Tag: donald trump

Trump Team Weighing Options For Preemptive Airstrikes On Iran’s Nuclear Program

Just days after the rapid collapse of the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, and now with Israeli warplanes having complete domination over Syria’s skies for the first time in modern history, the priorities of US and Israeli officials in the region have drastically changed.

Both US and Israeli leaders are now mulling the possibility of striking Iran’s nuclear program, amid several reports in recent weeks saying the Islamic Republic is expanding its program and enriching more nuclear-grade material. Tehran is now much more on the defensive, and could be more desperate to achieve nuclear weapons.

A significant Friday report in The Wall Street Journal says that “President-elect Donald Trump is weighing options for stopping Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon, including the possibility of preventive airstrikes, a move that would break with the longstanding policy of containing Tehran with diplomacy and sanctions.”

“Trump has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent calls that he is concerned about an Iranian nuclear breakout on his watch, two people familiar with their conversations said, signaling he is looking for proposals to prevent that outcome,” the report continues.

“The president-elect wants plans that stop short of igniting a new war, particularly one that could pull in the U.S. military, as strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities have the potential put the U.S. and Iran on a collision course.”

Currently the United States still has some 1,000 troops occupying northeast Syria, and they have come under internecine attacks by Iran-backed militias over the recent years. In any broader US-Iran war, these troops would be sitting ducks for attack via Tehran’s proxies in the region.

Trump in his first administration tried but failed to bring the troops home, but deeper entanglement in striking Iran could surely draw these troops into a broader conflict. The Pentagon would in that case likely expand its deployed forces in the region as well.

“Iran has enough highly enriched uranium alone to build four nuclear bombs, making it the only nonnuclear-weapon country to be producing 60% near-weapons-grade fissile material,” WSJ has noted further. “It would take just a few days to convert that stockpile into weapons-grade nuclear fuel.”

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Trump’s Syrian Opportunity

With the shock overthrow of the Assad dynastic dictatorship that ruled Syria since 1971, new diplomatic opportunities are opening for the incoming administration. If President-elect Donald Trump is serious about his “ending forever wars” rhetoric, Syria offers him a chance to grab a low-hanging fruit.

Encouragingly, Trump himself seems to realize that. Commenting on Syria, he suggested that the events unfolding there are “not our fight”. He said that the “U.S. should have nothing to do with it (the situation in Syria). Let it play out. Do not get involved”. 

The Vice-President-elect JD Vance echoed this sentiment. When the neoconservative Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin categorically declared that in Syria “Freedom won[;] Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Assad lost,” Vance admitted that such comments “made him nervous because the last time this guy was celebrating events in Syria, we saw the mass slaughter of Christians and a refugee crisis that destabilized Europe”. 

Trump-Vance’s prudence, as opposed to the wildly optimistic hawkish takes, is well advised. As Stimson Center’s Emma Ashford warned, “the track record of Arab Spring revolutions suggests a healthy amount of caution is warranted on where this is headed”. 

That certainly applies to Syria. Assad’s regime was an odious tyranny even by Middle Eastern standards, and its collapse is unlamented. The leader of the Islamist terrorist opposition Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—formerly associated with Al-Qaeda—and the de facto new ruler of Syria is Ahmed al-Sharaa, more widely known as Mohammed al-Jolani, who is considered a terrorist by the U.S. and has a bounty of $10 million on his head. Since seizing power, he has embarked on a charm offensive promising an inclusive governance respectful of Syria’s ethnic and confessional diversity. Yet gruesome details of the extrajudicial executions of former regime officials and members of the Alawite religious group (to which the Assad clan happens to belong) are already emerging.

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Zuckerberg And Bezos To Donate $1 Million Each To Trump’s Inauguration Fund

Tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos of Meta and Amazon are both reportedly giving a million dollars to President Trump’s inauguration fund.

Zuckerberg’s donation comes following a private dinner he had with Trump at his Florida home

The Wall Street Journal reports that the donation is part of an effort by Zuckerberg to ease tensions between him and Trump.

Trump previously threatened to prosecute and jail Zuckerberg and anyone else who interfered in the election by using their tech platforms to censor information in the same vein as the Hunter Biden laptop revelations in 2020. 

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President Trump Named TIME Magazine Person of the Year, They Refuse to Use His Iconic Image, and Slap Him with a Fake Fact-Check

President Donald Trump was named TIME Magazine Person of the Year on Thursday morning.

TIME Magazine refused to use the iconic image of President Trump facing the assassin’s bullet.

That would be obvious and too honest for the TIME staff.

TIME also couldn’t help themselves and fake fact-checked President Trump on the link between vaccines and Autism.

TIME says without hesitation that there is no link. They got this from Big Pharma.
Millions of Americans today would disagree.

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Secret Service fired 6 close-range shots at Ryan Routh—missed them all: report

The US Secret Service (USSS) agent that took shots at Ryan Routh, the second alleged would-be assassin of now-President-elect Donald Trump, reportedly missed six times from around five feet away from Routh. The alarming failure of the agent comes as the USSS has come under higher scrutiny since the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting and attempted assassination of Trump.

Routh, who was positioned around 300-500 yards away from Trump on his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, was taken into custody earlier in the fall after USSS spotted him in the bushes with a rifle. After USSS agents took the shots at him, he ran off and was later arrested and charged in the alleged assassination attempt.

The report from the task force said that on September 15, there was an agent “riding along the fence line” of the golf course and then “noticed an individual by the fence line on the external perimeter.”

“The agent first noticed the suspect, later identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, and then noticed the barrel of Routh’s gun sticking through the fence line. The special agent, who may have been as close as five feet away from Routh, immediately responded by firing shots toward the suspect. It is believed six shots in total were fired; however, final ballistics are pending an ongoing FBI investigation,” the report added.

Routh then fled from the scene to his “pre-positioned vehicle” the report adds. “A bystander who, according to the Secret Service, heard the shots and witnessed Routh running to his vehicle, snapped a photo of Routh’s license plate and provided it to one of the Secret Service special agents,” it continued.

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Trump’s Choice For Top Justice Department Role Says Marijuana Is A ‘Gateway Drug’ That Makes Consumers ‘Boring And Smelly’

President-elect Donald Trump has made his selection for another top Justice Department official: Harmeet Dhillon, who has peddled the gateway drug theory about marijuana and says cannabis makes people who consume it “silly, boring and smelly.”

Trump said on Monday that he intends to nominate Dhillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights. The lawyer has served in leadership roles with the Republican National Committee and California Republican Party, and she’s a frequent Fox News contributor.

For those following the marijuana policy positions of Trump’s cabinet picks, Dhillon’s comments on the issue reveal a staunch opposition to the use of cannabis, which she claimed is a “gateway drug and ambition-killer” following President Joe Biden’s mass marijuana pardons.

This choice for a key DOJ position also comes amid the final steps of the Biden administration’s efforts to reschedule marijuana—a task that the incoming Trump administration will inherit and which his Justice Department will play a pivotal role in facilitating.

Dhillon doesn’t seem expressly opposed to the idea of preventing people from going to jail over simple cannabis possession, however, and she’s pointed out that federal prosecutors rarely go after people over that low-level offense. At one point, she criticized Vice President Kamala Harris over her prosecutorial record on cannabis.

But she’s made her distaste for cannabis consumption clear on a number of occasions.

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Understanding the 14th Amendment

In his efforts to get illegal immigration resolved and/or reversed, President Elect Trump has recently hinted of an executive action to repeal birthright citizenship. This seems to indicate a multiple level of misunderstanding the Constitution of the United States. First is his premise of overriding a Constitutional provision via executive or legislative action. When will our elected officials stop with the efforts to ignore or rewrite a Constitutional provision without taking it to the States?

Secondly, Trump could accomplish his goal by ABIDING by the 14th Amendment. In an excellent article by Professor Edward J. Erler in July of 2008, he helps us to understand the original intent behind the citizenship clause. Section one of the Amendment (which contains the citizenship clause) begins as, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Professor Erler states,

“…during the debate of the [14th A]mendment, Senator Jacob Howard of Ohio, the author of the citizenship clause, attempted to assure skeptical colleagues that the new language was not intended to make Indians citizens of the U.S. Indians, Howard conceded, were born within the nation’s geographical limits, but he steadfastly maintained that they were not subject to its jurisdiction because they owed allegiance to their tribes. Senator Lyman Trumbull, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, rose to support his colleague, arguing that ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ meant ‘not owing allegiance to anybody else and being subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States.’ Jurisdiction understood as allegiance, Senator Howard interjected, excludes not only Indians but ‘persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.’ Thus ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ does not simply mean, as is commonly thought today, subject to American laws or American courts. It means owing exclusive political allegiance to the U.S.”

In the past there has been support from the Mexican government itself for asserting this argument as applied to illegal aliens in the U.S. of any nationality. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon helped us better understand this provision of the 14th Amendment in 2008 while attending the opening of a Mexican Consulate in New Orleans. A report of the event notes,

“At the opening of the consulate, President Calderon, said Mexico wants to assist and protect its citizens in the states of Louisiana and Mississippi that the consulate will serve,” and further quotes the former president: “With the reopening of this consulate, we will be able to guarantee those Mexicans who live and work in Louisiana and Mississippi that they will have the support of the Mexican government. It is my commitment that no matter where there is a Mexican citizen, he or she will also have the support of our government.”

Author asserts that these are basically re-statements of the Constitutional provisions as explained in Professor Erler’s article, courtesy of the then president of Mexico.

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Trump shooting task force unveils bombshell final report on ‘preventable’ assassination attempt

The House Assassination task force released its final and longawait report on Tuesday.

The 180-page report claims the deadly shooting at Donald Trump‘s Butler, Pennsylvania, rally on July 13 was ‘preventable and should not have happened.’

It was released just days after its final public meeting last week where Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe got into a screaming match with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas).

Rowe did acknowledge at the hearing the agency’s ‘abject failure’ in the July shooting.

The 13-member panel was created by a House vote shortly after the first assassination attempt over the summer. And a few months later they were asked to also look into the second incident.

The group concluded that there was no single failure that allowed shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks to fire at Trump, but ‘various’ decisions and moments that created an ideal situation for the assassination attempt.

The Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump released a series of recommendations it feels will help prevent future incidents.

Members of the task force visited both sites where men tried to take out the former – and now future – president.

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The Coming Sea Change at Trump’s FDA: Towards an Era of Safety and Public Transparency for Medical Devices

It has been over a decade since my late-wife, Dr. Amy Josephine Reed, was harmed and killed by a poorly regulated medical device, known as the Power Morcellator. The sheer force of Dr. Reed’s voice, as a Harvard Medical School faculty member and a physician-scientist — and the injustice it uncovered to countless other women like her — became a bellwether case that demonstrates an ongoing and severe safety failure operational in the medical device regulatory space at FDA.

Of course, this safety failure in the FDA’s medical device regulatory arm, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), is hardly unique to that center. Industry and conflicted academic “experts,” not patients, play an outsized role in governing and corrupting almost all of the FDA’s centers. But, certainly, the source of the safety failure at CDRH is crystallized in the dangerous regulatory regime that the agency center utilizes to clear the vast majority of medical devices for the US healthcare marketplace: The 510(k).

At a legislative level, CDRH’s 510(k) regulatory regime was not designed to ensure the safety or efficacy of the medical devices it regulates — a fact that is well known to most public health experts and FDA regulators themselves. CDRH’s 510(k) does not use anything even remotely resembling an “evidence-based” framework to provide clearance to thousands of new medical devices annually used in the care of patients across the US and abroad.

Even more problematic is that the medical device industry pays the FDA for the 510(k) clearances obtained. In other words, almost the entire 510(k) clearance apparatus at CDRH is literally funded by the medical device industry — the very industry that stands to gain the most from the 510(k) clearances it funds. This is a serious conflict of interest in the healthcare space, and should not pass ethical muster — even when the argument is that such payments from industry to government are saving taxpayer dollars. The moment the industry starts paying to keep the FDA’s centers’ lights on is when the industry, not the people, will have an outsized voice in governing the agency that is regulating it.

Worse yet, the CDRH personnel whose 510(k)-related activities are funded by medical device makers exert virtually no real scrutiny over the manufacturer’s claims in their 510(k) applications for market clearance — either because their “reviews” are deliberately superficial and nominal, or because they are grossly incompetent from an expert perspective. It is literally true that the overwhelming majority of medical devices that seek 510(k) clearance for use in the US marketplace are granted them, without difficulty and at mach speed, by any reasonable standard — and although these devices are literally directly engaging the most vulnerable of America’s citizens: patients who trust American healthcare at their most vulnerable!

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President Trump Doubles Down On Pledge To End Birthright Citizenship, A Policy Backed By The Overwhelming Majority Of American People

America, since its inception, has been a place of opportunity for aspiring, high-skilled people.

The geniuses and artisans of Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries flooded to these shores, enriching the society in many cases and making invaluable contributions to American culture – from our culinary traditions to newfound architectural styles – that continue to be influential through the present day.

This custom of selecting only the best and brightest is not anomalous to great nations throughout history.

All nations are only as good as the people which compose them: thus, any worthwhile nation would desire to enhance the quality of its people overall in order to elevate its global standing.

That operative goal, however, cannot be achieved under the present, suicidal policy of citizenship by birthright.

Among nations of the world, America is the only developed one that confers citizenship onto anyone simply for having been born to a parent who managed to inhabit these borders, regardless of legality.

That America is the only noteworthy country to still have this policy in place should be enough evidence alone of its insanity. The prevailing view among liberal legal scholars is that the Fourteenth Amendment sanctions this policy, which is permanent and cannot be altered.

This is flatly wrong. This erroneous interpretation is the byproduct of a slipshod and lazy construction of that particular Amendment, through the prism of erroneous interpretations of largely discredited, or at least, increasingly obsolete legal precedent.

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