Political Consensus Is Splintering Into Class Wars

Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog

"Understanding how these many wars will be waged is critical to surviving them intact."

In years past, we spoke of class war between the haves and the have-nots. It's no longer that simple. Now the traditional political consensus is splintering into multiple class wars between overlapping camps of the protected and the unprotected, those who've been promised entitlements and privileges that are no longer affordable and those expected to pay more taxes.

In Fiery, "Surreal" Press Conference, Trump Launches War On "Out Of Control" Press: Main Highlights

Zero Hedge  Numerous videos from the presser here.

"Many of our nation's reporters and folks will not tell you the truth and will not treat you with the respect you deserve," Trump said from the White House's East Room.

"Much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks for the special interests and for those profiting off the obviously very, very broken system.

The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people.

The press is out of control, the level of dishonesty is out of control" . . .

Humana exit highlights uncertainty about ObamaCare replacement plan

Weasel Zippers

"Humana’s decision to exit the ObamaCare exchanges at the end of the year could trigger a “domino effect” among insurers, with companies abandoning the marketplace and potentially leaving thousands with diminished or zero coverage options in 2018.

"Humana became the first insurance company to pull out of the exchanges for 2018 on Tuesday, amid uncertainty from Congress and the Trump administration about what an ObamaCare replacement will look like and when it might be implemented.
. . .
"And history shows that once one insurer drops out of the exchanges, others are likely to follow.

"For example, when Aetna announced last year that it would pull out of most of the exchanges, UnitedHealthcare and Humana also scaled back their participation.
“It did start to feel like a domino effect last year, and it could be something similar this year,” said Cynthia Cox, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation." . . .

Arabs, Trump and Israel

legalinsurrection

Did Netanyahu Just Tell Us What A Two-State Solution Looks Like?  "As I noted here, the Trump administration has effectively — and I think rightfully — decided to not pursue the same failed “Mideast peace process” we’ve chased like some will ‘o the wisp.

"The White House said that the agreement between Israel and the Islamofascist suicide bombers Palestinians must be worked out between those two parties and as long as that solution is supportive of peace and stability that the United States will support it. When coupled with the earlier statement that pointedly allowed Israel to build more housing within existing settlement areas, it clearly puts the onus on the Palestinians to either make a deal or to see a de facto border developed that might include more of the land they think is theirs than they would like." . . .

"Now let’s look at a map of Israeli settlement activity since 1967 and areas under Israeli control we see this:"

"How much of historic Judea do you think the Palestinians are going get to keep? I’m guessing you are looking at the maximum extent of Palestinian control and that area will be subject to shrinkage unless they reach a deal soon." . . .

California Schools Cut Meat, Cheese From Lunches To Fight Global Warming

Weasel Zippers/

Daily Caller  "Oakland schools partnered with the environmental group Friends of the Earth (FOE) to fight global warming by making student lunches climate-friendly.

"FOE gave kids a lunch menu designed to eliminate foods it says are “unsustainable for our planet.” The new menu features far less meat and more plant-based food. Any meat or cheese the school did use came from “pastured, organic dairy cows.” The student’s lunch menu went from beef hot dogs and pepperoni pizza to vegan stir fry tofu and vegan tostadas. The new FOE-approved menu served meat and cheese-less frequently and reduced the portion sizes.

“ 'This is a landmark moment for school food,” Jennifer LeBarre, head of nutrition services for Oakland Unified School District, said in a FOE press statement. “We were so excited to see how the data showed that we could reduce our carbon and water footprint by serving healthy, delicious food –– like the vegetarian tostadas with fresh made in-house salsa, that kids absolutely love –– all while saving money.”

"The district and FOE claimed the lunch program was healthier than before, but only on the basis that food from plants is typically healthier than meat. The study justifies its health claims by stating average poultry consumption fell. FOE did not undertake an actual study into whether or not the lunches improved student health." . . .

The Three-Headed Hydra of the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson

Trump has inherited a matrix of problems that primarily stem from Iran, Russia, and ISIS.

"The abrupt Obama administration pre-election pullout from Iraq in 2011, along with the administration’s failed reset with Russia and the Iran deal, created a three-headed hydra in the Middle East.

"What makes the Middle East monster deadly is the interplay between the Iranian terrorist regime and its surrogates Hezbollah and the Assad regime; Russian president Vladimir Putin’s deployment of bombers into Syria and Iraq after a 40-year Russian hiatus in the region; and the medieval beheaders of the Islamic State.

"Add into the brew anti-Americanism, genocide, millions of refugees, global terrorism, and nuclear weapons.

"ISIS is simultaneously at war against the Assad regime, Iran and Iranian surrogates such Hezbollah, and Russian expeditionary forces. ISIS also seeks to energize terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.

"Stranger still, ISIS almost surely is receiving stealth support from Sunni nations in the Middle East, some of them ostensibly American allies.

"This matrix gets even crazier.

"The authors of reset policy during the Obama administration are now furious at President Trump for even talking about what they tried for years: reaching out to Putin. Yet in the Middle East, Russia is doing us a favor by attacking ISIS, even as it does no favors in saving the genocidal Assad regime that has murdered tens of thousands of innocents — along with lots of ISIS terrorists as well." . . . 

The Silence of the Lambs Congress

Ann Coulter  "Let's compare what President Trump has accomplished since the inauguration (with that enormous crowd!) with what congressional Republicans have done. 
   
"In the past three weeks, Trump has: staffed the White House, sent a dozen Cabinet nominees to the Senate, browbeat Boeing into cutting its price on a government contract, harangued American CEOs into keeping their plants in the United States, imposed a terrorist travel ban, met with foreign leaders and nominated a Supreme Court justice, among many other things.

"(And still our hero finds time to torment the media with his tweets!)

What have congressional Republicans been doing? Scrapbooking?

"More than 90 percent of congressional Republicans kept their jobs after the 2016 election, so you can cross "staffing an entire branch of government" off the list. Only the Senate confirms nominees, which they've been doing at a snail's pace, so they've got loads of free time -- and the House has no excuse at all.

"Where's the Obamacare repeal? Where are the hearings featuring middle-class Americans with no health insurance because it was made illegal by Obamacare?

"The House passed six Obamacare repeals when Obama was president and there was no chance of them being signed into law. Back then, Republicans were full of vim and vigor! But the moment Trump became president, the repeals came to a screeching halt." . . .

Can't Hillary be capable of looking deep inside to see herself as so many Americans saw her?

Lena Dunham says not to blame her for Hillary's loss   Language advisory. . . . "It's amazing. I'm like, "Why don't we check in with Russia, you guys?" I think it tends to come more from the right wing, although I'm not sure. Now it's so hard to know what's coming from where, because stories get published on Breitbart and two days later they're in Newsweek and you're like, "What the f--k is happening right now?" No one is more studied in the art of the right wing planting a story and liberals eating each other alive over it than I am. I see it every single day, but I'm not gonna stand there screaming about it, 'cause that makes you a bad sport. And also it's boring and I'm not interested in it. But do people want me to go, "I don't think I'm really good for this. I'm gonna bow out"? I wouldn't see any use for celebrity if I wasn't fighting rabidly for what I thought was right." . . ."I'm like. . . "?

This pre-inauguration article calls HRC like she is  . . . "Well, Donald Trump had one thing in his favor: he ran against one of the most unpopular and despised presidential candidates in American history, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Combine the electorate’s Clinton antipathy with a risky but targeted strategy to flip the Rust Belt and it’s not so hard to understand why Donald Trump, a man with no experience in government, will be sitting in the oval office come late January." . . .

 'Well, allow me to retort. Hillary Clinton lost the election because she was a terrible candidate. Nobody likes or trusts her (yes, elections actually are popularity contests) and her neoliberal domestic policies and neoconservative foreign policies turned people off because they are genuinely bad. Clinton represented the establishment in a change election, something she was happy to do. She even openly courted Republicans hoping her “temperament” talking point would make partisan Republicans vote for one of the most hated Democrats in history. It didn’t work.

Liberal activists want no part of a Chelsea Clinton candidacy

Legal Insurrection

"While the media obsesses over the Trump White House day after day, they are largely neglecting to report that a battle is still raging for the soul of the Democratic Party.

"Chelsea Clinton is gearing up for her turn at bat, but the progressive wing of the party isn’t interested.

"The Washington Times reports:

‘Never Chelsea’ movement grows among liberal activists 

They weren’t ready for Hillary, and now they’re definitely not ready for her daughter, Chelsea Clinton.   . . .  

. . . If the candidates running for chair of the DNC are any indication, the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing is about to assume control of the party. The establishment wing however, isn’t going away quietly.

Report: Former Obama officials leaked to take down Flynn because he wanted to expose the Iran deal

Hot Air  "I get the first part of this story, not so much the second. The bit about Obama alumni targeting Flynn? Highly plausible if not likely. Flynn was a harsh Obama critic ever since O fired him from his position as DIA, and Flynn more than anyone else in the administration seemed prepared to guide Trump towards detente with the same Putin regime that had tried to sink Democrats’ chances during the campaign with the DNC and Podesta hackings. Flynn is also famously an Iran hawk, something which the Obama administration was, er, not. Did Team O have the means and motives to take down a man they despised? You betcha."
. . .
"I’m not even sure it qualifies as a “secret” that Obama appointees were trying to take down Flynn. Last night’s WaPo bombshell about the DOJ warning Trump in January about what Flynn said to the Russian ambassador is littered with Obama administration names in the key details. It was Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General who ended up being fired when she wouldn’t enforce Trump’s travel ban, who took the information about the call to the White House. It was James Clapper and John Brennan who reportedly decided that Flynn’s sanctions talk with the ambassador — which was by all accounts ambiguous — was so grave that Trump needed to know, for fear of potential Russian blackmail. It also stands to reason that Obama guys down the chain would be the bureaucrats most invested in protecting the foreign policy status quo of the last eight years from the one guy in the new intelligence hierarchy who most threatened that status quo."

Surprise: At the End, Obama Administration Gave NSA Broad New Powers
This spiteful, vindictive man was happy to wall off aged veterans from visiting open-air war memorials and block viewpoints on open highways with the order to make the government shutdown "hurt". Naturally he will try to make his successor in the While House fail.
"The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches." . . .

America's spies anonymously took down Michael Flynn. That is deeply worrying.

. . . Members of the unelected, unaccountable intelligence community are not the right someone, especially when they target a senior aide to the president by leaking anonymously to newspapers the content of classified phone intercepts, where the unverified, unsubstantiated information can inflict politically fatal damage almost instantaneously." . . .

Trump Needs To Either Shutdown the Pro-Obama Leakers Or He Needs To Resign

RedState  "Color me a more than a little dubious about the motivation for bringing Flynn down. There are enough people hostile to the Iran deal in the NSC that if they wanted to leak the scope of the US surrender to the Mullahs they would have done so by now. Having said that, I have no doubt that Kredo is right in linking Ben Rhodes’s merry platoon of Obama fellatistos to the operation. The leaks on Trump’s calls to foreign leaders can only have come from within the so-called (haha) professional staff of the National Security Council. The “former” intelligence officials quoted by the Washington post were almost certainly Obama hired staffers who lost their jobs on January 20.". . .

Israel's Ambassador Danon interrupted by protesters at Columbia University

Israel's Ambassador Danon interrupted by protesters at Columbia University . . . "Israel's ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, spoke to a crowd of 300 at Columbia University Monday night, hosted by the Columbia University chapter of Students Supporting Israel.  A large anti-Israel crowd outside Lerner Hall protested the event.


"The groups Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Barnard Columbia Socialists, and Columbia Against Trump coordinated the protest on the Facebook page "Racists Not Welcome: Protest the Israeli Ambassador at Columbia."  Reasons given to protest Danon included his desire to "annex the West Bank" and his "abandoning even the pretence [sic] of the 'two-state solution.'"  They also accused Danon of being "a cheerleader for Trump and the Republican fight" and alleged that "from racist walls to repressive border policing, Trump copies Israel."  And that "Danon is the official representative of a state born, like America, through savage ethnic cleansing" and that "his is a state that has besieged and bombed the Palestinian people since its inception.' " 

Wait just a minute!  Just who is the apartheid group here?
"Experts: Over 200 US-approved textbooks teach Palestinians to kill Jews

"The violent curriculum can be found in 240 books – ranging from civics to mathematics – in over 400 UNRWA schools in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, experts say."

. . .

"Indeed, among the myriad of examples presented from the books, one is a math word problem asking students to use variables, including the number of Jews killed during the first and second intifadas.

"Another was the following excerpt from a poem:
Hearing [weapons] clash is pleasant to my ear
And the flow of blood gladdens my soul
As well as a body thrown upon the ground
Skirmished over by the desert predator
By your life! This is the death of men
And whoever asks for a noble death – this is it!”

“ .We have copies of the books and went through them, and what’s happening is very clear."

When the Jews of Israel are at last murdered or driven into the sea, will these leftist students then demonstrate for them? TD

Two Arab Terrorists Confess to Fogel Massacre - without Regret  . . . "The teenage terrorists, who are members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), were assisted by at least six others, four of them from Awad’s family.


"The massacre of the Fogels took place at night on Friday night (Sabbath), March 11. The terrorists climbed over the fence surrounding Itamar, a Samaria community, and entered the Fogel family's home. They stabbed to death Rabbi Ehud (Udi) Fogel, his wife Ruth, 11-year-old Yoav, four-year-old Elad and three-month-old Hadas.

"The terrorists not only expressed no regret for the brutal stabbings of their parents, the baby, and two other young children, but they also said they would have killed two other children, Roi, 8, and Shai, 2  if they had known they were in another room. The sixth child, Tamar, was out of the house at the time of the murders and discovered the shocking scene when she returned home." . . .

Palestinian TV Airs Show Praising Fogel Family Murderer