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Light Saber

Dissent among EU ranks: Germans, Czechs, Greeks, Cypriots oppose sanctions against Russia

stop the madness
The Greek, Cypriot Opposition Leaders Denounce EU's Ukraine Policy and Sanctions against Russia.

In a statement released following the meeting in Athens between Panos Kammenos, leader of the Independent Greeks party, and Giorgos Lillikas, leader and founder of the Citizens Movement of Cyprus, and former Cypriot Presidential candidate, denounced the EU support for the unelected, nondemocratic government of Ukraine and proposal for sanctions against Russia. They also attack the European Union bailout and memorandums imposed on Greece and Cyprus.

Kammenos stated that the two leaders expressed concern for the situation "that has emerged in Ukraine with the recognition of an undemocratically non-elected government from the EU side" and expressed that they are "particularly concerned by the debate that is imposing an embargo, particularly with regard to equipment, because this potential embargo essentially affect only two countries in the European Union: Cyprus and Greece."

Headphones

Scandalous! Secret Sarkozy recordings spark uproar in French right party

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© Reuters/Yves Herman
Recordings made in secret by Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign adviser posted on Wednesday have thrown the former French president's UMP party into disarray, weeks before local elections in which it hoped to claw back terrain from the ruling Socialists.

In the recordings posted on the right-leaning Atlantico web site, Sarkozy can be heard discussing electoral strategy, a cabinet reshuffle and his public image in the run-up to France's 2012 presidential election, which he lost.

While the excerpts are more intriguing than incriminating, analysts said more revelations from what are apparently hours of recordings could hurt his chances of staging a political comeback in time for presidential elections in 2017.

The lawyer for campaign manager Patrick Buisson confirmed the authenticity of the recordings to Reuters but denied allegations his client leaked them, and said they were stolen.

A former editor of a far-right magazine who helped engineer a right-ward shift to Sarkozy's campaign, Buisson made the tapes as a matter of historical record and because he could not take written notes, said his lawyer Gilles-William Goldnadel.

Road Cone

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

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© Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty ImagesDistrict 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 NazcaGonzalez 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.
โ€‹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/MCTChairman 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 SalonJohn 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.