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Washington D.C. Mayor outraged over Secret Service's 'disrespect' for citizens

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© Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
District of Columbia Mayor Vincent Gray
D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray is outraged over the United States Secret Service's decision to close streets that created severe traffic problems in the nation's capital.

WNEW Senior Correspondent Mark Segraves obtained a copy of a letter Gray sent to USSS Director Julia Pierson on Tuesday after the mayor learned the southbound lanes of 14th Street NW had been closed for several blocks. The roadway is considered one of the busiest in the city.

"These actions create gridlock in and around this area that will cause tremendous inconvenience to tens of thousands of District workers and visitors especially during rush hour," the letter reads. "To treat the District with such disrespect is simply unacceptable."

Tuesday's closure marked the second time in a year USSS officials closed streets around the Willard Hotel due to visiting dignitaries. Such VIPs typically stay at Blair House which is currently closed for renovations.

Stock Down

No money, no jobs: Growing desperation in Europe

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© Reuters / Jon Nazca
Gonzalez and her children stand in a street with their dogs and belongings after Spanish riot police evicted them from an unoccupied building of flats in Malaga.
​The EU's inability to deliver repeated promises of prosperity continue to ring hollow. After five bitter years of recession, now the bloc can barely register anemic growth.

After so long in the economic doldrums, the fabric of the Mediterranean is being torn apart. Following massive bailouts to Greece and Spain, Cyprus' savers were pillaged. France and Italy dangle by a thread over the economic abyss. Eurozone unemployment is 12.1 percent, with current predictions merely shaving that to 12 percent by year's end. (The UK and US are already approaching 7 percent, and falling).

War Whore

War Whores want your money: Military's top general propaganda on nation's defense

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© Oliver Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT
Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey, September 3, 2013 in Washington, D.C.
The nation's top military commander painted a dark picture Tuesday of future U.S. defense capabilities clouded by shrinking Pentagon budgets and adversaries' technological advances that he said would erode American battlefield superiority.

Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided his sobering views as part of the Quadrennial Defense Review, a congressionally mandated evaluation of U.S. military strength issued every four years.

Dempsey predicted that it would become increasingly difficult to balance the competing demands of protecting allies abroad, securing Americans at home and deterring future wars.

"The smaller and less capable military outlined in the QDR makes meeting these obligations more difficult," he said. "Most of our platforms and equipment will be older, and our advantages in some domains will have eroded. Our loss of depth across the force could reduce our ability to intimidate opponents from escalating conflicts."

Dempsey added: "Moreover, many of our most capable allies will lose key capabilities. The situation will be exacerbated given our current readiness concerns, which will worsen over the next three or four years."

Comment: "Washington has had the US at war for 12 years: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and almost Syria, which could still happen, with Iran waiting in the wings. These wars have been expensive in terms of money, prestige, and deaths and injuries of both US soldiers and the attacked civilian populations. None of these wars appears to have any compelling reason or justifiable explanation. The wars have been important to the profits of the military/security complex. The wars have provided cover for the construction of a Stasi police state in America, and the wars have served Israel's interest by removing obstacles to Israel's annexation of the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon." - Paul Craig Roberts

Washington drives the world toward war


Bug

DNC attendees can't name a single Hillary accomplishment - She's a Useless Eater


Last week, the Democratic Party had their winter meeting and MRCTV's Dan Joseph decided to ask DNC committee members and guests if they're ready for Hillary--and why.

Some said she had about a hundred moments of greatness when she served under President Obama - but, strangely, couldn't name a single accomplishment of hers, besides marrying Bill Clinton.

Another attendee mentioned Clinton's stance on abortion as a reason to be super excited for Hillary Clinton in 2016. As for her accomplishments, none came to mind, but she noted that Obama saw a reason for her to be nominated as Secretary of State.

Nebula

Ukraine Crisis: Russian roulette in space? Who'll man the Space Station?

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© NASA
Rocky Russian relations could leave U.S. astronauts without rides to the International Space Station.

Since NASA retired its fleet of space shuttles in 2011, Russia has had a monopoly on flying crews to the orbital outpost. The only other country currently flying people in space is China, which is not a member of the 15-nation space station partnership.

That leaves the United States in a vulnerable position as it ponders options to diffuse a tense standoff between Russia and Ukraine.

For now, the U.S.-Russian space partnership is insulated from the political whirlwind generated by Russia's decision to move troops into the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea last week, fueling fears of a full-fledged invasion.


"We are continuing to monitor the situation," NASA administrator Charles Bolden told reporters on a conference call on Tuesday.

"Everything for us continues to be nominal," he said.

Comment: NASA space missions to be halved in 2014, and halved again in 2015


Vader

Hillary and other assorted barbarians at Russia's gate

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The United States is more than just an ally to fascists in Ukraine and everywhere else; the American South provided an historical model for fascism. "The fascist order of the pre-Sixties Solid South was simply a domestic expression of U.S. Manifest Destiny - the national religion." The fascists - both local and imperial - have laid siege to Russia.

Hillary Clinton is a walking profanity - and, thereby, a prime candidate to be the next president of the United States. The fiend who played Julius Caesar when U.S.-employed jihadists butchered Libya's Muammar Gaddafi ("We came, we saw, he died") now likens Russia's response to the U.S.-backed fascist putsch in the Ukraine to Hitler's quest for a Greater Germany. It is like spitting on the graves of the 25 million Russians and other Soviet nationalities slaughtered in Hitler's racist jihad - the people who actually defeated the Nazis while the U.S. and Britain loitered off Europe's shores. At war's end, the United States imported thousands of Nazis to construct the nuclear/chemical/biological military juggernaut that would usher in an "American Century" - while confiscating Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Dubois' passports.

Thanks to the Americans, West German denazification never happened but, by the mid-Seventies, Washington had implanted fascist military regimes throughout Latin America - one of which exterminated 200,000 Guatemalan Mayas.

When John Kerry praises the "brave Ukrainians" that "took to the streets to stand against tyranny and demand democracy," he makes common cause with the direct political heirs of the Ukrainian Waffen SS units and concentration camp guards that eagerly joined Hitler's genocidal rampage in the mid-20th century. The Ukrainian fascists, who command 40 percent of the electorate in some western regions of the country, return the compliment, hoisting the Confederate flag in Kiev's city hall. They see, correctly, that the epicenter of their ideology is not Berlin, but Washington.

"Ethnic purity was the organizing principle of one-party Democratic rule in Dixie from the mid-1870s to the mid-1960s."

Heart - Black

High hopes for the GOP's poverty strategy? Not when created by phonies, frauds and liars

John Boehner Paul Ryan Marco Rubio GOP crooks
© Reuters/Jim BourgAP/Manuel Balce Ceneta/J. Scott Applewhite/Photo collage by Salon
John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio
Paul Ryan and friends won't expand the earned income tax cut or hike the minimum wage, even if it helps the economy

It's heartwarming to see how quickly Rep. Paul Ryan's new poverty report has been debunked and discredited. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has the most exhaustive takedown, but the Fiscal Times report featuring scholars who said Ryan misrepresented their work in order to discredit anti-poverty programs was devastating, too. What's become clear in the last two days is that, just like Paul, his fellow Republicans have absolutely no plans to fight poverty except, perhaps, repealing the 20th century.

As I noted Tuesday, Ryan did single out one anti-poverty program he likes: the earned income tax credit, which helps low-wage parents by eliminating their tax burden or giving them a refundable tax credit. President Obama, always on the lookout for areas of compromise, quickly responded, with a budget proposal that expands the credit to benefit 13.5 million workers and increases what it provides them. Obama would pay for the EITC expansion by eliminating the ugly "carried interest" loophole, which lets certain investment bankers evade taxes, along with another tax break for wealthy self-employed individuals.

What was Ryan's response? He dismissed Obama's budget as a "campaign brochure." House Speaker John Boehner, meanwhile, called it the president's "most irresponsible budget yet." Sen. Marco Rubio, who briefly pretended to care about poverty, specifically denounced Obama's EITC expansion. "I am concerned by the President's call to expand the status quo on the Earned Income Tax Credit. We should be reforming this flawed approach to helping low-income workers, not expanding it."

Vader

U.S. policy of isolating Russia and expanding NATO is a dismal failure

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[NATO's goal is] to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.
- Hastings Ismay, first NATO Secretary-General
Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
- James Madison (1751-1836), fourth American President
The hazards associated with American foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 should appear obvious to all, because it is precisely this policy that has caused the crisis in Ukraine with all its negative consequences for the coming months and years.

President Barack Obama was candid in admitting it on March 3, 2014: "we are indicating to the Russians [that] if in fact they continue on the current trajectory they're on, then we are examining a whole series of steps - economic, diplomatic - that will isolate Russia."

Well, it is precisely this desire to expand NATO and to isolate Russia by incorporating all the countries bordering Russia into NATO; i.e., a strategy of geopolitical and military encirclement of Russia, which has provoked that country when it felt threatened in its national security.

This is easy to understand.

War Whore

The looting of Ukraine has begun

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This supporter of the Ukraine joining the EU has received her reward: a 50% cut in her pension.
According to a report in Kommersant-Ukraine, the finance ministry of Washington's stooges in Kiev who are pretending to be a government has prepared an economic austerity plan that will cut Ukrainian pensions from $160 to $80 so that Western bankers who lent money to Ukraine can be repaid at the expense of Ukraine's poor. It is Greece all over again.

Before anything approaching stability and legitimacy has been obtained for the puppet government put in power by the Washington orchestrated coup against the legitimate, elected Ukraine government, the Western looters are already at work. Naive protesters who believed the propaganda that EU membership offered a better life are due to lose half of their pension by April. But this is only the beginning.

The corrupt Western media describes loans as "aid." However, the 11 billion euros that the EU is offering Kiev is not aid. It is a loan. Moreover, it comes with many strings, including Kiev's acceptance of an IMF austerity plan.

Remember now, gullible Ukrainians participated in the protests that were used to overthrow their elected government, because they believed the lies told to them by Washington-financed NGOs that once they joined the EU they would have streets paved with gold. Instead they are getting cuts in their pensions and an IMF austerity plan.

Chess

21st Century U.S. imperialism: Crimea, this time

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George Washington warned against "foreign entanglements." Was it because he had a premonition of the cluelessness and ineptitude of his successors in the Bush years and in the Age of Obama?

If so, the Bush-Cheney - now Obama - War on Terror shows how right he was. It might as well have been concocted deliberately to encourage Islamists to attack Western targets. The ill will it has created will be a factor in world politics for generations to come.

It has also diminished the liberal protections Washington and his contemporaries prized. Privacy rights have suffered the most.

Was that the idea all along? It could be.

Bush and Cheney certainly saw to it that their successor would have a hard time changing course. Did Obama even want to? There is no sign of it. He and his advisors have carried on with unbridled gusto.