Category Archives: General Interest

January 11, 2017 · 10:59 pm

Trump: the Russian patsy

Trump uses Twitter not only to get out his messaging, without having to go through the media, but he also uses it constantly to set-up the media with inflammatory tweets, to get them to overreact.

The mainstream media went all-in on running the Clinton Scorched Earth 2.0 pile-on to bury Trump in dirt during the general election. Wikileaks used hacked emails to expose the Democrats corrupt media collusion to run the Clinton talking points, memes and even emails exposing Donna Brazile sneaking debate questions to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which assuredly is cheating.

Trump won the election legitimately despite massive corruption, from the “GOP Insurgency” where the mainstream media and FOX News gave Trump BILLIONS of dollars in free media to promote Trump. Without that unfair advantage, I doubt Trump would have been able to pull off his “winning in all the polls” and “Trump doesn’t play by the rules” mantra. The spin effort also railroaded Republican leaders into endless set-up questioning, asserting, “Trump is winning in the polls, don’t you need to get behind the winner?” This was an orchestrated messaging campaign. However, in the end no one coerced anyone to vote for a particular candidate and the Department of Homeland Security reported that there were no irregular cyber activities to hack into voting machines detected.

There were plenty of statements made by Trump sleazes, like Roger Stone, throughout the campaign that presaged Wikileaks hits, as if they knew about the Wikileaks email releases in advance of their release. There’s plenty of evidence that the mainstream media went along with the GOP Insurgency in the primary to throw the GOP into chaos and help Hillary. There was plenty of corruption in both presidential camps and also with the media participating in scorched earth campaign efforts, Trump glorying in Wikileaks leaks, in addition to unsavory campaign attacks like Hillary’s campaign orchestrating the Alicia Machado hit on Trump and DrudgeReport and Breitbart launching stories to hype Hillary the decrepit old woman spin efforts.

The 2016 presidential election was a national embarrassment, with two candidates who will do or say anything, no matter how low, to win.

The FBI Notes on Hillary’s email server have been glossed over by Democrats and the mainstream media, who are content to repeat that FBI director, James Comey, said there was nothing criminal about Hillary and her cronies using an unsecured private server to send highly classified information. The media and Dems also latch onto and repeat that the FBI said her server wasn’t hacked. Well, the FBI Notes show, another server the Clintons used, 13 blackberries Hillary used and none of them were ever handed over to the FBI, plus some laptops that had server emails on them. The Platte River Network also had Hillary’s emails on a server and they Bleach Bit the emails and they put those emails on a laptop and mailed it to Hillary’s lawyers, but it got lost in the mail.

What the FBI was investigating was email CHAINS. From the FBI notes and released emails, it’s apparent that people beyond the State Department were involved in these CHAINS and some of them used private email to email Hillary – that exposed classified information too. How anyone can be sure information on Hillary’s servers was not compromised by hostile foreign intelligence boggles the mind when one considers how many unsecure and unaccounted for devices were used to send and receive these emails. Then along comes the perv Weiner’s laptop and lo’ and behold Huma Abedin had lots of State Department emails stored on that laptop, which she never turned over. My hunch is we have not heard the last of that Weiner/Abedin laptop and those emails. I have never believed the story that the Clinton criminal investigation was reopened, that close to the election, just so the FBI could get a subpoena and read them. I believe there’s a lot more to this story.

Hillary’s email server was really Bill Clinton’s private server, which he had set-up in his home to for his Clinton Foundation emails. When Hillary became Secretary of State, that server was upgraded to what the FBI referred to as the Pagliano server. So, while the FBI’s focus was classified State Department emails on Hillary’s private server, that server contained not only Hillary’s emails, but also Bill Clinton foundation & personal emails, Chelsea Clinton had an account on that server also Huma Abedin. The foundation emails were why, I believe, so much effort was made to Bleach Bit the Platte River server and why David Kendall, Cheryl Mills, went to such extraordinary lengths to cover-up the scandal and why Heather Samuelson, refused to even tell the FBI what keywords were used in searching Hillary’s emails ostensibly for State Dept. work-related emails. Hillary kept saying that she never told anyone to delete any emails and that’s probably true, because I believe the real scandal that needed to be covered up was not classified emails on her home-brew server, but Bill Clinton’s Clinton Foundation emails and that Bill Clinton orchestrated this cover-up with his long-time lawyer and friend, David Kendall. Mainstream media reported that David Kendall had a thumb drive of the entire email content on that server, so where is that thumb drive? Patrick Kennedy, the State Department employee, who has done his best to thwart the Congressional Oversight Committee’s investigation, under oath stated that he believed the FBI has that thumb drive. That thumb drive of the server contents should exonerate the Clintons, who claim to be innocent victims of a right-wing witch hunt.

Let’s move on to Trump, the lying, corrupt, con man and his latest antics attacking US intelligence over the Russian hacking. Trump has been playing this game touting Wikileaks and trashing US intelligence, which undermines US national security.

We have a president-elect who is touting a Russian front, while openly attacking US intelligence agencies.

Yesterday, Buzzfeed published a dossier of unverified information about compromising intelligence the Russians have on Trump. The media went into frenzies on Twitter, but Trump attacked the media, the dossier and US intelligence agencies today. He started off the morning with some tweets touting the Russian government as stating the dossier is false. Got that – the president-elect of the United States trusts Russian intelligence, but does not trust US intelligence agencies.

Here are Trump’s morning tweets:

‏@realDonaldTrump

Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is “A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE.” Very unfair!

‏@realDonaldTrump

Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!

‏@realDonaldTrump

I win an election easily, a great “movement” is verified, and crooked opponents try to belittle our victory with FAKE NEWS. A sorry state!

‏@realDonaldTrump

Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?

Then Donald Trump set-up a press conference where he did his usual sideshow. He had stage props of course, but in this one he had a table of folders supposedly containing information on how he will separate himself from his business, where in that VA fundraiser press conference he had a million dollar check to a Marine charity as a stage prop or the press conference where he had Trump steak, wine and magazines to tout his great businesses. He attacked the media today , but he also attacked US intelligence agencies.

I think he’s a national security threat to the United States. That is my gut feeling and I believe he lashed out like this because he knows the FBI and US intelligence agencies are investigating his ties to the Russian mob. I believe there’s way more to the Clinton investigation than her unsecured email server too. Knowing how she jeopardized highly classified information, because she didn’t want to have to carry two devices (that was her lame explanation) she is definitely a threat to national security and should never be allowed to handle sensitive information again.

And since Trump lives on Twitter, I suspect what set him and his corrupt cronies in Trump Tower off into staging this sideshow today were tweets by various people on Twitter alluding to US intelligence investigations, like former NSA analyst, John Schindler’s tweetstorm January 9th:

https://storify.com/Ayei_Eloheichem/trump-the-russian-mob-and-the-fsb.

Schindler lays out allegations that Trump is a long-time money-launderer for the Russian mob in 15 tweets, like this one:

John Schindler ✔@20committee

There are literally dozens of Russian OC scams, some gargantuan, that we know were based at Trump properties — quite a coincidence. /10

10:43 AM – 9 Jan 2017

And along with the Russians and Trump playing tag team at the expense of US intelligence, Wikileaks kept tweeting crap like this:

WikiLeaks ‏@wikileaks 13h13 hours ago

WikiLeaks Retweeted Donald J. Trump

Trump understanding the difference between a leak and a “leak” (a pseudo-leak or plant with pet media by CIA/admin)

WikiLeaks added,

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?

231 replies2,589 retweets4,709 likes

This is where I’m at in regards to Trump – I hope the FBI and US Intelligence agencies complete their investigations quickly and I hope they find enough to impeach Trump. The sooner the better. I have watched his tweets praising Putin and the way they tag team messages back and forth for several weeks, but seeing him insinuate US intelligence agencies are Nazis, while accepting Russian intel without question shows he is the MOST USEFUL IDIOT the Russians have ever acquired.

I sure don’t support a do-over election. The election was legitimate. For weeks, I’ve been saying he deserves a chance and he does. I never thought I would hope a President of the United States gets impeached, but after watching Trump undercut, belittle, and undermine US intelligence, while praising Wikileaks, Putin and now Russian intelligence, playing right into their propaganda, well, I believe Donald J. Trump is a threat to The Constitution. I hope we have some leaders who will abide by The Constitution and vigilantly watch every step Trump takes as President and I pray that our intelligence agencies come up with enough compelling evidence to impeach him. It feels odd to have a president-elect, whom I hope the FBI can build a case for Congress to say to Donald J. Trump, “You’re fired!”

His games with Putin are a threat to the United States, because he is not only undermining Americans’ confidence in US intelligence agencies, every time he pulls these sideshow gimmicks, he’s undercutting America’s standing with our long-time allies.

I also hope the FBI can make a case against the Clintons and their massive money-laundering operation through the Clinton Foundation.

I would love to see Trump and the Clintons wholesale public corruption exposed and their money-laundering operations hung out to dry.

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Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption, The Constitution

January 9, 2017 · 10:15 am

The road to becoming an “information specialist”

Growing up in the 60s & 70s, with America divided over the Vietnam War, the endless partisan one-upmanship between the Left and the Right is all I’ve ever known. For a few moments after 9/11 it seemed like America had united for a common purpose, but it quickly turned into more of the rancorous partisan flame-throwing, blame games, and jockeying for political advantage atop the World Trade Center rubble and thousands of dead victims. Despite the divides in America, I had the privilege to be a part of a unified team – the United States Army.

I became a Cold War warrior in 1979, when I enlisted in the United States Army. That experience reinforced my core values, which already aligned with the Army’s Values, but it also greatly shaped my world view. Reading about foreign policy, foreign intelligence operations, military affairs and being an unrepentant news junkie became life-long habits, but I am not an expert on anything.

My overriding political belief is that every American should diligently protect and defend The Constitution, because the rule of law protects the rights that keep us free. Everyone has to play by the rules, no exceptions.

This blog and everything I write is MY OPINION. I make no claims to being an expert on anything. After my short time in the Army, I devoted my time from 1981 to 1999 to being a homemaker and volunteer in Army communities wherever we lived. While everything I write is my opinion, I do try to cite sources and explain how and why I believe the things that I do. If anything I write is not properly attributed to a source, please tell me and I will edit it immediately.

In 1980, I was assigned to a Pershing missile battalion, as a public affairs specialist. Of course, being 19 yrs. old and having completed a three-month basic journalism course at the Defense Information School, I really wasn’t much of a journalist and knowing next to nothing about the Army, I assuredly wasn’t a “specialist” on anything.

I’ve written plenty about my family, my life and assuredly more about my political opinions than anyone wants to read. However, this post is going to be a another personal story, except this time I’m trekking back to 1980 and some important things I learned serving in a Pershing missile battalion.

My trip from the Defense Information School (DINFOS) at Fort Benjamin Harrison, IN to my Pershing missile battalion in southern West Germany went about like most trips in my life – some bad luck with my baggage. I flew to Philadelphia and was supposed to go from Philadelphia to McGuire Air Force Base and from there to Germany.

When I went to retrieve my bags in Philadelphia, which consisted of a large suitcase and my duffel bag with all my Army uniforms, my suitcase was missing. At the counter I was informed that my suitcase had likely been sent back to Pittsburgh. So, I filled out the necessary paperwork for missing baggage, then found the bus I was supposed to take to McGuire.

At McGuire, my parents were waiting, having driven from the Pocono Mountains in PA to see me off to Germany. My mother was very worried about me flying to Germany by myself, but I kept telling her that I wasn’t alone, I was with soldiers who are all part of my team and besides that a girl, who had become a good friend at DINFOS, was on the same flight as me. I introduced her to my parents.

The Army back then didn’t do direct assignments for lower enlisted soldiers, so at the 21st Replacement in Frankfurt, it was a routine of standing in formations constantly, as names were called out and soldiers given their assignments, processed and sent on their merry way to an Army unit in Germany. I ended up being sent to a Pershing missile battalion.

Being very scared of guns, the bus trip to my unit was hours of reading my information packet over and over, then staring at the big Pershing missile on the front of the packet. All I did was worry about what I had gotten myself into. I joined the Army after refusing to go back to college after my freshman year. My parents were hounding me to death that summer of 1979 and I decided I needed to get a job.

I don’t know why I settled on the Army, but along with receiving a lot of college information in high school, I also had military recruiting brochures. The recruiting information made it sound like travel and interesting jobs, more than signing up to protect America. I called the Army recruiter, who came to our home and I signed my paperwork without even telling my parents. My mother was beside herself, to say the least. During my swearing-in ceremony, in a group of dozens of other enlistees, there was this woman loudly sobbing in the back of the room… that was my mother.

It was very cold when I arrived in southern Germany, in January 1980, with only my duffel bag of military uniforms and no civilian clothes, because my suitcase was still in the States. The battalion had around 1000 men and less than 100 females. The little PX on our kaserne had no women’s clothes, so I bought a couple of pairs of men’s jeans, a couple sweatshirts, and a tan, bomber-style corduroy jacket.

Even though I had bad luck with my luggage and I had worried myself sick on the bus ride, I hit the jackpot on leadership there.

Some people can inspire you for life, even though they’re only in your life a very short time. Many teachers are like this. In the Army there are many outstanding leaders, who can do that too. The Army has two tracts of leadership – commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs), with two distinct military missions. NCOs are the leaders who carry out the day-to-day training and execution of the mission in the military – they are the leaders soldiers rely on for daily guidance. My first sergeant in my battery (field artillery units call their companies – batteries) was a hard-as-nails, 82nd Airborne/Vietnam vet, who had a single focus on being prepared for war. He was also one of the best leaders I have ever met. Despite the gruffness, he took the time to get to know his soldiers. He not only talked to his soldiers – he listened to them. What I liked best was he was willing to listen to questions and patiently answer them.

My first battalion commander also left a lasting impression and was an outstanding leader. He also talked to his soldiers and listened to them. He explained the Army and our mission in terms that made me feel like I was part of a long-tradition of warriors dedicated to the most important mission – national defense. He also often mentioned bits of military history that inspired in me a life-long love of reading military history. In a few months, he inspired me for life – that is a great leader.

I met my husband in that unit too and he was a very good NCO, who taught me one of the most important life lessons: The mind controls the body, the body does not control the mind. He also convinced me that I could conquer fear and win, even when fear had convinced me that I couldn’t do something.

He also inspired in me a belief in diligently reading and studying boring training manuals, regulations, reports, etc. Although my job was ostensibly an “information specialist” and he was an 82nd paratrooper, he taught me that every soldier should become an “information specialist”, in the sense of learning as much about soldiering and how the Army works from top to bottom. He was like a walking encyclopedia of Army knowledge, even as a young sergeant.

He taught me that other people are counting on me to be part of the Army team.

Learning that it’s not about “me”, but about “we” is a lesson all Americans, especially the partisans, should learn.

The word count for this post is well over a 1000 and I didn’t tell the story I intended to, so I’m going to write about that story in another post. That story fits in with being an “information specialist” too.

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Filed under American Character, General Interest, Military

January 7, 2017 · 12:04 pm

LB blog repost on Wikileaks from August 2016

Trust, only after arduous fact-checking

In July, Donald Trump made bizarre comments in regard to Hillary Clinton’s emails. He was saying he hopes the Russians find the 30,000 missing and return them. He also praised Putin as a strong leader. The NY Times reported:

DORAL, Fla. — Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he hoped Russian intelligence services had successfully hacked Hillary Clinton’s email, and encouraged them to publish whatever they may have stolen, essentially urging a foreign adversary to conduct cyberespionage against a former secretary of state.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference here in an apparent reference to Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Mr. Trump’s call was another bizarre moment in the mystery of whether Vladimir V. Putin’s government has been seeking to influence the United States’ presidential race.

His comments came amid questions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, which American intelligence agencies have told the White House they have “high confidence” was the work of the Russian government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-clinton-emails.html?_r=0

Trump’s comments were construed by Democrats as urging the Russians to hack America and by Trump followers as either he was urging Putin to hand them over to the FBI or pointing out how much Hillary jeopardized national security, which seems an irrefutable FACT – she did jeopardize national security. However, there’s an ominous danger to trusting in anything hostile foreign intelligence agents release, even though sometimes they do release factual information. It’s always important to keep in mind that their objective is to stir up distrust among our allies, or distrust between Americans and their government or distrust between our partisan political factions. Their objective is NEVER to benefit America or the American people.

Their efforts are ALWAYS to HARM America. It is very important to remember that they follow a ruthless “divide and conquer” strategy at all times and playing sides against each other remains their favorite tactic. It’s a very vicious and cynical form of fighting, of the type psycho women engage in when catfighting – poisoning people, setting up sex traps, playing people against each other, spreading vicious rumors, etc. It is a warfare tactic for BULLIES, who are really nothing more than wimps, imo.

BUT trusting Putin or Wikileaks, an organization widely believed to be a Russian front organization by many US intelligence experts, is NOT the answer.

No American should trust Wikileaks’ revelations at face value. Herein comes a short warning message about Russian active measures and their long history of incredibly sophisticated and sometimes brilliant disinformation campaigns against the West, and America in particular:

As this scorched earth presidential campaign between these two vile,very corrupt candidates descends toward hell, we the American people will be ruthlessly manipulated and lied to, not only by the candidates and their mouthpieces, but by our very corrupt media, by BIG moneyed interests like, George Soros, and ALSO by some foreign intelligence agencies, working to sway this election.

Here are a few links on Wikileaks being a Russian front:

http://observer.com/2016/07/wikileaks-dismantling-of-dnc-is-clear-attack-by-putin-on-clinton/

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/07/how-putin-weaponized-wikileaks-influence-election-american-president/130163/

http://observer.com/2016/08/vladimir-putin-has-already-won-our-election/

RedState had a piece on Russian disinformation, “Harry Reid Joins Donald Trump In Pushing Russian Dezinformatsiya In The United States” yesterday and there’s a link to a very interesting CIA study into the Russian AIDS disinformation campaign, to plant the false story that the CIA created AIDS as a biological agent. This disinformation lie still resonates today, especially in the black community.

Here’s the link to the CIA study on that Russian disinformation campaign: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol53no4/pdf/U-%20Boghardt-AIDS-Made%20in%20the%20USA-17Dec.pdf

The black community in America, due to America’s long, difficult history on race, makes it a group that the Russians (and Soviets), Islamists and others hostile to America frequently target with disinformation campaigns to make them distrust the US government. Trump and Hillary are also targeting the black community with campaign rhetoric (much of it lies).

With so many people targeting, we the American people, with LIES, it’s best to trust, only after arduous fact-checking. And even then, be prepared to consider new information that comes to light, because we’re in for a rough few months between now and November in this take no prisoners, scorched earth battle of the wholesale public corruption titans, Drumpfzilla vs. the Witch of Chappaqua, as they slug it out in the sewer for the keys to the White House.

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Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Hillary's Email Scandal, Politics, Public Corruption, ThatWitch2016, The Media

January 6, 2017 · 4:02 pm

#DefendTheConstitutionAlways

Another day of America politics gone off the rails.

Congress certified the Electoral College vote from December, so it’s official, Donald J. Trump will be the next United States President and Mike Pence will be the next Vice President.

Now, to the surreal, is the intelligence nightmare that continues over the Russian hacking and what influence it had in the 2016 Presidential election.

Yesterday, intelligence officials testified under oath to Congress finally, but there were no smoking gun sound bites from that hearing presided over by Senator John McCain.

Hours later news media outlets started reporting on leaked information from a senior administration official:

“Meanwhile, US intelligence has received new information following the election that gave agencies increased confidence that Russia carried out the hack and did so, in part, to help Trump win.

Included in that new information were intercepted conversations of Russian officials expressing happiness at Trump’s win. Another official described some of the messages as congratulatory.

Officials said this was just one of multiple indicators to give them high confidence of both Russian involvement and Russian intentions. Officials reiterated that there is no single intercepted communication that qualifies as a “smoking gun” on Russia’s intention to benefit Trump’s candidacy or to claim credit for doing so.”

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/05/politics/intel-report-says-us-identifies-go-betweens-who-gave-emails-to-wikileaks/index.html

What outraged me was intercepted signal intelligence was leaked by the Obama administration to clearly bolster the Democratic spin effort to delegitimize Trump’s win, when top intelligence officials were in front of the cameras for hours earlier and had the opportunity to provide intelligence that was deemed suitable for release to the public. It’s disgusting to see intelligence gathered to keep all Americans safe used to fuel partisan political agendas.

Trump is demanding Congress investigate this leak that he perceives as a witch-hunt, but he has devoted a lot of effort to sucking up to Putin and championing Julian Assange as some sort of crusader for the truth, when in reality Assange’s leaking is not geared toward governmental transparency, as he claims, but works to destabilize western democracies and foment distrust among Western alliances. His operation works to bolster the agenda of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.

The American mainstream media greatly discredited itself by participating in the Clinton Scorched Earth 2.0 effort to promote the GOP Insurgency to the tune of billions of dollars in free media and selling Trump talking points and sitting on piles of dirt on Trump during the primary. Then in the general election, the mainstream media jumped into action working to bury Trump in all that dirt they had compiled for months.

Trump mastered the Clinton scorched earth, Sure, he benefited from the Wikileaks leaks and the FBI criminal investigation being reopened, but he also benefited from Hillary’s terrible missteps like calling Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables” and sanctimonious speeches, poor campaign planning on which states to visit and a lack of a campaign message. She campaigned on “Trump is Deplorable” and it backfired.

Trump’s talking points – the “Make America Great Again” slogan, the focus on jobs, securing the border, and rebuilding the military resonated with many Americans as meat and potatoes issues.

If anything provided Trump the boost to winning this election, I would argue it’s the very corrupt billions of dollars of free media he was given by the media in the primary to wage his GOP Insurgency on the cheap. Who the media colluded with for the Trump primary spin messaging has not been reported. Who fed Trump those primary talking points and advised him to spin the “winning in all the polls” and other memes, has not been revealed yet either.

Wikileaks exposed the Clinton campaign’s corrupt media collusion, but make no mistake of it Trump’s GOP Insurgency was a product of corrupt media collusion too.

That’s why I was #NeverTump&NeverHillary all along. Trump won the corrupt scorched earth battle, but the long war of protecting and defending The Constitution is the one every American should be fighting. Both political parties in American are now completely controlled by very corrupt leadership.

The Democratic Party machine is a known entity, The Clinton machine corruption is a known entity. President Obama and his ties to the Chicago political machine are a known entity.

Trump’s financial ties to foreigners, his connections to organized crime, even his tax records aren’t known. Trump’s siding with Putin and Wikileaks while attacking American intelligence agencies should raise alarm bells. Trump’s insistence on tweeting about nuclear policy and other serious foreign policy issues should raise alarms too.

Trump corrupts everyone around him. He is like the Clintons in that regard. Newt Gingrich these days sounds like Lanny Davis. Back in November Gingrich started selling thwarting anti-nepotism laws, so that Trump could have his son-in-law, Jared Kushner and daughter, Ivanka, working in the White House:

““I think they would have to get a waiver to the anti-nepotism law,” Gingrich, a longtime Trump surrogate, said on “Fox and Friends” on Wednesday. “That might be a little tricky, although I think if they worked at it, they could do it.””

http://www.politico.com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/2016/11/jared-kushner-may-need-nepotism-waiver-231794

Here’s Rep. Pete King on Julian Assange, pre-Trumpian and now:

“This person should be pursued,” King declared in a November 2010 Fox News interview. “Assange is absolutely guilty. He does have blood on his hands. And the fact is that there should be much more outrage.”

“They are aiding and abetting terrorist organizations. They are providing the weapons to terrorist organizations, giving them information which they can use to kill Americans,” King said of WikiLeaks, adding, “Because they are accessories to a terrorist organization, we should declare them a terrorist organization.”

In December that same year, Rep. King introduced a bill targeting WikiLeaks.

“I consider Mr. Assange a handmaiden of terror. And he definitely has blood on his hands as far as I’m concerned,” said former CIA Director James Woolsey, now a Trump national security adviser and media surrogate, in a November 2010 MSNBC interview.

Contrast that to his response Wednesday when asked about Mr. Trump’s citing of Julian Assange. “I don’t know what Julian Assange knows,” Woolsey said. “This really ought to be a situation in which we get at the facts and understand them before we start making judgments, it seems to me

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/key-trump-surrogates-once-led-fight-vs-wikileaks-and-assange/ar-BBxUNoz

Thankfully, James Woolsey had his fill of the Trump moral vacuum and walked away as a senior adviser to Trump yesterday. One can only wonder how far Newt and some of these others will go selling their souls to prop up Donald J. Trump.

What alarms me the most is how effortlessly the Russians have been able to keep Americans frothing in partisan battles, to the point partisan factions put advancing their partisan agenda above the national security of the United States. A president-elect with the emotional maturity of a 10 year-old champions Putin, strong-men in general, and a Russian front – Wikileaks and a senior official in the current White House is leaking intercepts of high level Russian officials to score partisan points.

Donald Trump was legally elected. There was plenty of corrupt campaigning on both sides, corrupt media collusion and corrupt influence from abroad, but Homeland Security reported there was no unusual activity detected on election day, tampering with ballots. Americans are free citizens and no one forced them to vote a certain way.

I will support President Trump on issues where I believe his policies are beneficial to America, but if he strays from The Constitution, I will speak out and support constitutional efforts to deal with that, whether it be through Congressional actions or Supreme Court rulings – the same as I have supported with every other President of the United States.

We are at a perilous cross-roads in America. No matter what happens, my devotion is to defending The Constitution and referring to the rule of law to be championed above partisan causes.

That is where I stand:

#DefendTheConstitionAlways

#SayNoToPublicCorruption

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Filed under General Interest, Politics, The Constitution, The Media

January 5, 2017 · 1:01 pm

A woodpecker in my willow tree

My husband, who is disabled, spends a lot of time sitting in what I call the “sun room”, which was our screened in back porch. We had windows installed and heat/AC several years ago, converting it into another room. He’s a chain-smoker and I can’t deal with cigarette smoke in the house, despite being a former smoker (the worst kind of smoke nazis) myself, so this sun room is the compromise. He has a TV, coffee-maker, small refrigerator out there and I added a large electric air purifier. He uses the house phone intercom a lot to call me when he needs something.

Last week he called me and told me I needed to come out there, because he wanted to show me something. When I went out there he pointed to my willow tree and told me to look at the woodpecker near the top. I didn’t spot him at first.

My husband said, “How can you miss him, he’s the size of a B-52?”

I stepped out on the patio and then I saw him, because he had moved around the trunk of the tree. I wish I had had my cell phone in my hand to snap a photo of him. He was the largest woodpecker that I’ve ever seen – the size of a crow actually.

Later, my youngest daughter in Texas messaged me about some bald eagles in Florida hatching, which she thought I’d be interested in, because I had gotten engrossed with some other bald eagles hatching a few years back. I told her about our woodpecker sighting. After explaining what this woodpecker looked like with his red crest on his head and large size, she started sending info on a pileated woodpecker. That sure looks like the woodpecker in my willow tree. He hasn’t returned, but if he does I want to try and take a photo.

This woodpecker sighting spurred me to think back over the years to the many times I worked in my yard and heard a woodpecker pecking away in the woods behind my house. Often I thought that these Southern woodpeckers in the woods sure make a lot of noise for such small birds, because the sounds were more like a jack hammer, than a bird pecking. There were many times I heard branches falling after long pecking jags. When I mentioned this woodpecker and my thoughts about the loud sounds of woodpeckers in the woods for years to my sons, they said they had heard the very loud woodpeckers many times too.

All of sudden I wondered if large woodpeckers had been living here all along.

That got me thinking about how many times things might have been right in front of my nose (or ears), but I was too blind to see (or hear) them.

Trying to be open to new information seems like an endeavor worth pursuing. So, with 2017 fresh, I’ll strive not only to open my eyes and ears, but most of all my heart and mind to new information, ideas and ways of looking at the world.

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Filed under Food for Thought, General Interest, Uncategorized

January 1, 2017 · 10:55 am

Happy New Year!

At the end of 2015, I wrote about moving my blog in another direction:

“Instead of endless political and foreign policy commentary (402 posts in 2015), I’m going to attempt to move my blog in another direction. Anyone can be an armchair critic about all that is wrong in American politics and culture, but let’s face the truth, it’s not the politicians’ fault for the state of our culture, our communities or the problems in our own lives. Despite the hype about the 2016 election, neither political party can fix America. Only committed citizens can do that.

Assuredly, failed social programs do deserve criticism, but let’s enter the new year facing the truth. Rebuilding the American team starts at the individual level, in fact, it starts with each of us. So, with this wide open internet why can’t we start working to share ideas, resources, and most of all inspirations geared toward that mission: rebuilding the American team.”

https://libertybellediaries.com/2015/12/31/rebuilding-the-american-team/

With a US presidential election in 2016 and so much else happening in the world, I didn’t stick to that goal of writing about inspirations to rebuild the American team as much as I wanted. Like most of America, I got caught up in the Witch of Chappaqua vs. Drumpzilla endless battles, but with that national embarrassment of two vile candidates running down-in-the-mud scorched earth campaigns over, it’s time to take a deep breath and refocus on that goal.

And after last year’s Reality TV national embarrassment, it’s time for all Americans to recommit to rebuilding the American team;-)

Wishing everyone a safe, happy, blessed New Year!

Sincerely,

Libertybelle

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Filed under American Character, Blog Notes, Food for Thought, General Interest

December 29, 2016 · 8:26 pm

Hand-me-downs

A hand-me-down book from my childhood

Fair warning, this is going to be another backwoods PA story from my childhood. Escape while you can:-)

I was born in 1960 and grew-up in a small village in the Pocono Mountains. Our end of the county was and still is called the West End (which is synonymous with hicks). Most of our neighbors were of PA German ancestry, although even in the 1960s, the urban exodus to the Poconos had begun. The Poconos had been a vacation spot for city dwellers since the Civil War era, but during my childhood many of these urban visitors began building homes in the Poconos and staying year-round. Many of the locals hold the urban dwellers moving into their peaceful country neighborhood as loud, boorish, pushy, stupid and very rude.

Back in the 90s, a phone conversation with my mother railing about some “stupid New Yorker” about sums up the sentiment and the disconnect. My mother was complaining about some woman from New York who wanted the township to pay for street lights in her little residential area in the Poconos. The woman also apparently had thought sidewalks would be a good idea. My mother, like most locals, ended her complaints with a statement that went pretty much like, “I wish these damned city people would go back to the city and leave us alone!”

However, that unknown woman from New York got a very different reaction than my mother dealing with our pastor’s wife, who was not only New York City born and bred, but also Jewish. The parsonage was right across the road from our home, so our pastor’s wife was also our neighbor. My mother adored our pastor’s wife, my mother adored her elderly mother too, who would come and visit for several weeks at a time when I was a child.

It’s often interesting how many people will prejudge an entire group of people, but when they are in a situation where they are dealing with an individual from that group and getting to know him or her, all of sudden common ground can be found and friendships blossom.

Spending my adult life around Army communities, I’ve always been very grateful for the experience of being able to meet so many people from so many different countries, backgrounds, and experiences. The thing that binds Army communities is soldiers with a common mission. Their wives, no matter if they are foreign-born or American invariably become friends, share recipes, share in the worries when their spouses deploy, and share in a sense of community.

Finding that common ground in America is an existential crisis, not media hysteria about “fake news” or “Russian influence”.

The partisan political divides, listening to political pundits, reading news from various political stripes and observing comments on Twitter, facebook, etc., make me feel like these groups live on different planets, not in the same country.

So, back to my childhood, in a family with six kids, with widely different opinions. For instance, conservative me, has a far-left brother, who was really into zero population growth as a cause. When he lectured me when I was pregnant with my third child, asking if my husband and I thought our genes were so good that we had to spread them around with so many children, well, I didn’t get angry. I smiled at him and replied, “Well, now that you mention it, yes, we do.” I also told him I wanted 5 or 7 kids, because I like odd numbers (although we stopped “spreading our genes around”, overpopulating the world, at 4 kids).

No matter how angry we were at each other or how vehemently we disagreed, when it was dinner time, we all had to sit at the table and behave civilly. My parents didn’t want to hear how mad we were or how much we disagreed or whether we had been fighting all day about something – we had to sit at the table and eat our dinner. There was no taking your plate to another room or screaming at each other at the table allowed.

Especially with the advent of the internet, the splintering of America has escalated, where there’s really very little discussion in online political discussion forums, only hyper-charged partisan attacks. Each side generates talking points, which the political combatants hurl back and forth non-stop. Poll numbers get tossed in to validate positions, although really polls are meaningless – they’re the opinions of a few people extrapolated to represent the opinions of very large groups of people.

I’ve met many wonderful people from New York City and other urban areas. I’ve also met some total assholes right where I grew up, who were locals. And it shouldn’t even have to be said in America, but we’ve got to start talking to each other and move beyond our own little cocoon of people who think just like we do or hold the same political views.

We need to start embracing getting to know people as individuals.

The same goes for considering political viewpoints and here again, my mother taught me that you can’t make anyone believe anything. My oldest sister is 8 years older than me and she had friends in high school, who like her, read a lot. Along with wearing hand-me-down clothes, I became a proud collector of hand-me-down books. Anything my sister or her friends were ready to discard, I was ready to add it to my “collection” of books. I read the entire Warren Commission Report in paperback, I got a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. I still have the Watchwords of Liberty, filled with great American quotes. I also ended up with paperback histories like:

Then somehow I ended up with:

So, while you might expect my conservative, staunch Republican mother to want this book out of her house, you’d be wrong. She told me she didn’t believe in Marxism, but to decide for myself. She gave me a copy of a little booklet (which I gave to someone), called, Good Citizen and she told me this booklet had a lot of interesting information on America. So, I read Marx’s Concept of Man and then I read her Good Citizen booklet and many other books too.

In 1976, the American Bicentennial fueled a bunch of books on the American Revolution and my American love affair with The Constitution and our republic bloomed like cherry blossoms in Washington springtime. I was hooked on American ideals. I had started adding to my hand-me-down book “collection” with books I bought with babysitting money – books like:

I also got enthralled by The Kent Family Chronicles, that John Jakes series commemorating the 200 year anniversary of America. By that point, I was sold on The Constitution, sold on American ideals and Marx sounded like depressing whining about “unfairness”, where there’s never any hope for individuals to aspire to anything… just endless reliance on imposition of command economy enforcers to decide on what’s fair and relentless fueling class warfare. The American Bicentennial fueled a life-long love of reading American history. My short time in the Army expanded that to loving to read military history too.

In life, we all have some really dumb ideas and beliefs. That’s the truth! No one gets through life being perfect and all-knowing. For instance, I abhor violence and had this idea that all behavior is learned, so when I had kids, I didn’t want my kids to be violent. I didn’t want my sons to have any toy guns, because I believed that would encourage violence. I believed this despite the fact that I got into plenty of fistfights as a kid fighting bullies.

My mother and sisters laughed at me and told me I was stupid. My husband just rolled his eyes. My toddler sons, well, they turned everything into a weapon, to include their older sister’s Barbie dolls. They were very destructive and liked to clobber each other, while there I was telling them in this prissy voice, “you’ve got to be nice!” My daughter didn’t take to them wrecking her stuff and she smacked them when they touched her stuff. So much for my toy guns make boys violent belief.

When I told my mother about my sons throwing everything and turning everything into a weapon, which my daughter had never done, my mother said, “welcome to the world of boys.”

Here’s another story on “boys” from a few years later. We were living in Germany and I was throwing a birthday party for one of my sons. My next-door neighbor had a lot of very colorful finches in a cage and she decided to let them fly loose that day. They were getting ready to PCS back to the states. My daughter came running in the house to tell me that all these little boys had sticks and were trying to kill these little finches that were sitting in the bushes around the house. So, I walked outside and there was this group of little boys, bloodlust in their eyes, gleefully trying to kill these tiny birds with big sticks. They were barbarians! In that moment I realized that there is something about males and violence that is probably hard-wired. And I realized that my “be nice” idea had been idiotic all along.

What people believe can’t be forced, so it’s best to try to find that common ground, I keep blabbing on about. Here again, I think my mother had the right idea there too – get people to sit at the same table and share a meal, insisting that everyone be polite.

Simple as it may be, perhaps just getting people to share a meal and talk might work miracles, where all the social programs have failed. Here’s an old LB blog post from 2014:

“I’m always amazed at how when people sit down to share a meal, the petty squabbles subside, conversations almost invariably turn to family and home. A friendly dinner table is the world’s most under-tapped peacemaking tool. The simple act of breaking bread together at a table of brotherhood doesn’t seem all that hard and once people can come together and peacefully share a meal and conversation, then all the other politicized barriers fall to the wayside. Community potlucks could rebuild communities and not cost taxpayers a dime. Believe it, because it’s true and with so much animosity and hatred in America, at the very least neighbors might make new friends, so there’s no downside to the endeavor.”

https://libertybellediaries.com/2014/11/29/another-home-truth/

I also quoted my mother’s least favorite poet, Maya Angelou in that post. I’m not a fan of Angelou’s poetry either, but she sure nailed a home truth with this quote:

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.” –
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/26244-hate-it-has-caused-a-lot-of-problems-in-the

Again, finding ways to heal the divides in America is an existential necessity.

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Filed under American Character, American History, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, The Constitution

December 29, 2016 · 4:03 pm

America needs to become ONE TEAM

We haven’t even “officially” exited the “Obama nightmare” and entered the “Trump Strong-Man Era”, but I’m stitching away… Used red and white for this pattern, instead of just one color, as the pattern instructed. Think it will make a cute Valentine’s Day tissue box cover for my youngest daughter’s desk. Think I will make one for my oldest daughter’s desk at her work too.

Now, on to politics: What in the hell are Obama and Kerry trying to do? They have not only sold Israel down the river a second time, but they’ve basically handed over regional domination in the Mid-East and beyond to Russia, Iran and China. All the thugs on the world stage, thanks to this feckless administration, are in the driver’s seat and America is almost irrelevant.

Back when Hillary was Secretary of State and the Arab Spring bloomed bright in delusional idiots’ heads, the Obama administration tried to sell the Muslim Brotherhood as a “mostly secular” organization. The Obama administration supported the ouster of President Mubarak and backed Mohamed Morsi, a MB leader. That move completely put Sinai security in jeopardy and effectively threw Israel into a very serious security crisis.

With all the mainstream media and Dems hype of “fake news”, well the Obama administration & Democratic Party continue to be the biggest aggregators of “fake news”, with their endless fabricated “talking points” and “narratives”, which the mainstream media repeats constantly… selling it as real news. Let’s be clear, this hype is really propaganda that is planned, packaged and sold to generate hysteria and public concern – it is designed to manufacture “public opinion” that aligns with their political agenda. In simple terms it’s sophisticated mass media brainwashing and it only works with massive media collusion, as I must have said dozens of times in the past year. The orchestrated nature of the talking points (aggressive keyword messaging with relentless repetition) and the vast mainstream (liberal) media collusion that aids in that messaging is combined with a relentless repetition of polling data to manufacture public opinion and nudge it toward the desired political agenda.

Here’s a repeat of what I believe Clinton SPIN and Obama “narratives” really are:

The reason Trump broke out of the pack was because he used the borrowed Clinton-style mass media saturation/scorched earth strategy.

That strategy is a sophisticated INFORMATION WARFARE strategy introduced into American politics by the Clinton political operatives.

The mass media saturation strategy was developed by far-left Alinskyite Marxists. The messaging wall required for mass media saturation to succeed requires the active collusion of the mass media NEWS outlets to facilitate it, by actively and relentlessly repeating the messages of the political candidate or activists using this “buzz word, catchphrase spin (talking points messaging). Mass media saturation INFORMATION WARFARE requires mass media collusion to succeed. This strategy can NOT succeed without mass media messaging dominance to CONTROL (“win”) the 24/7 news cycle (or as the Clinton team dubbed it – the spin cycle).

It is a form of mass media brainwashing and antithetical to American free speech principles! To succeed this strategy requires MEDIA COLLUSION.

It can NOT work without that media collusion.

Here are the components:

Talking points and buzz word messaging, which are relentlessly repeated by both political operatives and the media.

Mass media domination of the messaging, to control the 24/7 NEWS cycle, which requires mass media collusion.

Relentless repetition of polling data by both the political operatives and media, to facilitate the manufacture of opinion cascades (winning in all the polls)

Only Democrats had successfully used this strategy before Trump, because the liberal media never before gave BILLIONS of dollars in free media for one GOP candidate, to run a “GOP Insurgency” for 8 months straight on all three cable news networks nor did the mass media cable networks ever collude or facilitate in the mass media messaging for any Republican candidate or cause.

Just as the Wikileaks leak has exposed the MEDIA COLLUSION between the DNC and the media to rig the system against Sanders, that SAME media collusion exists between the Potemkin Trump campaign (or the Clinton operatives who were in the shadows masterminding this charade) and the media.

Those electronic trails exist!!!

This mass media saturation requires constant messaging coordination between political operatives and the media facilitators to keep the SPIN cycle moving. Trump’s “win, win, win” is exactly like Carville’s “sex, sex, sex” during impeachment. I feel sure Trump’s MEDIA COLLUSION will be exposed before November.

And the scorched earth part of the strategy is really just the mass media saturation strategy on steroids, replete with endless character assassinations (low-energy Jeb, lyin’ Ted, little Marco, etc.) and a take no prisoners attitude.

https://libertybellediaries.com/2016/07/30/the-pieces-of-the-media-messaging-puzzle/

The selling of polls as a “scientific” metric to gauge public opinion and polling results over 50% as a legitimate reflection of the “will of the people” has dumbed down America and created a nation of sheep, easily herded to conforming to the polling/media viewpoints. Watching how polls were used to sell Donald Trump as the “GOP Insurgent” by the liberal media and many “conservative” news outlets during the GOP primary, then watching the liberal media switch to the Clinton Scorched Earth 2.0 mode at the end of February/early March with the staged showdown in Chicago and coordinated media talking points blitz of “Trump the Fascist”, the media wasn’t just reporting the “news”, they were active political players, driving a political agenda. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC , the Washington Post and many others were actively engaged in shameless agitation propaganda to discredit Trump and promote Hillary. FOX News, Drudge Report, many talk radio venues, along with Wikileaks (a likely Russian front) and others were busily selling Trump.

Now, I’ve been called all sorts of names in the past year online, but since I am a nobody homemaker, have no monetary incentive to bolster any political candidate, well, I don’t really give a crap what names I get called. I am still free to speak my mind in America. So, first I want to point out a polling sound bite the media is selling to hype the “fake news” crisis and then I want to make a few big picture comments.

A Mediaite article citing a poll about dumb Trump voters who believe “fake news” has been getting circulating on Twitter, largely retweeted by liberal media types. The Mediaite article states:

About Half of Trump’s Voters Really Think Clinton Is Involved in Pedophilia Ring

“No matter how many times law enforcement and the media insist that there is no Democrat-led pedophilia ring being run out of a D.C. family restaurant, there will always be people who believe that there is.

Specifically, there will always be Donald Trump voters who believe that Hillary Clinton traffics kids out of a pizzeria basement. That story was spawned and propagated by fake news sites and even led to a man discharging a gun inside of the restaurant in question. Still, the rumor persists.”

http://www.mediaite.com/online/about-half-of-trumps-voters-really-think-clinton-is-involved-in-pedophilia-ring/

You got it? Trump voters are just mindless idiots, who need smart liberals to police the news and protect them from “fake news”. The right uses a lot of these same tactics now too and Trump won, because he mastered the Clinton SPIN cycle during the primary, where he repeated endlessly that he was “winning in all the polls” and the American media (liberal, FOX News, talk radio) all colluded to sell Trump as the “GOP Insurgent”. Sure, there’s discontent across America and populist sentiments swirling, but Trump is a media-created President, the same way President Obama was cast as the second-coming, walking on water, making the seas part, transformational leader.

Now, we move to the Russian influence operations hysteria. where massive effort has been expended to turn Russian influence operations into an existential crisis “threatening our democracy”.

First off, my default reaction to hearing about “our democracy” makes me want to shout, “America is a republic!” Then my less reactive response to the Russian influence operations hysteria is, “what the hell did you expect from Russia and other adversaries, when our President is so gutless that he allows US Armed Forces to be humiliated repeatedly by being harassed in international territory and last January, Iran captured two American naval vessels and crew, then had them on their knees, broadcasting those images around the globe? It was the most shameful, gutless act of moral cowardice and failure of American leadership since probably Somalia in the 90s. The Obama administration and John Kerry did NOTHING and praised Iran for resolving the situation peacefully… They got on their knees too!

Only when the Russians escalated their information warfare operation during the 2016 election did clueless politicians notice the Russians are on the move – because it affected Washington politicians. The Washington politicians weren’t concerned enough to demand actions when Iran took our sailors hostage or Russia was buzzing our planes and harassing our ships. No, only when it became a partisan political issue could President Obama and the Dems get on their soapbox with their liberal media friends colluding to manufacture this Russian influence crisis.

Russians and other American adversaries have continued influence operations for DECADES in American universities and colleges, in black urban areas, and throughout the American educational system. President Obama marinaded in professors who were promoting anti-American agendas and willing purveyors of hostile foreign influence operation messaging. The Marxist/Alinsky crowd are some of Russian influence operators most willing accomplices and useful idiots for decades. The entire PC agenda is permeated with old Soviet-era messaging.

Yes, we have a Russian influence problem, but the real threat to America is the lack of American republican values & virtues, as espoused by our founding fathers in our founding documents, having enough influence in America.

We lack a common American bond.

The partisan, social (cultural) and economic (class), and ethnic divides are splintering our nation into small, rabid, enemy factions.

Creating hysteria over Russian influence in our election, while doing nothing as Russians literally harass America’s military with no fear, is about like the French with their idiotic burkini ban. French police patrolling beaches to harass Muslim women who are wearing modest swimwear, yet not securing their border, shows the complete disconnect from understanding real threats vs. ridiculous political antics masquerading as sound policy.

We need to respond to real acts of aggression forcefully and without fear or hesitation!

We need to quit with the endless information warfare being waged between American partisans.

“United we stand, divided we fall” – that’s as simple as it gets.

America needs to become ONE TEAM!

#DefendTheConstitutionAlways

#NoMoreScorchedEarth

#SayNoToPublicCorruption

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Filed under American Character, Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, Foreign Policy, General Interest, Military, Politics, Public Corruption, The Media

December 26, 2016 · 12:41 pm

Think for yourself

“When a man ain’t got no ideas of his own, he’d ought to be kind of o’ careful who he borrows ’em from.” – Owen Wister (The Virginian)

American public opinion is shaped by “experts” of various political ideologies. Welcoming many ideas is a good thing, because we should be a nation that is not fearful of competing ideas. However, we should also be a nation that does not allow elites to rule which information we can access or a nation reliant on a small group of elite “experts” to feed us what facts, information or ideas we should believe. Efforts to quell free speech or rely on elitist gatekeepers, whether they be “journalists”, “military experts, “intelligence experts”, “medical experts”, talk show hosts, reality TV stars, etc., has created an American people who place their trust in other people’s ideas, usually without any independent research, fact-checking, or even thought.

America has become a nation of intellectually lazy people, who are easily led.

THAT is the problem facing our country in this fast-paced mass media information battlefield today, where aggressive foreign influence operations abound. Back when I was first on the internet and posting comments on the Excite message boards, I wrote about this problem, which even in the late 90s was referred to as the Oprahization of America.

Actually, I believe the trend started much further back, when talk shows like Phil Donahue started trying to mold the American conscience on politics and hot button cultural issues. In todays’ fast-paced information landscape, talk shows have now been upstaged by newsy talk shows, where cable TV pundits take “viral social media” comments or unidentified man-on-the-street videos and turn these into “national conversations”, except there is no real “conversation” – only slick media trying to mold public opinion.

Twitter, in 140-characters, is the fast-lane avenue for “debate” among America’s elite to shape public opinion on news and events. Along with journalists who sit on their butts retweeting each other’s stories, without even a cursory effort to check the facts first, Twitter is full of think tank, military and intelligence experts, who laud it over and take delight in dismissing the lesser mortals as nobodies who should not even be allowed to comment. They, like the “professional journalists”, retweet each other’s “expert” opinions and theories, while mocking and dismissing lesser mortals opinions automatically. Trump mastered Twitter too.

It’s a very insular world of elites, where only ideas and opinions they deem worthy of consideration become the accepted wisdom. If you are part of their elite group, even if you’re tweeting and retweeting total bullshit, you’re an “expert” or a “journalist”, but if you challenge their “expert opinion” and aren’t part of their elite group, you are dismissed as a hack.

Twitter is just the latest social media gathering spot for the politico experts to sit and argue back and forth online, the Excite message boards were a hub in 1998.

Russian influence operations is a topic of national concern now. I’ve been concerned about its reemergence since the late 1990s. Online, I’ve fallen for several sites, which were purportedly “conservative”, but which I now believe are Russian front operations. I’ve quoted some of them on my blog too and given credence to their information, because I believed they were conservative sites reporting facts that the mainstream media wasn’t. This election has brought the Russian influence operations out into the open, because they’ve been so flagrant and plentiful.

I have been looking for a way to expose the wholesale public corruption of the Clinton machine since 1998. I wrote my story, Messages of mhere, in a snarky manner, replete with pseudonyms, but the events happened. During impeachment I was attacked in my home by a Clinton hack retired general, who hates my guts over family support run-ins I had with his wife during Desert Storm. Letters I wrote to my husband’s company commander during Desert Storm, informing him about what was happening back in Germany, ended up at the Department of the Army afterwards. This general was my husband’s brigade commander during Desert Storm.

My comments on the Excite message boards were countering the Clinton spin there and some of my arguments were being picked up by actual conservative pundits, so I was silenced. Ever since impeachment – this retired general has been a faithful Clinton/Democratic Party hack. He was used many times to bash GWB’s Iraq War and travels the speaking circuit.

In 1998, being fairly new to the internet, plus technology-challenged, I did not save my comments that I posted on the Excite message boards, which was the only place I was posting comments online. I can’t prove my story yet, so I continue to use a pseudonym and to study, looking for a way to expose what happened. It wasn’t just being attacked in my home that keeps me working to expose what happened and it isn’t some deep-seated hatred of the Clintons – it’s because my husband was manipulated in this attack on me, by people in the Army he TRUSTED. My husband trusts this brigade commander and would never believe that he would attack me or harm our family. I also believe this brigade commander was fed fabricated information that led him to believe that I was a deranged, right-wing psycho and since he already hated me – I doubt it took much for him to believe the worst of me. My Desert Storm letters caused a big stink at DA – although I didn’t even know they had been sent to DA until several years after Desert Storm.

The US Armed Forces chain of command was deliberately corrupted and used as a partisan political tool, to attack an UNARMED American citizen on American soil.

As a result of being attacked, I was involuntarily committed to a mental facility, I was repeatedly taken into a conference room by two different shrinks, who kept trying to coerce me to sign paperwork. One of those shrinks called my husband at home, at night, to try and convince him to agree that I should be committed to a state mental hospital – permanently. I had been locked up 18 days, a hearing had been arranged and NO ONE in this mental health facility ever told me there was going to be a hearing or advised me of my rights. They kept taking me to a conference room and trying to coerce me to sign paperwork. My one son, then a young teen, when he was visiting with my husband, whispered that the shrink had called my husband the night before and that my husband was crying. He told me there was going to be a hearing and the shrink wanted my husband to agree with sending me to a state mental hospital. This is the effort that went into silencing me. And this is the kind of stuff that happens in Russia and totalitarian regimes, NOT in AMERICA.

If it could happen to me, a nobody homemaker, it could happen to any other American too.

The foreign information warfare efforts aren’t just a problem with a few specific sites, in my amateur opinion. I have believed since 1998 that the Clinton machine & DNC were permeated with hostile foreign intel information assets. The SPIN cycle, replete with repetitive talking points messaging and endless polling data to convince Americans that polls (momentary opinions of a few people) reflect the “will of the people”, works to nudge Americans to get in line behind this majority opinion, as expressed in polls. The news media sells which polls are “scientific” and reliable… I also believe that there’s a lot of foreign influence within the Republican party and among “conservative” sites, but they’re harder to discern, because they wrap themselves in the American flag.

The Democratic Party is a bunch of disparate factions, whose only unifying glue is their rabid hatred of the right. The Republican Party used to be fairly unified on foreign policy and some social conservative planks, so that even with fissures, they were touting The Constitution. Then the Tea Party (red flag with that movement imo) came along to divide the Republican Party. This election cycle a leftover Marxist set out to fracture the Democratic Party and a populist, con man was recruited to demolish the GOP in a “GOP Insurgency”. This masterpiece agitprop theater, that was the 2016 Election, had massive influence for sure, in fact, I suspect that both of our political parties were dupes, because we’ve been conditioned in our rabid partisan responses by mass media, like some Pavlovian lapdogs.

I quoted The Last Refuge blog many times and although I didn’t like some of the comments there when I first saw their site – using the Andrew Breitbart aura and claiming to use crowdsourcing to expose information that the mainstream media didn’t report, I paid attention to their articles. I was looking for a way to expose my story and this site did come up with a lot of information on the black grievance industry – Treyvon, Mike Brown, etc., but I noticed comments that were racist and did not get challenged or moderated. I was banned from posting for commenting on historical facts about the Islamic Golden Era, because supposedly saying the Islamic world ever had a “golden era” is verboten. So, when Trump entered the race, the Last Refuge blog morphed into Trump Polling Update Central and that raised a huge red flag with me.

The omnipresent polling hype has been carefully cultivated to herd Americans to conforming to whatever majority opinion the Left & media are selling.

All Americans, but especially those who revere The Constitution, should argue principles on merits, not using poll numbers. Trump was sold as “winning in all the polls” and herding Republicans into “don’t you have to support the winner”, based on media-manufactured opinion cascades created by BILLIONS of dollars in free media, with endless rallies reported live and in their entirety.

Here’s one series of tweets from this morning, where I explained how I keep looking further back and wider, whenever something strikes me as odd:

libertybelle Retweeted John Schindler

Saw the ZeroHedge link on DRUDGE. Yahoo search shows InfoWars also reporting. Before congress.gov or news sites.

libertybelle added,

John Schindler@20committee

In case you had any doubts about ZH’s allegiance in the #SpyWar http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-24/obama-signs-countering-disinformation-and-propaganda-act-law …

libertybelle ‏@october601 2h2 hours ago

@october601 Drudge mainstreamed Alex Jones in the past year. Suggest watching changes to Drudge links – ditched RedState & added ZeroHedge.

libertybelle ‏@october601 1h1 hour ago

@october601 Drudge came to national prominence for breaking the Lewinsky scandal & moved instantly to a major player in info. warfare game.

libertybelle ‏@october601 1h1 hour ago

@october601 Drudge ostensibly is a “conservative” site, but became a TRUMP GOP Insurgency force multiplier in GOP primary (along with FOX).