How to Get News Articles to President Trump That General Kelly Won't Let Through

Politico reports:

 Confronted with a West Wing that treated policymaking as a free-for-all, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, is instituting a system used by previous administrations to limit internal competition — and to make himself the last word on the material that crosses the president’s desk.

It’s a quiet effort to make Trump conform to White House decision-making norms he’s flouted without making him feel shackled or out of the loop. In a conference call last week, Kelly initiated a new policymaking process in which just he and one other aide — White House staff secretary Rob Porter, a little-known but highly regarded Rhodes scholar who overlapped with Jared Kushner as an undergraduate at Harvard — will review all documents that cross the Resolute desk.

The new system, laid out in two memos co-authored by Kelly and Porter and distributed to Cabinet members and White House staffers in recent days, is designed to ensure that the president won’t see any external policy documents, internal policy memos, agency reports and even news articles that haven’t been vetted.

Rest assured that the General is not going to allow Trump to see any alternative news media articles.

Here are four workarounds the general public can use to get alternative news to Trump.

Trump's 'New' Afghan Strategy: Protect The Empire!

As always some very important insights from Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams---especially on the power of the Deep State.

 -RW

The Most Impressive Leftist in the Age of Trump

In the Age of Trump, there are only a very few sources a libertarian can turn to for sound reporting and analysis. Much of the conservative movement has been captured by Trump and they will go through all sorts of mental contortions to make the ridiculous claim that Trump is anti-war and isn't influenced by the elitists.

On the left, you have almost all focus on the dubious charges that Trump somehow colluded with Russia and focus on the silly analysis of how "presidential" Trump looks from one speech to the next. That's about it,

Alan Dershowitz, on the left, is a bit of an exception. He is excellent on the dangers from a Constitutional perspective of the Mueller investigation into Trump, but he is pretty much limited to that. Noam Chomsky will occasionally make sound comments about the Age of Trump but the comments are outliers.

Probably the most impressive reporter/analyst on the left, maybe in all of current day broadcasting, is The Real News Network senior editor Paul Jay. He is solid and insightful on elitists, mainstream media, the type of generals around Trump, the military-industrial complex and the Empire. He understands how things really work.

He is a lefty, though, so my views on economics are far different from his, but he is so solid on elitists and foreign policy that I have to rave about him.

The below hour long clip is really worth watching. It starts off slow with some inside baseball about what they plan to do at The Real News Network but then the insights really start flowing and don't stop.

Among many other comments, Jay has some interesting insights about the Koch brothers, including that Vice President Mike Pence is their guy. But his take on Pence will scare the hell out of you.

  

  -RW

President Trump Pardons Convicted Criminal Joe Arpaio

Of all the people rotting in federal prisons, President Trump has exercised his power of presidential pardon for the first time to pardon a pretty nasty SOB.

 Trump formally pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona Sheriff, on Friday.

The Atlantic provides the context:

[Arapio's] extreme treatment of prisoners and detainees drew widespread condemnation and allegations of racial bias. A 2011 Justice Department report concluded that Arpaio engaged in “unconstitutional policing” by systematically targeting Latinos for racial profiling. That same year, in response to a lawsuit, a federal judge ordered Arpaio to stop detaining and harassing residents of largely Latino neighborhoods. He ignored the order and continued to perform sweeps, claiming they were lawful.

The judge charged him with civil contempt in 2015 and criminal contempt, a misdemeanor offense, the following year. A federal court found him guilty in July. Trump’s pardon comes before that legal process against Arpaio had finished: His sentencing hearing was scheduled for October, where he faced a maximum of six months behind bars.

Arpaio also launched

The Generals Get Another One: Silent Coup Nearly Complete

Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump closely aligned with Steve Bannon, resigned late Friday.

In a resignation letter, Gorka cited "forces" that do not support President Trump's "MAGA promise" as being ascendant in the White House.

“Regrettably, outside of yourself, the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again,’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months," Gorka wrote.

Gorka certainly shouldn't be considered a libertarian, but he was an effective spokesman for the White House and had President Trump's back.

Outside of some possible second-tier staff, the Generals appear to have full control of the White House, including the news material Trump gets to read. The New York Times reports:

White House aides were told that all materials prepared for the president must go first to [ Robert Porter, the assistant to the president for policy coordination ] for vetting and clearance. Then [General] Kelly must sign off on them before they go to Mr. Trump’s desk. That includes news articles, according to West Wing officials who described the memos’ content — of particular importance, given the propensity for some of Mr. Trump’s staff to slip him news accounts from dubious sources that shape his thinking or prompt him to cite unreliable or inaccurate information.

  -RW

UPDATE

Who Is Jared Kushner And Why We Should All Worry Now

This is an excellent analysis of what is developing in the Middle East. The US has surrounded Iran.

  -RW

Trump's Top Economic Adviser Just Supported Antifa

This is amazing: HERE.

It's Good to See the Left Fretting Over the Future Soul of Libertarianism....

By this, I am referring to a new article up at The Washington Post titled: Libertarians wrestle with the alt-right.

In which Chris Cantwell, who once called himself a libertarian, is featured and who ended up being at the center of the Charlottesville unrest with his neo-Nazi ranting.

Example of a current Cantwell view: "How could Trump allow his beautiful daughter to marry a Jew."

WaPo writes:

Mainstream libertarians were worried about the spread of ideas like that.

But I can assure you that, although WaPo's concern is appreciated, libertarianism will survive. As far as I can tell, the top best selling libertarian authors at this time are Mises, Rothbard, Hayek and Block. Of the four, only Hayek is not a Jew.

It is very difficult to start a neo-Nazi movement if you are a hardcore follower of these folks. Nazi, by the way, stands for National Socialism, which all four attacked. So some crazies may pass through the libertarian movement but "pass through" are the operative words.

If you like central planning and hate Jews, I really don't see you wearing a Rothbard t-shirt.

That said, perhaps the Left should spend more time on self-contemplation.

Why are they always supporting leaders that make conditions horrific for most?

Consider Venezuela.

Actor Sean Penn met with the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, several times and claimed Chavez did "incredible things for the 80 percent of the people that are very poor."

Michael Moore praised Chavez for eliminating "75 percent of extreme poverty."

John Stossel reported:

[Noam] Chomsky, whose anti-capitalist teachings have inspired millions of American college students, praised Chavez's "sharp poverty reduction, probably the greatest in the Americas." Chavez returned the compliment by holding up Chomsky's book during a speech at the U.N., making it a best-seller.

Of course, now under Chavez's endorsed successor Venezuela is a hell hole.

Consider the Soviet Union.

From Wikipedia:

Walter Duranty (May 25, 1884 – October 3, 1957) was a Liverpool-born, Anglo-American journalist who served as the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1921).

In 1932 Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, 11 of them published in June 1931. He was criticized for his subsequent denial of widespread famine (1932–33) in the USSR, most particularly the mass starvation in Ukraine. Years later, there were calls to revoke his Pulitzer; The New York Times, which submitted his works for the prize in 1932, wrote that his later articles denying the famine constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."... Duranty often admitted the brutality of the Stalinist system then proceeded to both explain and defend why dictatorship or brutality were necessary.

But getting back to Cantwell, his entire personality, as judged by videos, seems remarkably different from years earlier. He really seems like a different person. Could he be taking antipsychotic drugs?

Perhaps WaPo can do some digging here. Is there a Big Pharma connection to Cantwell like there has been to so many nut jobs?

I suspect that it was likely a combination of Big Pharma and Trump (Cantwell is a Trump fan, despite what he said about Trump's Jewish son-in-law) that triggered Cantwell.

And speaking of Trump, I want to, once again, push the idea that Donald Trump should be thrown under the bus by libertarians. I see no strategic reason he should be supported. He holds no libertarian positions and support for him is not going to gain us any followers that understand libertarian principles.

At times, it makes sense to form alliances with other groups if there are particular libertarian issues we want to advance or if it will help us introduce libertarianism to new groups. But the followers of Trump have no libertarian instincts. They are pretty much idiots (Gary North calls them schnooks: "true believers, also known as schnooks, who voted...will shrug their shoulders and not miss a beat in supporting a flip-flopping politician.").

For sure, they hate Obamacare but they don't want to end government healthcare. They aren't for nation building but they are for fighting terrorists. Pretending we have something in common with these people is only going to get us in trouble.

In his unpublished strategy paper, Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change, Murray Rothbard wrote:

[T]he classical liberals were trapped by their alliance with the "practical" men into foreswearing any sort of radical general principles in striking to the practical short run details, with ultimately disastrous results....

Libertarians should not make the same mistake. The advancement of liberty is a long game. There is no strategic move that will result in a libertarian society emerging any time soon. On top of that, we are in something of a "quiet period" in terms of advancing liberty. There are no obvious groups that we should be forming alliances with. It is a time for the slog of one-on-one mental battles. Trump be damned.

 -RW

General Kelly Has Set New Full Access to Trump Rules

It's Melania, Barron and, with limitations, Ivanka (and, of course, the General).

For everyone else, it is by appointment only.

The New York Times reports:

On Mr. Kelly’s first day on the job, he held a small meeting with top aides to the president after a fuller staff meeting. He told them that Oval Office access to Mr. Trump, which was once nearly universal to people coming through the West Wing, would be strictly limited to appointments only.

The exceptions, Mr. Kelly said, were the president’s wife and his 11-year-old son. And, he added, turning to Ivanka Trump, who was seated near him, the president’s eldest daughter, if she was speaking to him as a daughter and not a member of his staff.

 -RW

BREAKING Julian Assange to Join Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017

Order tickets here.

Why the Military Wing of the Octopus of Empire Will Not Be Able to Defeat the Taliban

By Michael S. Rozeff

Secretary of State Tillerson has made it clear that the U.S. is in Afghanistan to deny victory to the Taliban even if the U.S. isn’t victorious. In other words, the U.S. policy is to buy time by indefinite stalemate. The hope behind this policy is that the U.S. can negotiate a face-saving exit from Afghanistan.

The U.S. wants Kabul, the Taliban and Islamabad to come to terms politically and stop fighting. The Taliban won’t do this if they can continue to gain ground using current tactics and if Islamabad supports them. They’ll do it but only as a temporary measure if they think that under cover of peace they can gain ground and eventually take over, as North Vietnam took over South Vietnam 2 years after concluding an agreement with the U.S. The Taliban have a strong home court advantage.

Trump said he’s out to kill terrorists, not nation-build. That’s an admission of failure because the U.S. cannot defeat the Taliban without the partnership of a strong Afghan state on the ground in Afghanistan that has effective and substantial armed forces. These essential conditions do not exist. That is to say, the U.S. can’t defeat the Taliban at any reasonable cost. Sending in huge forces is out of the question. Bombing the whole country into oblivion is likewise out of the question.

The Taliban will continue to build their own nation-state in this vacuum, that is, in the face of the weak and corrupt Afghan government. They will chip away at Afghan and U.S. pockets of strength. The U.S. has failed at building a viable Afghan state. This was a foreseeable blunder, repeated in Iraq and Libya. Vietnam was an earlier dramatic example that the U.S. cannot build states as a general rule and under most conditions. Haiti has been a longstanding example of this. When a country is completely flat on its back and when it has a homogeneous society and when it has a prior tradition of a strong state, then it’s possible that a new nation-state can emerge on terms heavily-influenced by the U.S. Japan and West Germany show this. But under other conditions, such as non-homogeneous societies that have been held together by strongmen rulers, such is not the case. In the case of Afghanistan, the prior tradition of a strong state has been absent and there are tribal divisions. These have spelled the failure of the U.S. to build a nation-state.

Trump now says that the U.S. doesn’t aim to nation-build in Afghanistan. This is a welcome statement, but he cannot by himself change the empire’s course, even if he wanted to. Not only is he surrounded by advocates of empire, but also he doesn’t have a clear aim of accomplishing the goal of downsizing the empire. Parts of the U.S. government still harbor frustrated desires of nation-building. Nation-building is strongly embedded in the U.S. military structure and doctrine. That now shows up in the U.S. training of military forces in many countries in Africa. This doctrine is part and parcel of the larger political ambitions of the U.S. government. The military forward strategy is an arm of the embracing octopus of empire along side of programs of “aid”, treaties of defense, bank loans, trade agreements and sanctions.

The above originally appeared at LewRockwell.com/