and race-exclusive science training.” University departments and schools, too, are creating their own diversity enforcers.” Schools are adjusting the way they teach and evaluate minority students and job candidates, for instance, developing “culturally sensitive pedagogies” that downplay knowledge and skills and upgrade, in the words of one program, awareness of the “racialized and gendered construct of scientific brilliance.””
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So how does a wife beater maintain his prestigious Senate job and his top security clearance after she gets a PFA?
http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/08/james-wolfe-domestic-violence/
“The former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer indicted for lying to the FBI about his leaks to the media was charged in 2004 with domestic violence, court documents show.
James A. Wolfe, 57, was charged on June 25, 2004 in a Maryland domestic violence case involving his wife. Maryland court records also show that Wolfe is listed in a June 2003 case that resulted in a protective order being placed against him.
Wolfe was also a defendant in a 2006 civil claim from Tower Federal Credit Union. Maryland court documents show list the U.S. Senate Hart office building as Wolfe’s mailing address.
The 29-year Senate veteran’s criminal history raises numerous questions about his Senate work, which allowed him access to Top Secret information.
A spokesperson for the Senate Intelligence panel acknowledged that Wolfe was charged in the case but said that the FBI likely investigated the allegations.”
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I guess the FBI dropped the ball. Again.
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An interesting tidbit at the bottom……
“Johnson says that he recorded his conversations with Wolfe because he had a suspicion that the staffer was leaking information to the media.
“I purposely recorded the phone call because I knew that Wolfe and the commitee were leaking and I knew that I would catch them in a leak,” Johnson told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
In the phone conversation, audio of which Johnson gave TheDCNF, Johnson battles with Wolfe over a committee request for documents related to Peter Smith, a longtime GOP operative who attempted to track down Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails during the campaign.
Smith, who committed suicide last year, worked with Johnson to find the emails, which he believed were on the so-called Dark Web.
Johnson, who has denied any wrongdoing in his relationship with Smith, said that he believed that Wolfe and the committee was setting him up for a “perjury trap.””
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#MeToo goes to church: Southern Baptists face a reckoning over treatment of women”
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/metoo-goes-church-southern-baptists-face-reckoning-over-treatment-women-n880216
“The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest evangelical denomination, is headed for a showdown over its treatment of women that could not only have far-reaching ramifications for the church but also influence the broader secular #MeToo movement.
At its annual meeting next week in Dallas, delegates called “messengers” will decide whether to approve a resolution acknowledging that, throughout the church’s history, male leaders and members of the church “wronged women, abused women, silenced women, objectified women.”
“The #MeToo moment has come to American evangelicals,” Albert Mohler, president of the flagship Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote last month. “And I am called to deal with it as a Christian, as a minister of the Gospel, as a seminary and college president, and as a public leader.”
The convention is meeting in the wake of several widely publicized scandals in which prominent Southern Baptist leaders have been accused of or have admitted inappropriate behavior toward women.
“Many women have experienced horrific abuses within the power structures of our Christian world,” Beth Moore, a prominent evangelical teacher in Houston, wrote in an open letter last month.”
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Back in the Dark Ages when I trained as a journalist, I went to extraordinary lengths to avoid conflict of interest–and told my editor when I thought I had crossed a line.
Perhaps this is why we need religious people in the media–so they, at least, will feel guilty when they bend ethical rules.
Chuck Colson pointed out maybe ten years ago that Harvard Business School did not have an ethics course. If people are not raised in a religious tradition, perhaps they should be obligated to take an ethics class or two–maybe they simply don’t know lying is wrong?
Certainly they’re not seeing unethical behavior being censured or punished in the public square. 😦
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A nice tribute to Krauthammer:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/the-indispensable-pundit.php
____________________________
There are a dozen or so pundits whose views I’m interested in reading across a range of subjects. Charles Krauthammer was the one pundit whose views I needed to read. It’s strange to think of any pundit as indispensable, but Krauthammer was for me. …
In my view, Krauthammer was in a league of his own when it came to commentary. His enforced absence has left a huge void — one that we now know will not be filled.
_____________________________
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Though technically still illegal, I live within two blocks of four marijuana dispensaries. They openly sell various forms of marijuana and hash with a sandwich board in the street listing daily specials. Prohibition has little support even amongst law enforcement and when one law is so disrespected its time to change it before law in general becomes disrespected.
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A philosophy professor I knew spent several years teaching business ethics to MBAs. It was a depressing time which reinforces his pessimism on humanity. The vast majority felt free market economics meant there were no rules. They heard of Wealth of Nations but not its companion piece Theory of Moral Sentiments.
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As Roscuro mentioned earlier, the Conservatives won the Ontario election in a far more convincing fashion than I predicted. Liberals either stayed home or mostly moved to right instead of voting for the left wing NDP.
The Liberal implosion was so bad that for the first time this century in both provincial or federal elections, the Liberals were in third place in my district. The NDP won in my district with 66%, the Conservatives 17% and Liberals 11%. The NDP is so secure here that they don’t bother to campaign ….few signs, no pamphlets, no door knocking ….its hard to tell there ever is an election here. And this isn’t a gerrymandered district, the borders are a highway and three natural barriers.
It’s quite the bubble to live here. My daughter and her friends think of a conservative voter as a strange alien. Even a Liberal is though of as too conservative.
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Michelle,
Thought you might like this.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/09/meet-virginia-hall-one-of-the-unsung-heroes-of-d-day/#disqus_thread
“Meet Virginia Hall, One Of The Unsung Heroes Of D-Day
Hall had a rather unorthodox origin for a spy. She was a socialite from Baltimore, who had a penchant for writing, and the means to live any life she wanted.”
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Here’s a detailed read with both sides of the argument.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/tony-mecia/reefer-madness
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Some good news. We need more of this.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/31651/atlanta-sex-trafficking-sting-results-hundreds-ryan-saavedra
“A total of 39 law enforcement agencies conducted a massive sex-trafficking sting operation which concluded this week and resulted in hundreds of arrests and hundreds of children rescued.
WSB-TV reports:
Operation Safe Summer was a collaborative effort between the FBI’s Atlanta field office and 38 law enforcement agencies in six metro counties. …
The sting ended with nearly 160 children rescued, including one as young as 3 years old, and nearly 150 arrests, convictions or sentences, officials said.”
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The Bernie Rule.
I’m surprised it didn’t happen last election. Why they let an Indie run on their ticket was always a mystery. Perhaps to supply the illusion that they had a choice besides Hillary. All this will do is further alienate his supporters. Good for R’s, bad for D’s.
So yeah, woo-hoo. 🙂
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2018/06/09/dnc-adopts-rule-change-that-requires-candidates-run-and-serve-as-democrats-only-bye-bye-bernie-642867
“The Democratic National Committee is looking ahead to unseating President Trump in 2020 but their latest rule change may actually narrow the field of contenders.
A new rule, adopted at a DNC meeting in Providence, R.I. on Friday, requires all candidates for the party’s nomination to “run and serve” as Democrats, Yahoo News reported.”
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Maybe it will force Bernie to run as a true independent. Probably bad for both parties.
AJ , you post a lot on the Mueller investigation and related matters but I’m curious how the G7 mtg was perceived, particularly the unity showed by the allies and Trump’s insistence that Russia be readmitted.
The picture of Trump sitting down with his arms folded looking like petulant child being lectured by Merkel while the others watch is destined to be a classic
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HRW, Ask and ye shall receive.
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Congratulations, HRW and Roscuro! You are the globaliest of the globalists.
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That trump pic came up at the dog park last night (I hadn’t seen it yet). One of the guys vowed to volunteer for Bernie’s campaign should he run again. How old is Bernie now, though?
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And I suppose I hadn’t seen the photo because I’m still in the State of Denial, of course.
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So is the other guy with the folded arms a petulant child too, or is it only when Trump does it?
Talk about being petulant children….. 🙄
Is that really the best you’ve got?
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Trudeau is being called amateurish, and a backstabber. .
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/10/larry-kudlow-calls-justin-trudeaus-verbal-attacks-/
“President Trump’s chief economic adviser accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of stabbing the U.S. and fellow G-7 negotiators in the back with “amateurish” verbal attacks during a domestic press conference.
Larry Kudlow said Mr. Trump negotiated in good faith with fellow global powers in Quebec.
But the president also felt he couldn’t be pushed around by the Canadian leader on the cusp of a major summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
“He really kind of stabbed us in the back,” Mr. Kudlow told CNN’s State of the Union. “He did a great disservice to the whole G-7.”
Mr. Trudeau, along with other leaders of the G-7, have criticized Mr. Trump’s proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum to stop the allies from taking “advantage” of the U.S.
After Mr. Trump’s departure from the G-7, Mr. Trudeau held a press conference Saturday stating that all of the member nations, including the U.S., had signed a communique pledging to lower tariffs and other trade barriers.”
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/allies-bid-paper-over-cracks-fractious-g7-summit-052604839.html
“”He really kinda stabbed us in the back,” top US economic advisor Larry Kudlow said of Trudeau on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“He did a great disservice to the whole G7.”
“We went through it. We agreed. We compromised on the communique. We joined the communique in good faith,” Kudlow said.
US trade advisor Peter Navarro, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” reinforced that message.
“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door,” he said.
“That’s what bad-faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference. That’s what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did.””
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And speaking of the boy blunder, reality continues to instruct him in the error of his ways.
” “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.”
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https://hotair.com/archives/2018/06/10/canada-illegal-aliens-need-stop-breaching-border/
“Canada was busy welcoming leaders from around the world to the G-7 summit this weekend and, aside from the United States president, everyone seemed to receive the standard, polite greeting from their Canadian hosts. But there are some other foreigners who aren’t getting such a warm reception anymore. Those would be the illegal aliens pouring over the border into the Great White North now that U.S. immigration forces have been cracking down.
Despite Canada’s legendary niceness and previous offer to take in the huddled masses fleeing from President Trump, that attitude is quickly changing. This week they put the word out that they simply can’t keep taking people in and deportations from Canada are on the rise. ”
———————–
“For all the lecturing that Justin Trudeau and European leaders regularly deliver to the White House, Canada’s actions don’t seem to match the criticism they’re dishing out. The “education” that Canadian officials are offering sounds awfully similar to U.S. immigration policy, though perhaps phrased in more polite terms. Liberal Canadian MP Randy Boissonnault, visiting Florida to get the word out, said the following:
“People seem to think that if they cross the border there’s this land of milk and honey on the other side,” Boissonnault said from the Canadian consulate in Miami on Thursday. “What we want is for people to have the right information. We want them to do the right thing for their families.”
Turns out Canada really isn’t the “land of milk and honey” for illegal aliens at all. In just the month of August last year, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police nabbed over 5,500 people (mostly Haitians) crossing into Quebec, primarily from upstate New York. As we’ve discussed here previously, the Canadians made a big show of welcoming them, setting up trailers and tents where the incoming migrants were processed. But here’s the part they didn’t tell you. On average, only 8% of their applications were approved. The rest were deported back to Haiti or are in the process of being removed. So out of those 5,500 who crossed the border last August, more than 5,000 have been deported.
That would be a month’s work that even ICE would envy.”
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Globalists are in a snit, as evidenced by Ricky’s return. 🙂
Trump was smart to leave before the lectures from the usual suspects began. 🙂
https://hotair.com/archives/2018/06/10/trump-instructs-u-s-representatives-not-endorse-g7-communique/
“Mon Dieu! The globalists among us are all in a snit that President Trump attended the G7 Summit in Quebec and he didn’t play nice. Trump made himself perfectly clear before he left Washington Friday that he intends to make America’s trade deals great again. He will not allow other countries to impose higher tariffs on the U.S. without responding in kind. Why is this a surprise?
When Trump arrived in Quebec, he started off cordially enough with the others in the G7, our closest allies. There were handshakes and bon mots all around. Then as the meetings took place, things got a bit testy. It seems that Trump stood his ground and the other six leaders were none too pleased. He even told Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the host, that foreign automobile imports would be penalized. This president is different than previous ones who just wanted to go along to get along. Trump fancies himself a master dealmaker and a disrupter.”
————–
“Trump used the Singapore Summit as a convenient excuse to leave Quebec early. He avoided having to sit through lectures by our European betters on the topic of climate change as he left late Saturday morning. It is reported that he did agree to sign off on the communique, the joint statement with the European leaders and Canada at the conclusion of the summit. After Trump left, though, Trudeau held a press conference and trashed Trump.
Earlier Saturday, Trudeau criticized Trump’s recent decision to place tariffs on steel and aluminum from the European Union, Canada and Mexico, saying it was “insulting” that Trump cited U.S. national security as his reason for doing so.
“Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around,” Trudeau said at his own, separate news conference at the meeting’s end.
“I highlighted directly to the president that Canadians did not take it lightly that the United States has moved forward with significant tariffs on our steel and aluminum industry,” Trudeau said. “Particularly, [they] did not take lightly that it’s for a national security reason that for Canadians . . . who stood shoulder to shoulder with American soldiers in far off lands in conflicts from the First World War onward, it’s kind of insulting.”
Guess what happened next. That’s right. Trump took to Twitter and said, oh, by the way, the U.S. representatives won’t be signing off on that communique after all. Earlier Trump warned that he’d be willing to see America to go it alone if needed. ”
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The national economy of the US is 20T GDP. The rest of the attendees combined? 19T GDP.
They can complain all they like, it’s irrelevant…….
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So how about one of you globalists tell me why he’s wrong?
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/09/trump-says-us-is-like-piggy-bank-that-everybody-is-robbing-on-trade.html
“President Trump used a press conference at the G7 summit in Canada to double down on his tough stance on trade, telling reporters that the United States is like “the piggy bank that everybody is robbing” but promising that that is ending under his leadership.”
———————
“Trump said he didn’t blame the other leaders for what he saw as an unbalanced trade relationship which hurts the U.S.
“People can’t charge us 270 percent and we charge them nothing, that doesn’t work anymore,” he said.
He said he believes other countries are now more committed to a fairer trade relationship.
“I don’t blame them, I blame our leaders,” he said. “In fact, I congratulate leaders of others for so crazily being able to make those trade deals that were so good for their country and bad for the United States.”
But he promised an end to the situation, and even warned of penalties for countries that do not remove trade barriers. He also said that the North American Free Trade Agreement could either be renegotiated, split up into separate trade deals, or the U.S. could pull out entirely.
“We are like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,” he said. “And that ends.”
He warned that the U.S. will take any action necessary to defend Americans from unfair trade practices.”
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The picture has been photoshoped to have Trump sitting in a high chair.
AJ, even in the original its humorous given Merkel’s stereotype reputation as the stern school marm of the G7. If it was any other world leader it would not have gone viral but Merkel’s presence completes the picture. It makes fun of Merkel as much as It does Trump.
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You have to be a special guide of insecure snowflake if a blase communique upsets you. I highly doubt it will have any impact on the mtg with Kim. The Trump administration is more easily offended than any leftist. They need to relax …..you can’t bully everyone to agree with you its not like the Republican Congress.
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The Trump administration misunderstands how trade surplus and deficits work. It has nothing to do with the US treasury or any bank. It’s simply a value of the goods exchanged. And even then it’s still misleading. Pass through goods are counted 2x. That is a Chinese washing machine unloaded in Vancouver and transported to Seattle counts as both a Canadian and Chinese good.
For that matter, Ricky’s stats are also misleading since it doesn’t count subsidies as a trade barrier. Fighting over trade between allied nations over trade is dumb. Unless you have an economic or military plan to promote, you should let comparative advantage and individual corporations sort it out. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a deficit.
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Oh it doesn’t upset me, but I never cease to be amazed by just how pathetic and low you anti-Trump folks are willing to go. Like the one above.
What, no disdain for the Japanese PM too? It’s just so weak.
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It’s true the US has a large domestic market but that doesn’t mean it’s economy can exist within a vacuum. It does need things other nations can provide…..and it may need to sell its surplus elsewhere. Limiting yourself to an internal market has costs and creates inefficiencies. For example Canadian aluminum is far cheaper and probably better, to place a tariffs on it will protect smaller more expensive US firms. Unless there’s a compelling reason to do it, why burden the economy with extra costs.
Now I’m not a total free trader. Canada has a supply managed dairy and egg system which provides stable pricing to producers and consumers. It also maintains health standards and provides a solid income to family farms. However the price of dairy products in Canada is higher. In my opinion its worth it. Any modification or regulation that maintains health, safety or stability should not be treated similar to a tariff.
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“Fighting over trade between allied nations over trade is dumb.”
You know who always says that?
The people benefiting most from the current status quo, which is everyone but US, that’s who. The US workers on the receiving end of said economic shaft would disagree of course.
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I failed to see how it’s pathetic or low. As I said, its funny only in the context of Merkel’s relation to other world leaders. There’s another picture floating around in which Merkel is rolling her eyes while Putin is talking.
The snowflake comment is directed towards Kudlow. Trudeau issues a simple press release and the admin is all upset…..
The refugee flow across the border. See you can be nice and generous and still maintain rule of law. You don’t need to separate parents ftom their children and throw kids in mass detention centers. Give them food, shelter and health care but at the end of the day still enforce your country’s rules…..perhaps ICE can learn from us.
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I fail to see how the US worker is bring shafted by international trade. Stuff is cheaper than ever. Fresh fruit and vegetables available 12 months a year at affordable price.
In reality, the US worker is bring shafted by the US corporate and political class. Blaming foreigners is a distraction, the solution is at home. Raise the min wage, empower unions, maintain strict health and safety standards, universal heslth care etc.
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So Ricky…..
No thoughts on your favorite paper and their reporter getting caught with/being the leaker? You know, the leaks you and they blamed Trump for repeatedly? No comment on that?
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/06/10/new-york-times-wants-to-bury-reporting-scandal-and-other-examples-media-madness.html
“Government documents were leaked to the press. A reporter’s communications were seized by the government without her knowing about it. And a former Senate aide was charged with “lying repeatedly to investigators about his contacts with three reporters.”
It sounds like the makings of the next Hollywood production about the news media’s war against President Trump. There’s only one problem. The reporter wasn’t just involved with her stories. She was involved for three years with the man the feds charged.”
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“Wolfe and Times reporter Ali Watkins “exchanged tens of thousands of electronic communications, often including daily texts and phone calls,” according to The Washington Post.
The Post described it this way: “How a reporter’s romance with her source muddies the FBI’s seizure of her records.”
“President Trump’s administration excels at muddying the water, and the arrest of a former Senate aide, following an inquiry in which federal agents seized records from a New York Times reporter, might be its best work yet,” wrote Callum Borchers in The Post.
Most outlets weren’t that obvious. Especially The Times. Here are just a few of its headline choices: “Press Groups Criticize the Seizing of a Times Reporter’s Records.” Or “Times Says Justice Seized Reporter’s Email, Phone Records.” Perhaps, even, “Former U.S. Senate Staffer Charged With Lying to FBI Over Contacts With Media.”
Notice the difference? The Times practices the CYA strategy known as “hide in plain sight.” It addresses the issue, but not until several paragraphs into the story, where only true news junkies read. A couple of those stories were written by The Associated Press and Reuters. In the Times version, we don’t learn until the seventh paragraph that “She and Mr. Wolfe had been in a three-year relationship.””
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Here’s your Tweet of the Day, courtesy of the effeminate Trudeau.
I’m sorry I had to call him that, but real men don’t wear fake eyebrows. 🙂
It’s just not done.
https://twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1005707571859283969
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And then things devolve, as they’re want to do on Twitter……… 🙂
https://twitter.com/Albert20mufc/status/1005886538864123904
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https://twitter.com/pamelaval/status/1005821153435373569
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Aaaaa, the eyebrow meme, laughing out loud 🤭 😆
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As HRW noted, there were many comic versions of the G7 photo posted. However, these three different photos from completely different perspectives give a real feel for what was going on. It appears they were drafting (probably the closing statement) and Merkel did seem to be taking the lead.
May, Macron and Trudeau are green. Merkel will be leading the West for a while, but the youngsters have promise. The choices made by the remaining G6 in dealing with Russia and China while the US is AWOL are going to be interesting.
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Trump’s insistence on letting Russia back in the G8 is strange. They were kicked out after annexing the Crimea. They still have the Crimea and support rebels in eastern Ukraine so why let them back in? It’s as if Trump wants to support Russia over his NATO allies…..I wonder how much intelligence cooperation is still going on at NATO HQ.
China is trying to get the EU and other nations to work together to combat Trump’s tariff policies. This is getting fun….a supposed communist nation leading the defense of free markets.
Watched Larry Kudlow on CNN. What a drama queen. I can hardly take the Trump admin seriously…..if Canada offends them this much, they can’t criticise social justice warriors and political correctness as snowflakes as Kudlow was melting on the screen. Kim was probably watching in Singapore and thought Trump can’t this easy.
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May is too occupies by Brexit to takeover from Merkel. Trudeau is a lightweight more form than substance and I don’t have much confidence in Macron. The President of the EU is Donald Tusk a former Polish president who isnt liked by the current Polish govt but has the confidence of the rest of the EU. He’s a solid elder statesmen.
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Is that for real? Trudeau wears fake eyebrows? Fake eyebrows are “a thing”?
It’s probably better to use an eyebrow pencil.
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Well, there is now a debate over whether his eyebrows are really just very unwieldy and bushy or whether they are fake.
To be continued.
This is an issue that is silly enough that it plays well here in the State of Denial.
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“hwesseli | June 10, 2018 at 2:04 pm
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a deficit.”
and again
“hwesseli | June 10, 2018 at 2:44 pm
Raise the min wage, empower unions, maintain strict health and safety standards, universal heslth care etc.”
My answer to the first quote, 20 Trillion National Debt
My answer to the second quote,
“It took us 30 years to save $200,000 in an annuity and over 5 years we will lose 50% of buying power because of the raise in minimum wages. ($10 an hour to $15 an hour) ”
Our union was forced upon us. They voted to support killing babies.
Our State has plenty of “strict health and safety standards…”
“universal health care etc.” British National Health care
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