Tag: politics

Biased UN Report on Nicaragua Ignores Victims of US-Backed Opposition Violence

Reynaldo Urbina rides his motorbike around the streets of Masaya, Nicaragua, with agility, despite having only one arm. Nearly seven years ago, at the height of a US- supported coup attempt against Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government, Urbina was one of those guarding the city’s municipal warehouse when it was attacked by around 200 armed protestors. Warned of the impending attack, the guards had been ordered to hide their weapons and not resist capture, to minimize casualties.

But Urbina was suspected of knowing the whereabouts of the city’s mayor, whom the hooligans sought to assassinate, so they threw him to the ground and smashed his left arm with a rifle butt until it was practically destroyed. Urbina escaped, but his arm could not be saved, and was later amputated.

When a team was sent by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to Nicaragua to collect evidence on human rights abuses a few weeks later, Urbina was among those offered by the government as a witness. But the team refused to meet him.

The UN’s 40-page report, issued in August 2018, devotes just five paragraphs to violence by anti-government factions; the rest blames the government and its supporters for practically every other violent incident, including many (like an arson attack on a pro-Sandinista radio station) that were clearly part of the coup attempt.

Some time after the coup attempt, Nicaragua’s then vice-minister for foreign affairs, Valdrack Jaentschke, described an exchange with Paulo Abrão, who was the Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The IACHR was another of the bodies which had launched investigations of human rights abuses in 2018. Valdrack had asked Abrão why visiting investigators were not collecting evidence of the severe opposition violence which had taken place. Abrão gave two reasons: that human rights abuses can only be carried out by the state, and that violence by civil society groups is just “common criminality” and therefore not within the investigators’ mandate.

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All the LOLs: Hakeem Jeffries Says Trump Is ‘Losing’ Because Project 2025 or Something

The more I see of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the more I’m convinced that Nancy Pelosi put him in place to make the end phase of her tenure atop the House Democrats look brilliant by comparison. 

Granny Boxwine was one of the most powerful House speakers in American history. A lesser politician would have been out on his or her ear after the shellacking that the Democrats took in the 2010 midterms. She not only survived and remained minority leader, but hung around long enough to become speaker again. True, she was helped by the fact that we let members of Congress stay in office until they drop dead during a floor speech, but she’s also a political force who few in the Democratic Party are willing to go against, even now that she’s “just” a congresswoman. She did kind of limp towards the finish line at the end of her second stint as speaker, though. 

There was never any doubt that she would hand pick her successor, and she needed one who would make Democrats miss her being in charge. 

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The Morning Briefing: Dems’ Voter Outreach to the Clinically Insane Continues Unabated

Happy Friday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Srappanzeeh did his best haiku whilst in a Cool Ranch Doritos and unlimited Orange Dreamsicle micro-trance. 

Back when the Democrats were a formidable political party, it was easy to identify their core constituencies, mostly because of the egregious pandering they did to get their votes. Last year’s presidential election made them a little wobbly after two of those constituencies — black men and Latinos — became Trump voters. The Dem elites had relied on their voting bloc remaining intact in perpetuity, and the change in their status quo set them to spinning out of control.

They should be wrapping up a painful journey through the five stages grief, or at least be deep into it. Instead, they’ve set up camp in stage one: denial. That’s really not a good place from which to plan a political comeback: a focused one, anyway. They’ve been flailing a lot, but these past few days have really been out of control.

This is from something my friend Stephen Green wrote yesterday:

It can’t be easy, striving for relevance as members of a political party so far out of the mainstream that they can’t even golf clap for a cancer kid getting his presidential Make a Wish moment on national TV or for the widow and daughters of a slain veteran. 

When you stand for nothing aside from looting the Treasury — any excuse will do, including chemically castrating children — and opposing the Bad Orange Man, you’ve got to figure out ways to distract the American public from your complete moral vacancy. 

What they did was record a video that will make you want to take a shower after seeing it and bleach everything in the room where you watched it. Just as with their infamously bad memes, these video attempts by the Dems to connect with the people are beyond painful. They think they’re cool, though. It’s like an entire political movement full of people who didn’t have friends in high school. Or get good grades. 

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Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Orders Arrest of US Citizen for Political Speech

Brazil’s pro-censorship Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has issued an arrest warrant for Flavia Cordeiro Magalhaes, a US citizen of Brazilian origin, who has lived in Florida for over 20 years.

According to her legal representative, what Moraes is attempting to do here is lock up a US citizen for political speech expressed on US soil – meaning that the warrant in effect “raises questions about US sovereignty.”

Moraes appears to have first ordered Magalhaes’ X account blocked in Brazil because of a post from 2022, which she made while in the US.

According to Magalhaes, she was unaware of the block at the time, since she was not notified by the Brazilian court. But because she continued posting on X, this eventually led to an order to place her in pre-trial detention, under the pretext that she was allegedly in contempt of court.

That is supposed to have occurred when she traveled to Brazil in December 2023 and was told her Brazilian passport was “under restriction” – but even though she entered and left the country legally, using her US passport, Moraes decided to treat this as the use of “a false document” – and issue the pre-trial detention order in February of last year.

All this, despite Brazil’s federal police documents stating that Magalhaes traveled to and from Brazil legally.

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DOGE Is Not Elected—Neither Are the IRS, DOJ, or FBI, Yet They Hold Authority

Senator Elizabeth Warren was asked what she’d like to say to Elon Musk and DOGE; her response, which is now going viral on Twitter, was, “Get the hell out of our government. Nobody elected you.”

However, this response is incredibly shortsighted and disingenuous. The overwhelming majority of government positions are not elected. In fact, only the President and Vice President are elected by the entire country. Senators and Representatives are elected by voters in their respective states and districts.

However, beyond these positions, no other officials in the federal government—including those in the IRS, DOJ, and FBI —are elected; they are appointed or hired.

Roughly 4 million federal government employees are not elected. There is no way Senator Elizabeth Warren doesn’t know that, making her position disingenuous. The millions of Democrats and liberals retweeting this and making similarly uninformed statements may genuinely be unaware. However, the congressional representatives pushing this narrative know it is false.

The same crowd is now shouting that Elon Musk “got ahold of classified documents” or “wants to get ahold of classified documents,” but this is nonsense. Musk already holds extremely high-level security clearances due to his work with NASA, SpaceX, and other defense-related projects. His companies have major government contracts with the Department of Defense (DoD), NASA, and the U.S. Space Force, all of which require access to classified information.

Some with a sophomoric understanding of security clearances argue that he only has “need-to-know” access, which is partially true, but there’s no evidence that he has accessed—or is even attempting to access—documents beyond his authorized clearance. His job requires access to a broad range of government data, and there’s no indication that he lacks the necessary clearance for it.

The claim that Musk shouldn’t be allowed to access sensitive data is pure political posturing rather than a genuine security concern. He already has the clearances, and there’s no concrete accusation that he’s accessing anything he shouldn’t.

The other baseless claim these people are making is that Elon Musk should be arrested, deported, or stripped of his citizenship, but this makes no sense for several reasons.

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PUPPET STRINGS: 23 Democrats post identical scripted videos — who’s writing the scripts?

It started with just two.

Earlier today, some eagle eyed viewers noticed that Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren posted IDENTICAL propaganda videos — word for word — attacking President Trump.

(Article by Noah republished from 100PercentFedUp.com)

The b-roll video was the same, the scripts were identical, and they both read them like the good little puppets they are.

Take a look:

Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren posted identical videos — word for word — right before Trump’s speech. pic.twitter.com/NXTFZtJ81d

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 4, 2025

Elon Musk jumped in to ask who is writing the words for the puppets to speak?

Who is writing the words that the puppets speak? That’s the real question. https://t.co/N8kaTj8vPU

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 4, 2025

From 2 it grew to 3:

BREAKING – 3 democrat Senators Schumer, Warren, and Booker have been caught plagiarizing the same script word-for-word. pic.twitter.com/QmjgaiEwyZ

— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) March 4, 2025

And from 3 it jumped to 5:

There are at least 5 puppet Democrats saying the same thing now. pic.twitter.com/qdCCgSLuHQ

— Adam Smith (@AdamSmithKY) March 4, 2025

And then I’ll just cut to the chase….so far as of press time for this article there have been 23 Democrat Senators posting their own versions of the puppet video…

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Unhinged Democrats Scream Like Asylum Patients At Hearing 

Oversight Committee chairman James Comer found himself having to yell over extremist Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley Wednesday in the House as she attempted to kick up a fuss and get media attention.

Comer denied her request for unanimous consent to enter articles into the congressional record, including one from 2018 claiming that American citizens commit more murder and rape than immigrants.

Pressley announced that she was submitting the articles “as a survivor of sexual violence myself,” going on to scream that it was her procedural right to enter the articles.

“Okay, this trend that you’re all trying to get thrown out of committees so you can get on MSNBC is gonna end,” Comer interjected, asserting “We’re not gonna put up with it.”

Pressley attempted to continue reading the article, screeching at Comer “You do not get to dictate how I recite the articles for the record.”

 “No, no,” Comer shouted over her, explaining “It is [Democratic Virginia Rep. Suhas] Subramanyam’s time. No, you know the process of unanimous consent, you’re not recognized.”

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Canary in the Coal Mine: Romania’s Dying Democracy

The commitment of Washington’s European allies to democracy is increasingly fragile, if not hypocritical, as Vice President J D Vance highlighted in his speech to the Munich Security Conference last month. That problem is most acute in Romania. In the first round of the country’s presidential election on November 24, 2024, Calin Georgescu, the candidate of a right-wing populist party, unexpectedly led the field. In addition to having populist social views, Georgescu is an outspoken critic of NATO. His “apostasy” on that issue makes him especially unacceptable to Romania’s political establishment and its U.S. supporters.

The United States was already busily expanding its Mihail Kogalniceanu military base at Constanta in southeastern Romania to eclipse even Washington’s long-time principal European base, Ramstein, in Germany. The expanded facility in Romania would be 50 percent larger than Ramstein, and it would bring a massive U.S. military presence much closer to Russia. U.S. and Romanian officials were not pleased about the prospect of having those plans aborted by a new, less friendly government in Bucharest.

To make matters even worse for the two parties in the current governing coalition, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL), both of them failed to place a candidate in the runoff round. Instead, Elena Lasconi, a reformer representing another “minor” party took the other runoff spot. Thus, the establishment parties would not be able to focus their fire exclusively on Georgescu in the hope of inflicting a decisive defeat on the maverick.  Instead, whichever outsider prevailed in the runoff would not be from the usual governing elite or be a reliable client of the United States and its NATO partners.

The response of the beleaguered establishment forces was to get the country’s election commission, which the PSD and PNL dominated, to nullify the first round election results.  Romania’s Constitutional Court, which the PSD and PNL also dominated, ratified the election commission’s edict just two days before the runoff round was to be held. Instead, the Court rescheduled that round for May 4, 2025.  Both the Commission and the Court alleged that the election had been tainted by “Russian interference.” However, neither body cited tangible evidence of such interference on Moscow’s part, much less established that the alleged meddling was sufficiently egregious to nullify the election results. As New York Times reporter Andrew Higgins concluded: “The court’s intervention came after Romania’s security service released declassified intelligence reports that pointed to possible Russian interference in the election campaign but provided no solid evidence of that.”

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If We Set Aside Ideology, Is There Anything We Can Agree On?

Just the experiment of setting aside ideological certainties for a moment would be instructive.

Humans are hard-wired to prefer simplicity over complexity, and this is the foundation of ideology, which like mythology takes a complex world and radically simplifies it to an easily digestible construct. (I tease all this apart in my book The Mythology of Progress.)

Being social animals, humans are also hard-wired to quickly form loyalties to groups and gravitate to one camp. Very few football fans (if any) have zero loyalty to any team and have zero emotional stake (i.e. there’s no team they hope loses and none they hope will win).

Uncertainty generates anxiety, and so we settle the real world’s many uncertainties with internal certainty: an ideology is a simple sketch of how the world works, and we will defend this emotionally powerful construct even as evidence piles up that it doesn’t accurately map all of the world’s complexities. We will deny, rationalize and cherry-pick examples to “prove” our ideological certainties map the real world.

The problem with radically simplified constructs like mythologies and ideologies is they cannot possibly map the world accurately as complex, interactive systems don’t reduce down to a simplified construct. So every ideological construct ends up denying, rationalizing and cherry-picking examples to cover the inherent weaknesses of simplifying the world into bite-sized constructs.

Our intense drive to establish and nurture loyalties leads to emotionally satisfying but often counter-productive convolutions, such as any enemy of my enemy is my friend and any friend of my enemy is my enemy.

The problems with ideological constructs are magnified in tumultuous times as ideologies map a rapidly shrinking share of the real world. The internally coherent ideology drifts further into incoherence, and our natural defense is not to become more open-minded (i.e. actively embrace uncertainty and entertain new ideas) but to cling even harder to the simplified certainties that generate our internal sense of self and certainty.

Since the faithful of competing ideologies are pursuing the same strategy to reduce anxiety, our loyalties clash with increasing intensity. That possibility that all the ideologies claiming to map the real world are increasingly detached from real-world dynamics doesn’t occur to any true believer in any camp, for each believer remains confident (and when pushed, becomes ever more adamant) that their ideology is the one true construct that faithfully maps all of the real world’s immense complexity.

Such is the power of these internally coherent constructs that we don’t see them as belief structures, we see them as the bedrock of truth. We don’t recognize our ideological beliefs as beliefs open to question, and so when challenged, we respond defensively: Ideology? What ideology? What I’m saying is the truth. Yes, true to us, but an accurate account / map of all the world’s complexity? No.

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Serbian Opposition Throw Smoke Grenades and Tear Gas at Fellow Members of Parliament — One Lawmaker in Critical Condition

Things may get heated in Congress, but never do they fall apart like this.

Opposition lawmakers in Serbia threw smoke grenades and tear gas at fellow parliamentarians in a show of opposition to the government and to express their support for current student protests.

The demonstrations were a response to the collapse of a roof at a train station several months ago that killed 15 people and now threatens to bring down the country’s government.

The attack took place during a legislative session after the ruling coalition, led by the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), approved the parliamentary agenda.

As the agenda was approved, several opposition politicians rushed toward the parliamentary speaker, clashing with security guards.

Other individuals then threw smoke grenades and tear gas, covering the room in black and pink smoke.

Two people were injured by the attack, according to House Speaker Ana Brnabic, with one suffering a stroke and currently in critical condition.

“The parliament will continue to work and to defend Serbia,” she told the session.

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