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https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-suggests-challenging-broadcast-licenses-nbc-reports-wanted-tenfold-increase-u-s-nukes-152057437.html

Trump suggests challenging broadcast licenses after NBC reports he wanted tenfold increase in U.S. nukes

Dylan Stableford

Yahoo News, October 11, 2017

President Trump says an NBC News report that he said he wanted a tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal is “pure fiction, made up to demean” him.

“Fake @NBCNews made up a story that I wanted a ‘tenfold’ increase in our U.S. nuclear arsenal,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “Pure fiction, made up to demean. NBC = CNN!”

 

 

In a follow-up tweet, Trump wondered aloud whether the Federal Communications Commission should revoke the broadcast licenses for those networks — something President Richard Nixon threatened to do to the Washington Post after it began investigating Watergate.

“With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Bad for country!”

 

 

A spokeswoman for NBC News did not immediately return a request from Yahoo News seeking comment; nor did a representative for the FCC.

On Tuesday night, the network reported that Trump’s request for a bigger stockpile of nuclear weapons came during a “tense” July 20 meeting with high-ranking national security officials, citing three people who were in the room.

“According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised,” the NBC report said. “Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the buildup. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned.”

Soon after the meeting concluded, officials who remained behind heard Tillerson call Trump a “moron” — a comment that was first reported by NBC last week.

According to NBC, Tillerson considered resigning after Trump’s rambling, highly politicized speech to a gathering of Boy Scouts on July 24 and Vice President Mike Pence had to talk him out of it.

The report prompted Tillerson to abruptly call a hastily arranged press conference, during which he refuted the story and reaffirmed his commitment to the Trump agenda.

“The vice president has never had to persuade me to remain as secretary of state, because I have never considered leaving this post,” Tillerson said.

Trump subsequently called the NBC report “fake news” on Twitter and demanded the network apologize.

In a Forbes magazine cover story that was published online Tuesday, Trump reiterated that the report that his top diplomat called him a “moron” was “fake news” — but qualified the assertion.

“I think it’s fake news, but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests,” Trump said. “And I can tell you who is going to win.”

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On 11/10/2017 at 9:09 PM, Hector said:

The 15% of gay people who voted for him must be so proud of their vote. :bad:

Blacks, Mexicans and women also voted for him. Goes to show that for some people being an idiot is their number one priority. 

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Trump Tells Conservative Christian Audience: Times ‘Are Changing Back’

In an address to the Values Voter Summit Friday, President Donald Trump celebrated the power of the presidency to enforce Christian values.

Though much of Trump’s 30-minute remarks ran through his list of “promises I made you,” not one involved a successful congressional action, aside from the Senate’s confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Echoing the introduction of the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who introduced the President, Trump bragged about his re-instating the Mexico City Policy by decree, cutting off funds to international organizations that at all promote abortion as a method of family planning.

He also noted an executive action “to prevent the horrendous Johnson amendment from interfering with your First Amendment rights.”

The Johnson amendment prohibits non-profits, including religious organizations, from explicitly campaigning on behalf of political candidates. Though Trump signed an executive order instructing the Treasury Department to loosen its enforcement of the law, he does not have the constitutional power to eliminate it.

The President also mentioned that he had made “official” the National Day of Prayer. So did former President Barack Obama, via executive proclamation, eight years in a row.

And Trump reminded his audience of a peculiar focus of his since his early days on the campaign trail: “We’re saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again!”

Trump is the first sitting President to address the summit, which is organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group with deep political roots.

During his speech, the President extolled the values of the religious life and positioned them opposite an oppressive government bureaucracy.

“For too long, politicians have tried to centralize the authority among the hands of a small few in our nation’s capital,” he said. “Bureaucrats think they can run your lives, overrule your values, meddle in your faith, and tell you how to live, what to say, and how to pray. But we know that parents, not bureaucrats, know best how to raise their children and create a thriving society.”

He added separately: “In America, we don’t worship government, we worship God.”

The second half of Trump’s speech strayed into a laundry list of more general accomplishments, which were met with polite applause that grew louder at times: Promising tax and regulatory cuts, celebrating the trillions of dollars in stock market value “we’ve created,” and predicting “great health care in our county.”

“We’re taking a little different route than we had hoped,” Trump said of the latter point, weaving his hand through the air and noting that members of Congress unable to pass legislation repealing Obamacare had “forgotten what their pledges were.”

Trump on Thursday announced the White House would be ending key federal payments to insurance companies that subsidized coverage for the poor, among other changesessentially sabotaging central elements of Obamacare.

Concluding his remarks, Trump made explicit the underlying message of his speech: that the church is the cornerstone of American life.

“We see it in the church communities that come together to care for one another, to pray for each other, and to stand strong with each other in times of need,” he said, after referring to the “strength of the American spirit.”

“As long as we have pride in our country, confidence in our future, and faith in our god, then America will prevail,” he said.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-values-voters-summit

 

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Fucking vile.

 

If my mom who has a deep faith in a God and Jesus caught any of this her head is probably in the toilet puking her brains out.  She hates to even call herself Christian anymore because she doesn't want to be lumped in with these psychos 

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Finally

 

EU's Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini has put Trump in his place about his condemnation of the Iran nuclear deal signed by several countries in 2015. "It was not a bilateral deal, that is one prerogative the leader of the US doesn't have"

Glad the EU is for once showing a more dignified and strong position on foreign policy matters. Tired of two particular countries, the US and Israel (with complete blessing from the corrupt Vatican), with their bizarre lawless foreign policies leading the rest of the world astray

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/iran-nuclear-deal-trump-eu-federica-mogherini-netanyahu-israel-a7999556.html

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1 hour ago, karbatal said:

I hope all EU countries speak clearly because USA is LYING big time here.  Iran is fighting terrorism,  not being the source. 

 

And the irony, discrepancy, elephant in the room, foolishness, hypocrisy, you name it, of continuining to threaten and bully Shiite countries like Iran and Syria, MEANWHILE arming to the teeth trash like Saudi Arabia, the GCC countries and their Royal Families, the main sponsors of Wahabism, Salafism and the worst forms of hatred, violence and discrimination you could possibly imagine. US politicians in particular are shamelessly lying once again (as they always do, especially on foreign policy matters) whether it was Iraq Part Deux in 2003, Iran again in 2009 or Libya in 2011, never mind top political figures in Europe and North America having disclosed and admitted to having put together Al Qaeda back in the late 70s / early 80s aganst the former Soviet Union, when it suited their little imperialistic goal and convenience of the moment. Another wonderful legacy of people like Kissinger, Nixon, Brezinsky etc etc etc etc

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jul/08/july7.development

 

I have rarely seen the Commons so full and so silent as when it met yesterday to hear of the London bombings. A forum that often is raucous and rowdy was solemn and grave. A chamber that normally is a bear pit of partisan emotions was united in shock and sorrow. Even Ian Paisley made a humane plea to the press not to repeat the offence that occurred in Northern Ireland when journalists demanded comment from relatives before they were informed that their loved ones were dead.

The immediate response to such human tragedy must be empathy with the pain of those injured and the grief of those bereaved. We recoil more deeply from loss of life in such an atrocity because we know the unexpected disappearance of partners, children and parents must be even harder to bear than a natural death. It is sudden, and therefore there is no farewell or preparation for the blow. Across London today there are relatives whose pain may be more acute because they never had the chance to offer or hear last words of affection.

It is arbitrary and therefore an event that changes whole lives, which turn on the accident of momentary decisions. How many people this morning ask themselves how different it might have been if their partner had taken the next bus or caught an earlier tube?

But perhaps the loss is hardest to bear because it is so difficult to answer the question why it should have happened. This weekend we will salute the heroism of the generation that defended Britain in the last war. In advance of the commemoration there have been many stories told of the courage of those who risked their lives and sometimes lost their lives to defeat fascism. They provide moving, humbling examples of what the human spirit is capable, but at least the relatives of the men and women who died then knew what they were fighting for. What purpose is there to yesterday's senseless murders? Who could possibly imagine that they have a cause that might profit from such pointless carnage?

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4 hours ago, Skin said:

Fucking vile.

 

If my mom who has a deep faith in a God and Jesus caught any of this her head is probably in the toilet puking her brains out.  She hates to even call herself Christian anymore because she doesn't want to be lumped in with these psychos 

:rant:

 

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At the time of writing, no group has surfaced even to explain why they launched the assault. Sometime over the next few days we may be offered a website entry or a video message attempting to justify the impossible, but there is no language that can supply a rational basis for such arbitrary slaughter. The explanation, when it is offered, is likely to rely not on reason but on the declaration of an obsessive fundamentalist identity that leaves no room for pity for victims who do not share that identity.

Yesterday the prime minister described the bombings as an attack on our values as a society. In the next few days we should remember that among those values are tolerance and mutual respect for those from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Only the day before, London was celebrating its coup in winning the Olympic Games, partly through demonstrating to the world the success of our multicultural credentials. Nothing would please better those who planted yesterday's bombs than for the atrocity to breed suspicion and hostility to minorities in our own community. Defeating the terrorists also means defeating their poisonous belief that peoples of different faiths and ethnic origins cannot coexist.

 

In the absence of anyone else owning up to yesterday's crimes, we will be subjected to a spate of articles analysing the threat of militant Islam. Ironically they will fall in the same week that we recall the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, when the powerful nations of Europe failed to protect 8,000 Muslims from being annihilated in the worst terrorist act in Europe of the past generation.

Osama bin Laden is no more a true representative of Islam than General Mladic, who commanded the Serbian forces, could be held up as an example of Christianity. After all, it is written in the Qur'an that we were made into different peoples not that we might despise each other, but that we might understand each other.

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west.

 

The danger now is that the west's current response to the terrorist threat compounds that original error. So long as the struggle against terrorism is conceived as a war that can be won by military means, it is doomed to fail. The more the west emphasises confrontation, the more it silences moderate voices in the Muslim world who want to speak up for cooperation. Success will only come from isolating the terrorists and denying them support, funds and recruits, which means focusing more on our common ground with the Muslim world than on what divides us.

 

The G8 summit is not the best-designed forum in which to launch such a dialogue with Muslim countries, as none of them is included in the core membership. Nor do any of them make up the outer circle of select emerging economies, such as China, Brazil and India, which are also invited to Gleneagles. We are not going to address the sense of marginalisation among Muslim countries if we do not make more of an effort to be inclusive of them in the architecture of global governance.

 

But the G8 does have the opportunity in its communique today to give a forceful response to the latest terrorist attack. That should include a statement of their joint resolve to hunt down those who bear responsibility for yesterday's crimes. But it must seize the opportunity to address the wider issues at the root of terrorism.

In particular, it would be perverse if the focus of the G8 on making poverty history was now obscured by yesterday's bombings. The breeding grounds of terrorism are to be found in the poverty of back streets, where fundamentalism offers a false, easy sense of pride and identity to young men who feel denied of any hope or any economic opportunity for themselves. A war on world poverty may well do more for the security of the west than a war on terror.

And in the privacy of their extensive suites, yesterday's atrocities should prompt heart-searching among some of those present. President Bush is given to justifying the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that by fighting terrorism abroad, it protects the west from having to fight terrorists at home. Whatever else can be said in defence of the war in Iraq today, it cannot be claimed that it has protected us from terrorism on our soil.

 

 

robin-cook-brown-blair.jpeg

 

 

 

Brave Mr Robin Cook RIP and thank you

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