TomCADem
TomCADem's JournalThe Difference Between the CIA and FBI In Their Own Words
Rience Preibus has been strongly arguing on the Sunday news that the FBI has concluded that Russia was not trying to get Russiua elected and that the CIA assessment to the contrary should not be believed. However, this argument misconstrues the basic difference between the FBI and the CIA. The FBI is responsible for domestic law enforcement. They (should) enforce the law. In contrast, the CIA is responsible for intelligence gathering. They do not have law enforcement authority.
https://www.fbi.gov/about/faqs/how-does-the-fbi-differ-from-the-central-intelligence-agency
How does the FBI differ from the Central Intelligence Agency?
The CIA and FBI are both members of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The CIA, however, has no law enforcement function. Rather, it collects and analyzes information that is vital to the formation of U.S. policy, particularly in areas that impact the security of the nation. The CIA collects information only regarding foreign countries and their citizens. Unlike the FBI, it is prohibited from collecting information regarding “U.S. Persons,” a term that includes U.S. citizens, resident aliens, legal immigrants, and U.S. corporations, regardless of where they are located.
What authority do FBI special agents have to make arrests in the United States, its territories, or on foreign soil?
In the U.S. and its territories, FBI special agents may make arrests for any federal offense committed in their presence or when they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed, or is committing, a felony violation of U.S. laws. On foreign soil, FBI special agents generally do not have authority to make arrests except in certain cases where, with the consent of the host country, Congress has granted the FBI extraterritorial jurisdiction.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/myths-vs-real-cia.html
Myth: The CIA spies on US citizens.
Reality: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has the lead on intelligence matters in the United States, especially those directed against US citizens. However, the CIA and the FBI work together as needed to protect the interests of US national security. The CIA does not collect information concerning the domestic activities of US citizens, but its foreign intelligence collection mission can be conducted anywhere.
Myth: The CIA arrests people who break the law.
Reality: The CIA, unlike the FBI, has no law enforcement authority. The Agency’s mission is foreign intelligence collection and analysis. If you have a law enforcement issue, contact your local police department or the US Department of Justice.
NYT Editorial - Truth and Lies in the Age of Trump
In the made-up world of alt-right media and fake news, Trump is truth, America's problems are caused by minorities, immigrants and political correctness, and by repealing regulations designed to protect Americans, he is actually helping them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/opinion/truth-and-lies-in-the-age-of-trump.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region
Donald Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody watching the 2016 election: The breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.
The institutions that once generated and reaffirmed that shared reality — including the church, the government, the news media, the universities and labor unions — are in various stages of turmoil or even collapse. Because Mr. Trump himself has little regard for facts, it was easy for him to capitalize on this situation. But even as Americans gobble up “fake news,” there is the sense that something crucial has been lost. A North Carolina man told The Times that while he regularly clicked on links to stories claiming that Hillary Clinton was indicted or that Mexico built a wall along its southern border, he missed the days when Walter Cronkite delivered the news to the nation.
He’s not alone; it was different then. Americans knew that whatever they were hearing on the news, their neighbors were hearing, too. Cable TV fractured that shared experience, and then social media made it easier for Americans to curl up in cozy, angry or self-righteous cocoons.
The rise of social media has been great in many ways. In a media environment with endless inputs and outlets, citizens can inform and entertain one another, organize more easily and hold their leaders accountable. But it also turns out that when everyone can customize his or her own information bubble, it’s easier for demagogues to deploy made-up facts to suit the story they want to tell.
The Congressional Oath of Office - Those Covering Up Russian Interference Are Violating It
This is not a Republican versus Democratic issue. If you are covering up and suppressing evidence of foreign interference in the U.S. election, then you are violating the fundamental oath of your office.
http://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Oath-of-Office/
I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
The GOP unveils a 'permanent save' for Social Security with massive benefit cuts
Next up, a plan to "save" Medicare, by replacing it with healthcare saving accounts, and calling them Medicare.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-social-security-gop-20161209-story.html
Amid all the hand-wringing over Republican plans to eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid and repeal the Affordable Care Act, it shouldn’t be overlooked that the GOP has the knives out for Social Security too.
The latest reminder comes from Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Tex., chairman of the Ways and Means Social Security subcommittee. Johnson on Thursday uncorked what he termed a “plan to permanently save Social Security.”
Followers of GOP habits won’t be surprised to learn that it achieves this goal entirely through benefit cuts, without a dime of new revenues such as higher payroll taxes on the wealthy. In fact, Johnson’s plan reduces the resources coming into the program by eliminating a key tax --another way that he absolves richer Americans of paying their fair share, while increasing the burdens of retirement for almost everyone else.
Predictably, this plan has already been hailed by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a billionaire’s front group that likes to portray itself as a neutral budget watchdog. (The foundation of hedge fund billionaire Peter G. Peterson, whose hostility to Social Security is well-documented, provided $3.3 million in funding for the committee in 2015; that’s the equivalent of about half the group’s revenue of $7.1 million in 2014)
Richard Spencer's [White Supremacist] appearance at Texas A&M draws protests
Source: CNN
The room felt like a tinder box, ready to devolve any given moment into conflict, only to be calmed diffused by security.
Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who helped found the so-called alt-right movement, embraced the conflict as he spoke at Texas A&M Tuesday night.
For roughly two hours, Spencer delivered his message of white supremacy to a room of 400 people, the vast majority of whom were there in protest. "At the end of the day, America belongs to white men," Spencer said.
* * *
As the speech continued, followed by a tense Q&A, Spencer continued to provoke the crowd as he called for white people to "have a goddamn identity." "Race is the foundation of identity," he said. "The word racist is a fake word. No one identifies with the word racist."
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/06/politics/richard-spencer-texas-am/
While the MSM pushes the meme that Democrats need to get away from "identity" politics, the elephant in the room is that Trump won the election by catering to white men as a racial identity group, and white nationalist groups embraced that.
Also, the use of the term "identity politics" implies a false equivalency between groups like NOW, the NAACP or La Raza that are fighting for voting rights, equality under the law and equal opportunity versus groups like the Ku Klux Klan that are fighting for racial supremacy and the exclusion of non-white people from the U.S.
Study: Clinton-Trump coverage was a feast of false equivalency
I actually think the study may understate the issue, since it ignores the plethora of fake right wing news being distributed by paid purveyors of propaganda.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/12/07/study-clinton-trump-coverage-was-a-feast-of-false-equivalency/?utm_term=.c2d427ad48c8
U.S. media organizations are locked into such a negative mind-set that they portrayed Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as equally pernicious and scurrilous pretenders to the presidency. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study by Thomas E. Patterson in the fourth of his series of studies on media coverage of the presidential campaign for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
“False equivalencies abound in today’s reporting,” writes Patterson. “When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.” This chart from the Harvard study puts things into perspective:
https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1484
As the fine print relates, this equivalency hovers over the category of presidential “fitness for office” and includes themes such as “policy positions, personal qualities, leadership abilities [and] ethical standards.” Consider that the time period for these figures spanned from mid-August to the day before Election Day — which is to say, the weeks during which The Washington Post published the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape that had Trump boasting about sexual assault, and the resulting flood of on-the-record allegations from women that he did just that. That the media somehow produced an equivalent amount of negative stories regarding Clinton would appear to cement its dedication to the proposition that they’re all bastards.
* * *
False equivalency is tough to prove in the macro, in large part because the media is such a sprawling and almost uncharacterizable beast. The Shorenstein Center has tried to bring a finite sanity to the chore by limiting its examination to the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and USA Today and just the primary newscasts: ABC’s “World News Tonight,” “CBS Evening News,” CNN’s “The Situation Room,” Fox News’s “Special Report” and “NBC Nightly News.” On the mirco level, this blog highlighted a couple of the campaign’s more egregious false-equivalency fouls, such as the time that two top journalists with the White House Correspondents’ Association wrote a USA Today op-ed under the headline, “Trump, Clinton both threaten free press.” A better version would have said, “Trump poses mortal threat to First Amendment, Clinton prone to secrecy.”
Study: negative media coverage of Clinton soared in the last two weeks of the campaign
Source: Vox
Ten of America’s most prominent media outlets ramped up their negative coverage of Hillary Clinton in the final two weeks of the presidential campaign while also writing fewer positive stories about her, according to a new report released today by Harvard University researchers.
From late September to the middle of October — around the time of the presidential debates — the ratio of critical coverage of Clinton was roughly three positive stories for every two negative ones.
But as the election headed to a close, that gap dramatically widened. In the final two weeks, there were closer to seven negative pieces about Clinton for every two positive pieces, according to the report from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.
Of course, part of that change was driven by new facts on the ground — like the revelations about the FBI’s decision to briefly reopen an investigation into Clinton’s private email server, and the WikiLeaks disclosures — that Donald Trump voters may regard as legitimate reasons for more negative stories. But whatever the cause, according to the Harvard report, talk of Clinton’s alleged scandals hit their peak right before Election Day.
Read more: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/7/13872580/media-coverage-presidential-election
New study from Harvard confirms how the election was corrupted by a combination of FBI meddling in the election along with Russian sourced disclosures to wikileaks.
WaPo - Trumps Carrier deal is right out of Putins playbook
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-carrier-deal-is-right-out-of-putins-playbook/2016/12/01/f0456af6-b7e6-11e6-a677-b608fbb3aaf6_story.html?tid=paid_outbrain&utm_term=.c5135855c063The article, by Post correspondent David Filipov, describes how government-controlled television continually features Russia’s president interrogating or berating factory directors and petty officials.
“If prices have spiked, or salaries are low, or costs have gone way over budget, then Putin lays into the unfortunate bureaucrat — ‘What’s wrong with your head?’ ‘Are you crazy?’ ‘What are you saying?’— as the cameras roll and the Russian president’s quarry stammers and squirms,” the article explains. Putin has “positioned himself as the one person in the country to whom citizens can turn at a time when faith in government institutions is low.”
The persona of “fixer-in-chief” — the phrase comes from Putin biographer and Brookings Institution expert Fiona Hill — may work politically for Putin, though any public opinion poll should be taken with several grains of salt in a country where honest criticism can get you jailed or shot. It may be appealing as a model to America’s president-elect, too.
The problem is that it doesn’t work. Russia’s economy is shrinking, year by year, and no matter how many factory directors Putin humiliates, it won’t start growing again without structural and political reform.
The Global Gender Gap Report Index - U.S. is #45
I guess it is fitting that we have sexist and misogynist as our President-Elect. Iceland, Finland and Norway are at the top of the list. Heck, even Philippines is in the top 10, which makes sense since they have had several women Presidents.
http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2016/rankings/
35 Canada 0.731
36 Cape Verde 0.729
37 Bahamas 0.729
38 Poland 0.727
39 Colombia 0.727
40 Ecuador 0.726
41 Bulgaria 0.726
42 Jamaica 0.724
43 Lao PDR 0.724
44 Trinidad and Tobago 0.723
45 United States 0.722
46 Australia 0.721
47 Panama 0.721
48 Serbia 0.72
49 Israel 0.719
50 Italy 0.719
51 Kazakhstan 0.718
52 Austria 0.716
53 Tanzania 0.716
54 Botswana 0.715
55 Singapore 0.712
"I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump" - Must Read Article Gets It!
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." Martin Luther King also gave a sermon, The Drum Major Instinct, about how racism is used to oppress and exploit poor whites.
Now, we have Donald Trump who ran the most overtly racist and hateful campaign in recent memory, yet he is labeled a populist because he won a huge percentage of the poor white vote even though his actual policies are extremely harmful to the poor and middle class. Is this a new phenomena?
The answer, as the article ably explains, is that this tactic is well rooted in American history dating back to the days of slavery. Yet, the corporate media is reluctant to note how the economic elites have often used racism to oppress not just minorities who were the subject of the racism, but the poor whites whose hate was nurtured and exploited.
What the Democrats need to do is not to just denounce racism, sexism and xenophobia, but they need to bear witness to the harm caused by Republicans policies and expressly call out Republicans for using hate to not just oppress minorities and women, but to mislead and oppress white men.
http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/05/24/i-know-why-poor-whites-chant-trump-trump-trump/
What is it about a flamboyant millionaire that appeals to poor white conservatives? Why do they believe a Trump presidency would amplify their voices? The answer may lie in America’s historical relationship between the wealthiest class and the army of poor whites who have loyally supported them.
From the time of slavery (yes, slavery) to the rise of Donald Trump, wealthy elites have relied on the allegiance of the white underclass to retain their affluence and political power. To understand this dynamic, to see through the eyes of poor and working class whites as they chant, “Trump, Trump, Trump,” let’s look back at a few unsavory slices of America’s capitalist pie.
* * *
As the British labor market improved in the 1680s, the idea of indentured servitude lost its appeal to many would-be immigrants. Increasing demand for indentured servants, many of whom were skilled laborers, soon bumped up against a dwindling supply, and the cost of white indentured servants rose sharply. Plantation owners kept skilled white servants, of course, often making them plantation managers and supervisors of slaves. This introduced the first racial divide between skilled and unskilled workers.
Still, African slaves were cheaper, and the supply was plentiful. Seeing an opportunity to realize a higher return on investment, elite colonial landowners began to favor African slaves over white indentured servants, and shifted their business models accordingly. They trained slaves to take over the skilled jobs of white servants.
An investment in African slaves also ensured a cost-effective, long-term workforce. Female slaves were often raped by their white owners or forced to breed with male slaves, and children born into slavery remained slaves for life. In contrast, white female servants who became pregnant were often punished with extended contracts, because a pregnancy meant months of lost work time. From a business perspective, a white baby was a liability, but African children were permanent assets.
As the number of African slaves grew, landowners realized they had a problem on their hands. Slave owners saw white servants living, working, socializing, and even having babies with African slaves. Sometimes they tried to escape together. What’s more, freed white servants who received land as part of their freedom dues had begun to complain about its poor quality. This created a potentially explosive situation for landowners, as oppressed workers quickly outnumbered the upper classes. What was to prevent freed whites, indentured servants, and African slaves from joining forces against the tyranny of their masters?
As Edmund S. Morgan says in his book American Slavery, American Freedom, “The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt.”
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