Douglas Caddy

FEMA prepping for possible coronavirus emergency declaration http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fema-prepping-for-possible-coronavirus-emergency-declaration/ar-BB10DK4J?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=UE07DHP [Didn't President Trump say last week that soon infections would be down to zero? Did he not say with a wave of his hand that the virus would miraculously disappear ?]

I wish you had interviewed James Rothstein for your book who has a topic devoted to him in our forum. He was on the Essex during the Bay of Pigs invasion and helped supervise the loading of two nuclear bombs aboard the ship in preparation for the invasion. He is in contact today with a few sailors on other ships that were involved in the invasion. He could tell you about his and others being denied certain Veterans benefits because the role of the Essex has been covered up officially due to the nuclear bombs being on board.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/01/coronavirus-is-significant-threat-to-economy-and-trump-mark-zandi.html

The Coronavirus Has Put the World’s Economy in Survival Mode There’s little hope for a global economic rebound in 2020. By Eswar S. Prasad - The New York Times Mr. Prasad is a professor at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. March 1, 2020 A man wearing a protective mask inside the Shanghai Stock Exchange building on Feb. 28.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters Whether or not the coronavirus turns into a global pandemic, the outbreak is already infecting economies and financial markets around the world. While governments try to navigate the fine line between being prepared and setting off panic, the economic costs are growing as countries and communities try to control the spread of the disease. The hopeful narrative about 2020 heralding a modest rebound in global growth now lies in ruins. Europe stagnated and Japan’s economy shrank in the last quarter of 2019, even as China and India were losing momentum. So this year was already off to a rocky start. Now, the coronavirus has put the world economy in survival mode. The spread of the virus is hurting travel, trade and supply chains worldwide. The Baltic Dry Index, a forward-looking indicator of global trade, has fallen by half and oil prices are down by about a quarter so far this year. U.S. stock markets, after initially taking the epidemic’s fallout in stride, are now experiencing a major sell-off. Why were stock markets sanguine for weeks after the outbreak began, and why are they now in full-blown panic mode? Financial markets are prone to large, sentiment-driven swings that sometimes seem out of line with economic fundamentals. But the news of the last few days suggests that, rather than coming under control and being confined to China, the outbreak is spreading and could get far worse. Stock markets in the United States and elsewhere are reflecting this reassessment of the epidemic’s future trajectory and the risks it poses. The notion of this outbreak being a short-lived negative shock to global demand now looks unrealistic. It is not just spending on restaurants and travel that is suffering, but also investment by businesses while they wait for the uncertainty to be resolved. This will have long-term effects on growth even if the outbreak proves short-lived. Stock markets mainly reflect the prospects of medium-size and large firms. Warnings of weaker revenues and profits from giants like Apple and Microsoft have contributed to the declines in major stock indexes. Even though the United States has so far been relatively unscathed by the epidemic, the plunge in stock markets last week reflects the supply chain disruptions faced by U.S. companies and also weaknesses in foreign markets that account for a significant portion of U.S. multinationals’ revenues. The disruption of supply chains, especially those that pass through Asia, is hurting businesses in multiple dimensions. Countries such as China, South Korea and Japan are critical to the supply chains for products ranging from plastic toys to iPhones to high-tech machinery. In these countries, manufacturers can’t get raw materials delivered reliably, are facing worker shortages and are having difficulty shipping out products. Rejiggering supply chains takes months, if not years. If the coronavirus spreads and causes disruptions to other major economies, it could wreak further havoc on supply chains. Still, big companies are better equipped to cope in difficult times. They tend to have large cushions of cash and can get financing from banks. The picture is bleaker for small companies. In most countries, including the United States, small private businesses are among the most dynamic in creating jobs. But they usually have slim financial cushions. Banks are often reluctant to lend to small businesses even in the best of times. Moreover, even if their employers stay afloat, employed workers are likely to pare back spending as they face uncertainty about job prospects and shrinking investment accounts. Another quandary that governments face, especially in China and other countries hit hardest by the coronavirus, is how to balance containing the spread of the epidemic with keeping their economies humming. Every day that factories stay closed and restaurants have no customers makes it harder to get things back up. On the flip side, the very nature of increased economic activity, with more person-to-person contacts, would make it harder to control the spread of the epidemic. There is no easy way out. The Federal Reserve and other central banks could cut interest rates. This might not do much good, as uncertainty will restrain consumer spending and business investment even if cheap loans were available. Government spending might be more potent. Any assistance that reaches small businesses and allows them to stay afloat or goes directly into the hands of low-income consumers will help. But consumers and businesses are as likely to stash away any extra cash as they are to spend it. Governments cannot eliminate uncertainty, but they can ensure the transparent and accurate flow of information. Even if the news is bad, consumers, businesses and investors need to know that they have a reliable picture of the facts. That, along with knowing that governments are doing all they can, might be the salve that everyone needs.

NYSE could close trading floor in coronavirus contingency https://www.fox5ny.com/news/nyse-could-close-trading-floor-in-coronavirus-contingency

Inside Trump’s frantic attempts to minimize the coronavirus crisis http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/inside-trumps-frantic-attempts-to-minimize-the-coronavirus-crisis/ar-BB10zgPE?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=UE07DHP

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/05/24/upshot/22UP-JFK/22UP-JFK-articleLarge.jpg?quality%3D75%26auto%3Dwebp%26disable%3Dupscale&imgrefurl=https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/upshot/baseballs-role-in-jfks-life.html&tbnid=5iagOIceC_PL8M&vet=1&docid=J4Sd_qqpiHuZqM&w=600&h=475&itg=1&q=denbow+dallas+police+63+jfk&hl=en-US&source=sh/x/im#spf=1583026245839

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2431537/JFK-The-Final-Hours-seen-members-crowd-Texas.html?ito=facebook_share_article-top&fbclid=IwAR3DRoPh96pzB7HahTycYP6Wg9eXVxWk--JJL8l6wWicW2i3Ecq-K8bmRqE

Concerned About Nuclear Weapons Potential, John F. Kennedy Pushed for Inspection of Israel Nuclear Facilities https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2016-04-21/concerned-about-nuclear-weapons-potential-john-f-kennedy?fbclid=IwAR2Miea7ecEznNr7R7DUu8tscBSrxPinUJ0Swr40OVN9fN3ZDwC_nNE8ISY

Trump Makes Us Ill Going viral is not a good thing this time. By Maureen Dowd Opinion Columnist - The New York Times Feb. 29, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence at a news conference Wednesday about the coronavirus.Credit...Carlos Barria/Reuters Donald Trump was right. Germs are scary. For three decades, I talked to Trump about his fear of germs. When I interviewed him at the Trump Tower restaurant during the 2016 race, the famous germophobe had a big hospital-strength bottle of hand sanitizer on the table, next to my salad, ready to squirt. He told me about the nightmarish feeling he had when a man emerged from the bathroom in a restaurant with wet hands and shook his hand. He couldn’t eat afterward. Today, in a stunning twist of fate, germs are infecting his presidency and threatening a bad prognosis for his re-election prospects. Trump is the first president to use the stock market as a near-daily measure of his success — and his virility — and now the market is slumping. If you want to own it on the way up, you have to own it on the way down. Investors, who worried when Trump began to rise in politics, soon realized that he had their backs. He was just a corporate vessel pretending to be a populist; the stock market was his sugar high. Now Trump is learning the hard way what my fatalistic Irish mother taught me: The thing you love most is the first to go. As Mike Bloomberg points out, investors have factored in Trump’s incompetence, and that is contributing to the market cratering. The president urged the Fed to do something soon to mitigate the stock market losses. Socialism for the rich! The scaremonger in chief has been downplaying the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic and joining Fox News hosts in accusing the “anti-Trump” media and “Do Nothing Democrats” of scaremongering about the virus. At the CPAC convention, Mick Mulvaney told a cheering crowd that impeachment was the “hoax of the day” and now the press thinks the coronavirus “is going to be what brings down the president.” The media, he said, should spend more time on positive stories, like the president’s “caring” relationship with his teenage son, Barron, even though White Houses usually frown on stories about young presidential offspring. Mike Huckabee went on the attack, asserting that Trump “could personally suck the virus out of every one of the 60,000 people in the world, suck it out of their lungs, swim to the bottom of the ocean and spit it out, and he would be accused of pollution for messing up the ocean.” On Fox, Don Jr. said the Democrats “seemingly hope” the virus kills millions to stop Trump’s winning streak. Rush Limbaugh chimed in that the media “would love for the coronavirus to be this deadly strain that wipes everybody out so they could blame Trump for it.” There are 2,800 dead worldwide and disturbing stories showing how federal criteria delayed the diagnosis of a California woman and how federal health employees interacted with Americans who had possibly been exposed to the virus in China without proper training or gear. Yet Trump seems more consumed with how the Democrats might blame him for a coronavirus recession than with the virus itself. Trump had tweet-shrieked at President Barack Obama about how he should handle Ebola. (“Obama should apologize to the American people & resign!”) Yet he was so relaxed about the coronavirus threat that he spent 45 minutes Thursday chatting in the Oval with the authors of a little play called “FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers,” inspired by the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The play’s leads, Dean Cain of “Superman” fame and the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” actress Kristy Swanson, were also in the meeting. Trump joked that he’d be willing to be Cain’s understudy, the actor said. The president got together the same day with a group that included his social media boosters Diamond and Silk. At the White House press conference, Trump preened: “Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.” He later said that one day, like a miracle, the virus “will disappear.” His top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, pushed the crisis as an opportunity: “Stocks look pretty cheap to me.” Trump won’t be able to deflect and project and create a daft alternative narrative. The virus won’t respond to conspiracy theories from Rush Limbaugh or nasty diatribes from Sean Hannity or nicknames from Donald Trump. This will be a deus ex machina test of Trump’s authoritarian behavior. Epidemics are not well suited to authoritarian regimes and propaganda, as we saw this week when Beijing’s use of propaganda tactics to suppress information about the outbreak failed spectacularly and when Iran tamped down news about the virus for political reasons even as it ravaged top officials. The reality of the coronavirus spreading will reflect poorly on Trump — his cavalier dismantling of vital government teams for health response and his disdain for experts and science. Trump tried to make federal agencies complicit on his fabulist hogwash about the size of his inaugural crowd and the path of Hurricane Dorian. It is unlikely that he will be able to keep his insatiable and insecure ego in check long enough to give the nation the facts, reassurance and guidance it needs about the infection. Trump is already doing his orange clown pufferfish routine, acting as though he knows more about viruses than anyone, just as he has bragged that he knows more about the military, taxes, trade, infrastructure, ISIS, renewables, visas, banking, debt and “the horror of nuclear.” He appointed Mike Pence to be point man, even though, as the famously homophobic governor of Indiana, Pence helped make the H.I.V. epidemic there worse by substituting moral pronouncements for scientific knowledge. Coronavirus Czar Pence spent Friday at a $25,000-a-plate dinner in sunny Sarasota raising money to try to win back the House, The Tampa Bay Times reported. Trump’s history in business — he makes people feel good for a while and then it ends badly — could presage a stock market crash before he exits. And it’s conceivable that a crash — along with hospitals being overwhelmed by the uninsured — could lead to the election of a real populist promising Medicare for All. And that would be a very Trumpian arc indeed.

Hall remembers Lee Oswald, life at Beckley Avenue rooming house https://www.hsvvoice.com/news/20200224/hall-remembers-lee-oswald-life-at-beckley-avenue-rooming-house

Disease X Meets Planet X Excerpt from The New York Times: We Knew Disease X Was Coming. It’s Here Now. We need to stop what drives mass epidemics rather than just respond to individual diseases. By Peter Daszak Mr. Daszak is a disease ecologist. Feb. 27, 2020 In early 2018, during a meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blueprint) coined the term “Disease X”: We were referring to the next pandemic, which would be caused by an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human population. As the world stands today on the edge of the pandemic precipice, it’s worth taking a moment to consider whether Covid-19 is the disease our group was warning about. Disease X, we said back then, would likely result from a virus originating in animals and would emerge somewhere on the planet where economic development drives people and wildlife together. Disease X would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment. Disease X would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu. It would shake financial markets even before it achieved pandemic status. In a nutshell, Covid-19 is Disease X. From Robert Merritt’s third and final meeting with President Nixon in July 1972 as recounted in the original posting here on page 1: In essence, Nixon talked about “life as we do not know it.” He said that during the previous twenty years Knowledge had been obtained that could make the human race on Earth “the supreme beings in the universe.” This Knowledge came in part from helpful information provided from an extra-terrestrial being from Planet X, Nibiro, who was in a secure location in a building in the U.S. Nixon said the Knowledge came as the result of discovery made by scientists working at the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico who studied the extraterrestrial being’s information. Nixon said, “This all important Knowledge that we possess came from our discovery.” Nixon declared whoever possessed this Knowledge could be the most important person in the world. All would bow down to whoever possessed this Knowledge. The Knowledge was “astronomical, nefarious and devastating.” Nixon said that possession of the Knowledge had to be structured so that it was used only for the good of mankind. His fear was that a small group seeking power would get hold of it and utilize it to the group’s evil benefit only….. .It was then at Nixon made a cryptic remark, apparently to emphasize the importance of the assignment that he had given Merritt. Nixon said, “I took my order from above and have followed it to the T.” Merritt was taken aback by the remark and asked Nixon what he meant. Nixon did not reply directly but instead declared that “the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the world.” Merritt asked Nixon how he knew this would happen. Nixon replied, “Think of me a prophet.” http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/25917-watergate-trump’s-space-force-and-2020/

Disease X Meets Planet X Excerpt from The New York Times: We Knew Disease X Was Coming. It’s Here Now. We need to stop what drives mass epidemics rather than just respond to individual diseases. By Peter Daszak Mr. Daszak is a disease ecologist. Feb. 27, 2020 In early 2018, during a meeting at the World Health Organization in Geneva, a group of experts I belong to (the R&D Blueprint) coined the term “Disease X”: We were referring to the next pandemic, which would be caused by an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human population. As the world stands today on the edge of the pandemic precipice, it’s worth taking a moment to consider whether Covid-19 is the disease our group was warning about. Disease X, we said back then, would likely result from a virus originating in animals and would emerge somewhere on the planet where economic development drives people and wildlife together. Disease X would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment. Disease X would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu. It would shake financial markets even before it achieved pandemic status. In a nutshell, Covid-19 is Disease X. From Robert Merritt’s third and final meeting with President Nixon in July 1972 as recounted in the original posting here on page 1: In essence, Nixon talked about “life as we do not know it.” He said that during the previous twenty years Knowledge had been obtained that could make the human race on Earth “the supreme beings in the universe.” This Knowledge came in part from helpful information provided from an extra-terrestrial being from Planet X, Nibiro, who was in a secure location in a building in the U.S. Nixon said the Knowledge came as the result of discovery made by scientists working at the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico who studied the extraterrestrial being’s information. Nixon said, “This all important Knowledge that we possess came from our discovery.” Nixon declared whoever possessed this Knowledge could be the most important person in the world. All would bow down to whoever possessed this Knowledge. The Knowledge was “astronomical, nefarious and devastating.” Nixon said that possession of the Knowledge had to be structured so that it was used only for the good of mankind. His fear was that a small group seeking power would get hold of it and utilize it to the group’s evil benefit only….. It was then at Nixon made a cryptic remark, apparently to emphasize the importance of the assignment that he had given Merritt. Nixon said, “I took my order from above and have followed it to the T.” Merritt was taken aback by the remark and asked Nixon what he meant. Nixon did not reply directly but instead declared that “the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the world.” Merritt asked Nixon how he knew this would happen. Nixon replied, “Think of me a prophet.”

Maddow guest predicts one-third of Congress will catch coronavirus — and Capitol Hill will close https://www.rawstory.com/2020/02/maddow-guest-predicts-one-third-of-congress-will-catch-coronavirus-and-capitol-hill-will-close/

Joe: Howard was in a position to know much about the planning and carrying out of the plot to assassinate JFK. As to whether he was telling the truth or not telling the truth in his confession I am not able to say. I should add that in a court of law a dying confession is normally given great credibility but in the case of the murder of President Kennedy it must be weighed very carefully because much essential information about the event is still unknown or unproven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_declaration Doug

From the article: Nouriel Roubini, a New York University business professor and market prognosticator who foretold the housing bubble burst, told Yahoo Finance on Friday to expect "severe" consequences as the coronavirus continues to rattle markets. How severe? He told Der Spiegel it could be worse than investors even believe at this point, predicting "global equities to tank by 30 to 40 percent this year." https://theweek.com/speedreads/899110/stock-markets-are-headed-40-percent-plunge-says-economist-who-predicted-financial-crisis

When a Pandemic Meets a Personality Cult The Trump team confirms all of our worst fears. By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist The New York Times Feb. 27, 2020 President Trump on Wednesday addressed the evils associated with the coronavirus. Among them: the reporters asking questions.Credit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times So, here’s the response of the Trump team and its allies to the coronavirus, at least so far: It’s actually good for America. Also, it’s a hoax perpetrated by the news media and the Democrats. Besides, it’s no big deal, and people should buy stocks. Anyway, we’ll get it all under control under the leadership of a man who doesn’t believe in science. From the day Donald Trump was elected, some of us worried how his administration would deal with a crisis not of its own making. Remarkably, we’ve gone three years without finding out: Until now, every serious problem facing the Trump administration, from trade wars to confrontation with Iran, has been self-created. But the coronavirus is looking as if it might be the test we’ve been fearing. And the results aren’t looking good. The story of the Trump pandemic response actually began several years ago. Almost as soon as he took office, Trump began cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading in turn to an 80 percent cut in the resources the agency devotes to global disease outbreaks. Trump also shut down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council. Experts warned that these moves were exposing America to severe risks. “We’ll leave the field open to microbes,” declared Tom Frieden, a much-admired former head of the C.D.C., more than two years ago. But the Trump administration has a preconceived notion about where national security threats come from — basically, scary brown people — and is hostile to science in general. So we entered the current crisis in an already weakened condition. And the microbes came. The first reaction of the Trumpers was to see the coronavirus as a Chinese problem — and to see whatever is bad for China as being good for us. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, cheered it on as a development that would “accelerate the return of jobs to North America.” The story changed once it became clear that the virus was spreading well beyond China. At that point it became a hoax perpetrated by the news media. Rush Limbaugh weighed in: “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. … The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Limbaugh was, you may not be surprised to hear, projecting. Back in 2014 right-wing politicians and media did indeed try to politically weaponize a disease outbreak, the Ebola virus, with Trump himself responsible for more than 100 tweets denouncing the Obama administration’s response (which was actually competent and effective). And in case you’re wondering, no, the coronavirus isn’t like the common cold. In fact, early indications are that the virus may be as lethal as the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people. Financial markets evidently don’t agree that the virus is a hoax; by Thursday afternoon the Dow was off more than 3,000 points since last week. Falling markets appear to worry the administration more than the prospect of, you know, people dying. So Larry Kudlow, the administration’s top economist, made a point of declaring that the virus was “contained” — contradicting the C.D.C. — and suggested that Americans buy stocks. The market continued to drop. At that point the administration appears to have finally realized that it might need to do something beyond insisting that things were great. But according to The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, it initially proposed paying for a virus response by cutting aid to the poor — specifically, low-income heating subsidies. Cruelty in all things. On Wednesday Trump held a news conference on the virus, much of it devoted to incoherent jabs at Democrats and the media. He did, however, announce the leader of the government response to the threat. Instead of putting a health care professional in charge, however, he handed the job to Vice President Mike Pence, who has an interesting relationship with both health policy and science. Early in his political career, Pence staked out a distinctive position on public health, declaring that smoking doesn’t kill people. He has also repeatedly insisted that evolution is just a theory. As governor of Indiana, he blocked a needle exchange program that could have prevented a significant H.I.V. outbreak, calling for prayer instead. And now, according to The Times, government scientists will need to get Pence’s approval before making public statements about the coronavirus. So the Trumpian response to crisis is completely self-centered, entirely focused on making Trump look good rather than protecting America. If the facts don’t make Trump look good, he and his allies attack the messengers, blaming the news media and the Democrats — while trying to prevent scientists from keeping us informed. And in choosing people to deal with a real crisis, Trump prizes loyalty rather than competence. Maybe Trump — and America — will be lucky, and this won’t be as bad as it might be. But anyone feeling confident right now isn’t paying attention.

Pat Buchanan: Will JFK's Party become Sanders' Party? https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/patrick-j-buchanan/will-jfks-party-become-sanders-party/

National Security Wiretap System Was Long Plagued by Risk of Errors and Omissions The F.B.I.’s intelligence wiretap powers are at a crossroads after a damning report about the surveillance of a former Trump adviser. And the flaws may be systemic. The F.B.I. and the FISA court are working on an overhaul of the national security surveillance application system.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times By Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman Feb. 23, 2020 The New York Times WASHINGTON — In the 1990s, F.B.I. agents hunting for a Russian mole zeroed in on a C.I.A. official as their main suspect as they tried to determine who had sold secrets that had led to the deaths of American spies. When they sought court permission to wiretap him, they kept quiet about facts that cast doubts on their theory. But the mole turned out to instead be one of the F.B.I.’s own, Robert P. Hanssen, and the agents were later exposed for cherry-picking evidence against the innocent C.I.A. official in their surveillance applications. That little-known aspect of the notorious Hanssen case illustrates the risk of dysfunction in national security wiretapping, one of counterintelligence agents’ most powerful tools in fighting terrorism and espionage. Now, that defect has surfaced again. The F.B.I.’s flawed applications to monitor a former Trump adviser in the Russia investigation, Carter Page, has prompted a new cycle of scandal revealed in a damning report from the Justice Department’s inspector general. The problems may be part of a broader pattern in other applications that never receive the same intense scrutiny, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former F.B.I. agents and Justice Department officials who have worked with national security wiretaps. The system is vulnerable, they said, to lower-level agents suppressing or overlooking evidence that weakens their case when they seek permission to conduct surveillance. The F.B.I. and the court are already working on an overhaul, and lawmakers have vowed to fix the problems uncovered by the inspector general. But for Congress, agreeing on what needs fixing will be difficult. The F.B.I.’s misuse of its powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, has been politicized to a degree it never was in the Hanssen case, where an inspector general’s discovery of the failures attracted little notice. President Trump and his supporters have long embraced a theory that Mr. Page was a victim of a high-level political conspiracy. The inspector general report did not confirm that narrative, instead finding different — yet still serious — problems. Some of the president’s closest allies in Congress will influence any potential overhaul efforts, and whether they will act based on that narrative or instead focus on the systemic problems with surveillance is an open question. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee, led by Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, will mark up a bill that is expected to become a vehicle for Congress to weigh in on broader surveillance issues. He has been negotiating with Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who leads the Intelligence Committee, and with Republicans on his own panel. The timing is driven by the pending expiration of three investigative powers unrelated to the Page wiretap issues, including the F.B.I.’s ability to collect business records for an espionage or terrorism case. The draft bill would extend those powers while ending legal authority for a defunct system that gave counterterrorism analysts with the National Security Agency access to logs of Americans’ phone calls. But the bill, according to people familiar with negotiations over the draft, would make other adjustments that dovetail with the inspector general report — like expanding when FISA judges should appoint outsiders to critique the government’s arguments. Lawmakers could also legally require the F.B.I. to be candid with the FISA court and to correct errors. By contrast, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the close Trump ally who leads the Senate Judiciary Committee, is focused on further scrutinizing the Russia investigation. Recently, Mr. Graham requested interviews with 17 law-enforcement officials who were subjects of the inspector general investigation. “Somebody,” Mr. Graham said in an interview, “has to pay a price.” But similar flaws with surveillance have surfaced before, underscoring that the problems may be systemic rather than unique to the Page applications, current and former officials said. At the F.B.I., nobody gets credit for investigations that go nowhere, said Robert S. Litt, a former national security prosecutor and general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration. That cultural reality creates the risk that investigators will slant FISA applications to more easily secure a judge’s approval. The bureaucratic problem is not limited to the FISA process, Mr. Litt said, pointing to a scandal years ago over F.B.I. forensics experts overstating their findings in courtroom testimony. Still, the extra secrecy surrounding surveillance shuts out potential checks. For example, defense lawyers get to scour criminal wiretap applications for problems, creating an incentive for investigators to be scrupulous. But defense lawyers do not get to see FISA applications. “Because the court operates in secret, you are lacking one of the levels to prevent a bad actor that otherwise exist,” Mr. Litt said. In addition, the C.I.A. tightly limits access to information about its sources. That means when evidence from those sources goes into a wiretap application, fewer law enforcement officials know details that might help evaluate their credibility. In the Russia investigation, the inspector general found, the C.I.A. told the F.B.I. that Mr. Page had talked with the agency about his contacts with Russian officials over the years. Those disclosures could have made his pattern of communication look less suspicious. But the F.B.I. agent who received a C.I.A. memo about the issue did not accurately pass along that information to his colleagues, so no one told the court. F.B.I. agents are also racing against a clock with FISA wiretaps — good for 90 days — which can also leave them open to confirmation bias, former officials said. Once a wiretap is in place, Justice Department lawyers charged with seeking its renewal begin nagging F.B.I. agents to identify new facts gleaned from the wiretap that could help justify continuing it. But the lawyers are less insistent on finding facts that might instead undercut their suspicion, former officials said. Congress enacted FISA in 1978 to regulate national security wiretapping after scandals from the J. Edgar Hoover era. The law created a special court that today oversees more than 1,000 such applications each year. But investigators have repeatedly misled judges over the years, documents and interviews show. When such episodes have come to light, the Justice Department has blamed errors by or miscommunication with lower-level officials. In 2000, the Justice Department confessed to errors about cooperation between criminal and national security investigators in F.B.I. affidavits submitted for 75 applications related to terrorism investigations, according to a declassified FISA court opinion. After a follow-up review uncovered even more mistakes, the FISA court’s presiding judge, Royce C. Lamberth, barred an F.B.I. agent who had signed some of the affidavits, Michael Resnick, from appearing in front of the court again. The Justice Department also imposed changes, including strengthening fact-checking for draft applications. But the damage to the career of Mr. Resnick, who died in 2011, may have been more effective than any policy response, said James A. Baker, who oversaw the FISA process for the Justice Department in that era and was general counsel at the F.B.I. at the time of the Page wiretap. “The thing that Lamberth did to Resnick put the fear of god in all these people,” Mr. Baker said. “They didn’t want this to happen to them.” In 2003, an inspector general report about the Russian mole case uncovered an additional bombshell. Examining why the F.B.I. had spent so long investigating the wrong suspect and failed to pursue alternative avenues, it found that agents suppressed “crucial” evidentiary weaknesses as they sought a court order to wiretap the innocent C.I.A. official, Brian J. Kelly. The inspector general at the time, Glenn A. Fine, said this cherry-picking kept other officials from being able to evaluate the mole investigation and make an earlier course correction. The Hanssen report called for Justice Department lawyers to more closely oversee F.B.I. agents preparing wiretap applications. Mr. Baker used that recommendation to push through a then-secret further tightening of the rules for preparing FISA applications in 2006, including requiring closer scrutiny of the credibility of confidential sources. The Page report criticized an F.B.I. agent for ignoring that very procedure as part of half a dozen personal failings that included not passing on the information from the C.I.A., singling the agent out as “primarily responsible for some of the most significant errors and omissions.” It identified this person only as Case Agent 1. But he is Stephen M. Somma, a counterintelligence investigator in the F.B.I.’s New York field office, people familiar with the Russia investigation said. The F.B.I. declined to comment. The report did not find evidence that Mr. Somma or his immediate supervisors, whom it also faulted, were politically biased — as opposed to apolitical explanations like incompetence or confirmation bias. (Voter registration records show that a 49-year-old New York man with Mr. Somma’s name and middle initial is a Republican.) But the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, rejected as unsatisfactory such officials’ explanation that they were busy and referred them for disciplinary review. He also referred one official for criminal investigation over a narrower but more egregious act: altering a C.I.A. email he showed to a colleague, during the third renewal of the Page wiretap, in a way that kept the previous failure to disclose the agency’s relationship with Mr. Page from coming to light. That official, Kevin Clinesmith, a lower-level F.B.I. lawyer who had written text messages expressing opposition to Mr. Trump’s policies and writing “viva le resistance,” has resigned. The F.B.I. has already begun making changes in response to the inspector general’s findings and subsequent demands from the head of the FISA court, Judge James E. Boasberg, like expanding forms and checklists to force agents to focus on mitigating evidence. A FISA expert appointed by Judge Boasberg to help him evaluate the bureau’s proposed changes, David Kris, has said they do not go far enough and recommended that a supervisor in the field, not a headquarters official, sign factual affidavits. Denis Brady, a retired F.B.I. senior agent who worked with FISA applications, went further, suggesting case agents themselves should have to sign the documents. “That makes you responsible,” Mr. Brady argued. “You bring it down to the field office, where the people doing the work are responsible for it long term. They are not just doing a job to check a box and move up the ladder. That’s the fundamental problem.” Many civil libertarians favor permitting defense lawyers with security clearances to go through case files to look for problems with FISA applications on the rare occasions a target is later prosecuted. The inspector general’s office has begun a broader audit of unrelated applications, but for now has said it is focused on looking for factual errors in wiretaps applications targeting Americans — not the harder-to-detect problem of omissions. Whatever adjustments are made, perfection may remain elusive. Last month, the F.B.I. promised Judge Boasberg to work harder to avoid errors. When the bureau’s general counsel, Dana Boente, signed the memo, he did not notice that whoever drafted it had misspelled his name. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Daniel Estulin, described in the article as a 24-year veteran of Russian military counterintelligence , explains in the Power Hour interview in the link below how Putin, Trump and Xi after Trump's re-election will meet in a Yalta-like setting to impose world-wide rule, in other words a world-wide dictatorship. I have always believed ever since Trump was elected that this was the ultimate goal. Now it is confirmed. How does this relate to the topic here? Let’s go back to the beginning where I posted: “Who in 1972 when Watergate broke could have foreseen that the scandal eventually would lead back to President Trump’s uncle John G. Trump, an eminent scientist at MIT in the 1940’s who was delegated by the government among other classified tasks with reading Tesla’s secret files after his death and investigating the UFO phenomenon and then into the next century to Donald Trump inside the White House in a titanic struggle for control of the universe? Only one person foresaw this: President Richard Nixon who 47 years ago predicted that next year, 2020, would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the whole planet and who 32 years ago predicted that Trump one day would be president.” I believe that President Trump is in possession of Nixon’s general “Message to the American People” concerning the Alien Presence about which he told Robert Merritt at their third and final meeting around the second week of July 1972 that was held after the Watergate case broke on June 17, 1972. Nixon hid the Message in a small box embedded in the wall behind Volume II of American History in the White House Library. It was found by a CIA team using a thermal imaging machine a short time after Daniel Liszt interviewed Merritt on Dark Journalist on February 14, 2018. The interview, which I arranged, is posted early on in this topic. Indeed I have concluded that there is the distinct possibility that Merritt, a Trump supporter and chairman of Bronx for Trump during the 2016 campaign, may have clandestinely informed Trump through his contact person in the White House about the location of the Message shortly after his Dark Journalist interview. What Trump, Putin and Xi are striving now is to gain possession of the formula for control of the universe that Nixon passed on to Henry Kissinger in the letter that Nixon asked Merritt to deliver to Kissinger as recounted in their third and final meeting described in the February 2018 Dark Journalist interview cited early on in this topic. Kissinger today knows of the status of Nixon’s letter to him. The question arises now: If indeed Putin, Trump and Xi are planning to impose a world-wide dictatorship, how would the Alien Presence react to this especially so if these three world leaders are in possession or close to obtaining possession of the formula for control of the universe that was contained in Nixon’s July 1972 letter to Kissinger? Nixon’s July 1972 prediction about a cataclysmic event occurring in 2020 took place in the midst of his describing the Alien Presence in his final meeting with Merritt. It can only be assumed that Nixon’s was inferring that the Alien Presence has a relationship to the cataclysmic event, as Nixon was not more specific in what he told Merritt. https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/xi-jingping-trump-and-putin-are-on-the-same-team/?fbclid=IwAR3SpTn92wcjttO59vnlm6gYGCoFf-_-ewaS5ZtEAT2bJPzI5fp_x661ATc

Daniel Estulin, described in the article as a 24-year veteran of Russian military counterintelligence , explains how Putin, Trump and Xi will after Trump's re-election meet in a Yalta-like setting to impose world-wide rule, in other words a world-wide dictatorship. I have always believed since Trump was elected that this was the ultimate goal. Now it is confirmed. https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/xi-jingping-trump-and-putin-are-on-the-same-team/?fbclid=IwAR3SpTn92wcjttO59vnlm6gYGCoFf-_-ewaS5ZtEAT2bJPzI5fp_x661ATc

Why Democrats Are Bound for Disaster Win, lose or draw, there’s no legitimacy in America anymore. Continue reading the main story By Frank Bruni in The New York Times Opinion Columnist Feb. 21, 2020 I’ll let you in on a little secret about media coverage of prime-time political debates: What happens in the first half, even the first quarter, gets much more attention than what happens as the night drags on. We all have deadlines bearing down on us and must produce our stories immediately after the debate’s end, so we start formulating thoughts and fashioning sentences before then. If there are fireworks early in the event, we say a cheer of gratitude and let them light up our commentary. So it was with Mike Bloomberg’s miserable performance in Las Vegas. He established his awfulness right off the bat. We ran with it. I know I did. But in the case of this debate, what happened at the bitter end was probably most meaningful. All six candidates onstage were asked to envision a situation — utterly plausible this year — in which none of them went into the Democratic convention in Milwaukee in July with a majority of pledged delegates and, therefore, an unequivocal claim to the nomination. Should the politician with a plurality of delegates be the nominee? Only Bernie Sanders, who currently has the best shot at being that person, said yes. The others said no. That would mean a brokered convention, in which the votes of uncommitted “superdelegates” or alliances formed among certain candidates are necessary to put someone over the top. And it would be a nightmare scenario for the Democratic Party, which is deep into a bad dream already, because it would invite further cynicism, second-guessing, cries of illegitimacy and irresolution in a country that’s paralyzed by all of that. Something unsettling is going on in American politics — in America, period — and the chaotic Democratic race exemplifies it. The rules are all blurry. The processes are all suspect. Or at least they’re seen that way, so more and more judgments are up for debate and more and more defeats are prone to dispute. President Trump is a prime player in this, but it didn’t start with him and isn’t confined to him. He’s exploiting and accelerating a crisis of faith in traditions and institutions, not causing it. He’s improvising, and he’s hardly alone. Everywhere I look: incipient or latent pandemonium. The Iowa caucuses were a mess that motivated some candidates to press self-aggrandizing grievances. Bloomberg’s rivals argue (understandably) that he’s using his billions to game the system and pervert the whole shebang. And in a reprise of four years ago, Sanders’s supporters fume that the media, the Democratic National Committee and other supposed pillars of the establishment are conspiring against him in some underhanded, corrupt way. I’m no soothsayer, but I foresee intensifying quarrels over whether whoever is leading the field deserves to be in that position and whether his or her competitors got a raw deal. It’s 2016 all over again, except maybe worse. Back then both Sanders and Trump, who was braced to lose, insisted that the process was rigged. Sanders’s supporters questioned the legitimacy of Hillary Clinton’s victory in the Democratic primary before Clinton’s supporters questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s victory in the general election. There were good reasons all around, but it was striking nonetheless how fervently the disappointed rejected the denouement. It was also corrosive. I’m not recommending a pliant surrender to injustice, but I see more value in plotting carefully for the next fight than in raging boundlessly over the last one. At some point, doesn’t everyone have to move on? Not anymore. In Washington, there’s the prospect of impeachment beyond impeachment, of new hearings to supplement the old ones, of additional evidence that will spiritually nullify the president’s ludicrous acquittal by the Senate. John Bolton continues his national-security version of a strip tease; he’s both a man of — and a metaphor for — an era in which nothing finishes, everything festers and all can be revisited and revised. Bill Barr junks sentence recommendations. Trump commutes sentences. There are investigations into investigators. Cries of cheating and fraudulence fly in every direction. I blame the internet, because I like to and because it’s true. I mean that I blame the way it encourages people to choose their own information and curate their own reality, so that no official pronouncement competes with a pet theory. I blame a national epidemic of selfishness, too. It seems to me that fewer and fewer people are easily moved off their particular worries, their special wants. Any outcome that displeases them is ipso facto a bastardized one. “The refusal to grant victors legitimacy bundles together so much about America today: the coarseness of our discourse; the blind tribalism coloring our debates; the elevation of individualism far above common purpose; the ethos that everybody should and can feel like a winner on every day,” I wrote during the last presidential election, and I wondered then if this were a passing phase. Nope. It’s the context — aggravated if anything — for the current race for the Democratic nomination, which features a scrum of sharp-elbowed aspirants, room galore for recriminations and the very, very real possibility of a brokered convention. Imagine that Sanders — with a plurality but not a majority of delegates — loses the nomination that way. He and many of his supporters would probably say that Democratic voters had been betrayed, and they wouldn’t be wrong. They could be furious enough to abandon the party’s pick, to the advantage of Trump. Now imagine the opposite: Although Sanders lacks a majority, Democrats who aren’t on his train feel too intimidated not to ride it, and so rules and dynamics set up expressly to make sure that the nominee represents as close to a party consensus as possible aren’t properly applied. His nomination would be deemed unjust in some quarters, straining party unity. What would salvage either set of circumstances is the acceptance and acknowledgment by Democrats who don’t get what they want that perpetually sore feelings serve little purpose. But that perspective — that maturity — is in retreat. We certainly can’t expect it from Trump if (please oh please) he’s defeated in November. He’ll manufacture any and every argument to say that he was robbed. And in a country in which the messy guts of our institutions are increasingly conspicuous and the merchants of cynicism grow ever bolder, he’ll find takers aplenty. After all, getting worked up is so much less tedious than getting along.

Joe: Seth Rich is one of the most puzzling cases ever to catch the nation's attention. I wonder if it will ever be solved. Besides Mary Mayer's case, it reminds me of Judge Crater whose case was never solved but still is talked about in NYC where now and then you still see scrawled on a wall, "Judge Crater, please call your office." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Force_Crater

Turmoil at the National Security Council, From the Top Down Michael T. Flynn, left, the national security adviser, before boarding Air Force One on Friday. He accompanied President Trump and Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, on a visit to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times By David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Peter Baker Feb. 12, 2017 The New York Times Over the weekend, The Times published this investigation into the agency that Michael T. Flynn was leading before he stepped down. Read our updated article on Mr. Flynn’s resignation. WASHINGTON — These are chaotic and anxious days inside the National Security Council, the traditional center of management for a president’s dealings with an uncertain world. Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump’s Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls. Some staff members have turned to encrypted communications to talk with their colleagues, after hearing that Mr. Trump’s top advisers are considering an “insider threat” program that could result in monitoring cellphones and emails for leaks. The national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, has hunkered down since investigators began looking into what, exactly, he told the Russian ambassador to the United States about the lifting of sanctions imposed in the last days of the Obama administration, and whether he misled Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations. His survival in the job may hang in the balance. Although Mr. Trump suggested to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday that he was unaware of the latest questions swirling around Mr. Flynn’s dealings with Russia, aides said over the weekend in Florida — where Mr. Flynn accompanied the president and Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe — that Mr. Trump was closely monitoring the reaction to Mr. Flynn’s conversations. There are transcripts of a conversation in at least one phone call, recorded by American intelligence agencies that wiretap foreign diplomats, which may determine Mr. Flynn’s future. Stephen Miller, the White House senior policy adviser, was circumspect on Sunday about Mr. Flynn’s future. Mr. Miller said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that possibly misleading the vice president on communications with Russia was “a sensitive matter.” Asked if Mr. Trump still had confidence in Mr. Flynn, Mr. Miller responded, “That’s a question for the president.” This account of life inside the council — offices made up of several hundred career civil servants who advise the president on counterterrorism, foreign policy, nuclear deterrence and other issues of war and peace — is based on conversations with more than two dozen current and former council staff members and others throughout the government. All spoke on the condition that they not be quoted by name for fear of reprisals. “It’s so far a very dysfunctional N.S.C.,” Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a telephone interview. In a telephone conversation on Sunday afternoon, K. T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, said that early meetings of the council were brisker, tighter and more decisive than in the past, but she acknowledged that career officials were on edge. “Not only is this a new administration, but it is a different party, and Donald Trump was elected by people who wanted the status quo thrown out,” said Ms. McFarland, a veteran of the Reagan administration who most recently worked for Fox News. “I think it would be a mistake if we didn’t have consternation about the changes — most of the cabinet haven’t even been in government before.” There is always a shakedown period for any new National Security Council, whose staff is drawn from the State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies and is largely housed opposite the White House in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. President Barack Obama replaced his first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, a four-star former supreme allied commander in Europe, after concluding that the general was a bad fit for the administration. The first years of President George W. Bush’s council were defined by clashes among experienced bureaucratic infighters — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell among them — and by decisions that often took place outside official channels. But what is happening under the Trump White House is different, officials say, and not just because of Mr. Trump’s Twitter foreign policy. (Two officials said that at one recent meeting, there was talk of feeding suggested Twitter posts to the president so the council’s staff would have greater influence.) A number of staff members who did not want to work for Mr. Trump have returned to their regular agencies, leaving a larger-than-usual hole in the experienced bureaucracy. Many of those who remain, who see themselves as apolitical civil servants, have been disturbed by displays of overt partisanship. At an all-hands meeting about two weeks into the new administration, Ms. McFarland told the group it needed to “make America great again,” numerous staff members who were there said. New Trump appointees are carrying coffee mugs with that Trump campaign slogan into meetings with foreign counterparts, one staff member said. Video Michael T. Flynn served in the military for 33 years before becoming a singular and divisive figure in the intelligence community during the Obama administration. Matthew Rosenberg looks at President Trump’s former national security adviser.CreditCredit...Kevin Hagen for The New York Times Nervous staff members recently met late at night at a bar a few blocks from the White House and talked about purging their social media accounts of any suggestion of anti-Trump sentiments. Mr. Trump’s council staff draws heavily from the military — often people who had ties to Mr. Flynn when he served as a senior military intelligence officer and then as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency before he was forced out of the job. Many of the first ideas that have been floated have involved military, rather than diplomatic, initiatives. Last week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was exploring whether the Navy could intercept and board an Iranian ship to look for contraband weapons possibly headed to Houthi fighters in Yemen. The potential interdiction seemed in keeping with recent instructions from Mr. Trump, reinforced in meetings with Mr. Mattis and Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, to crack down on Iran’s support of terrorism. But the ship was in international waters in the Arabian Sea, according to two officials. Mr. Mattis ultimately decided to set the operation aside, at least for now. White House officials said that was because news of the impending operation leaked, a threat to security that has helped fuel the move for the insider threat program. But others doubt whether there was enough basis in international law, and wondered what would happen if, in the early days of an administration that has already seen one botched military action in Yemen, American forces were suddenly in a firefight with the Iranian Navy. Ms. McFarland often draws on her television experience to make clear to officials that they need to make their points in council meetings quickly, and she signals when to wrap up, several participants said. And while Mr. Obama liked policy option papers that were three to six single-spaced pages, council staff members are now being told to keep papers to a single page, with lots of graphics and maps. “The president likes maps,” one official said. Paper flow, the lifeblood of the bureaucracy, has been erratic. A senior Pentagon official saw a draft executive order on prisoner treatment only through unofficial rumors and news media leaks. He called the White House to find out if it was real and said he had concerns but was not sure if he was authorized to make suggestions. Officials said that the absence of an orderly flow of council documents, ultimately the responsibility of Mr. Flynn, explained why Mr. Mattis and Mike Pompeo, the director of the C.I.A., never saw a number of Mr. Trump’s executive orders before they were issued. One order had to be amended after it was made public, to reassure Mr. Pompeo that he had a regular seat on the council. White House officials say that was a blunder, and that the process of reviewing executive orders has been straightened out by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff. Still, Mr. Flynn presents additional complications beyond his conversations with the Russian ambassador. His aides say he is insecure about whether his unfettered access to Mr. Trump during the campaign is being scaled back and about a shadow council created by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s top strategist, who was invited to attend meetings of the “principals committee” of the council two weeks ago. For his part, Mr. Bannon sees the United States as headed toward an inevitable confrontation with two adversaries — China and Iran. Mr. Flynn finds himself in a continuing conflict with the intelligence agencies, whose work on Russia and other issues he has dismissed as subpar and politically biased. Last week, in an incident first reported by Politico, one of Mr. Flynn’s top deputies, Robin Townley, was denied the high-level security clearance he needed before he could take up his job on the council as the senior director for Africa. It was not clear what in Mr. Townley’s past disqualified him, and in every administration some officials are denied clearances. But some saw the intelligence community striking back. Two people with direct access to the White House leadership said Mr. Flynn was surprised to learn that the State Department and Congress play a pivotal role in foreign arms sales and technology transfers. So it was a rude discovery that Mr. Trump could not simply order the Pentagon to send more weapons to Saudi Arabia — which is clamoring to have an Obama administration ban on the sale of cluster bombs and precision-guided weapons lifted — or to deliver bigger weapons packages to the United Arab Emirates. Several staff members said that Mr. Flynn, who was a career Army officer, was not familiar with how to call up the National Guard in an emergency — for, say, a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina or the detonation of a dirty bomb in an American city. At the all-hands meeting, Mr. Flynn talked about the importance of a balanced work life, taking care of family, and using the time at the council to gain experience that would help staff members in other parts of the government. At one point, the crowd was asked for a show of hands of how many expected to be working at the White House in a year. Mr. Flynn turned to Ms. McFarland and, in what seemed to be a self-deprecating joke, said, “I wonder if we’ll be here a year from now?”