+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The new shtick is load up fees so they are not considered taxes. When you get a basic bill from the telephone company these days the company attaches ten or twelve fees, when you get a utility bill they do the same and this is what a cheap airline did regarding a fight we are taking in October. (See below.)
The purpose is to disguise tax increases by renaming them.
Meanwhile, The Federal Reserve tells you there is no inflation but if you get your clothes cleaned, park your car at the airport, pay real estate taxes, pay health care insurance, contract for any repair service from an electrician, plumber etc. you will discover plenty of inflation.
If you just breathe, costs are going up but we are told there is no inflation. More disingenuous lies.
+++
"Ole Estalishment Bill" threw himself a birthday party last night in order to raise money for their foundation so he can buy more votes for Hillary, so she can help Americans who are not "deplorable but adorable" and who do not live in a basket because they think the way she does.
The birthday checks are coming from those who seem anxious to shell out big bucks to show their love and appreciation for this charming couple from the Hills of Arkansas, who have distinguished themselves by their good deeds. The Clinton's have proved when you have wealth and power you can live the good life without ever having to worry because you have reached "untouchable status." I never knew The FBI was a "kosher" approved agency. (See 1 below.)
If they are lucky enough to return to The White House you can bet The Lincoln Bedroom will become a fund raising gig again.
+++
I have consistently maintained that whomever becomes our next president, like with GW, their domestic programs will eventually become hostage to what happens foreign policy-wise.
As a result of Obama's purposeful desire to shrink America's presence on the world scene, thereby, providing the vacuum created to be filled by radical Islamist terrorists, most prominently ISIS, the road for the next president will be filled with threatening detours.
After 9/11 GW had no choice but to respond and former Sec. Gates discusses the issue facing the next president. The ones he sees are those I have articulated.
His characterization of Trump is brutal and perhaps a bit overboard because I believe he has taken comments by Trump and drawn conclusions that suggest the man is beyond change. As for Hillary, he suggests she has time and needs to articulate her views and I get the impression that would make Gates comfortable. Perhaps I have over interpreted his comments and concerns. You decide .(See 2 below.)
===
Trump made a joke concerning Hillary's opposition to guns. Apparently, it still has not sunk in, anything he says will be viewed through a negative prism. Even if he is joking it will not be taken as such. We know The Donald loves to ad lib and whomever is in charge is incapable of muzzling him.
The ground of past presidential races is littered with comments that sank the fortunes of candidates . I still remember the picture of the former Gov. of Mass. in a tank and Life Magazine's Cover showed Dewey still dressed in a suit fishing in Florida with his boat tied to the dock.
Then we have the comments about being lied to, I knew Kennedy etc.
The mass media are avowedly biased and their tolerance for Republicans is very limited so Trump would be wise to stay serious and stop with the jokes and ad libs.
Hillary has 50 more days to egg you into a trap caused by your own tongue because she wants to get under your skin and cause a defeating response. Just some thoughts.
===
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1) Just 5.7 Percent Of Clinton Foundation Budget Actually Went To Charitable Grants
Just 5.7 percent of the Clinton Foundation’s massive 2014 budget actually went to charitable grants, according to the tax-exempt organization’s IRS filings. The rest went to salaries and employee benefits, fundraising and “other expenses.”
The Clinton Foundation spent a hair under $91.3 million in 2014, the organization’s IRS filings show. But less than $5.2 million of that went to charitable grants.
That number pales in comparison to the $34.8 million the foundation spent on salaries, compensation and employee benefits.
Another $50.4 million was marked as “other expenses,” while the remaining almost $851K was marked as “professional fundraising expenses.”
Despite taking in an additional $30 million in 2014, the Clinton Foundation spent 40 percent less on charitable grants in 2014 than in 2013. Even as it slashed charitable spending, the foundation increased the amount spent on salaries, employee benefits and compensation by $5 million in 2014. The foundation also spent $5 million more “other expenses” in 2014.
Sean Davis at The Federalist notes, “the bulk of the charitable work lauded by the Clinton Foundation’s boosters — the distribution of drugs to impoverished people in developing countries — is no longer even performed by the Clinton Foundation. Those activities were spun off in 2010 and are now managed by the Clinton Health Access Initiative, a completely separate non-profit organization.” (RELATED: Clinton Foundation Deceived IRS On Tax Exemption From The Start)
As first reported by The Daily Caller, the IRS launched an investigation into the Clinton Foundation this past July after 64 House Republicans called the foundation a “lawless ‘pay-to-play’ enterprise that has been operating under a cloak of philanthropy for years and should be investigated” in a letter to the IRS, FBI and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) Sizing Up the Next Commander-in-Chief
Neither candidate has seriously addressed how he or she thinks about the military or the use of force.
By ROBERT M. GATES
You wouldn’t know it from the presidential campaigns, but the first serious crisis to face our new president most likely will be international. The list of possibilities is long—longer than it was eight years ago.
Here is the world the new president will inherit at noon on January 20—a range of challenges for which neither candidate has offered new strategies or paths forward.
Every aspect of our relationship with China is becoming more challenging. In addition to Chinese cyberspying and theft of intellectual property, many American businesses in China are encountering an increasingly hostile environment. China’s nationalist determination unilaterally to assert sovereignty over disputed waters and islands in the East and South China Seas is steadily increasing the risk of military confrontation.
Most worrying, given their historic bad blood, escalation of a confrontation between China and Japan could be very dangerous. As a treaty partner of Japan, we would be obligated to help Tokyo. China intends to challenge the U.S. for regional dominance in East Asia over the long term, but the new president could quickly face a Chinese military challenge over disputed islands and freedom of navigation.
Dealing effectively with China requires a president with strategic acumen and vision, nuance, deft diplomatic and political skill, and sound instincts on when to challenge, when to stay silent and when to compromise or partner.
On this most complex challenge, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump has said or done much to give anyone confidence. All we really know is Mr. Trump’s intention to launch a trade war with a country holding over $1 trillion in U.S. debt and the largest market for many U.S. companies; and Mrs. Clinton’s opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which she helped to craft and the failure of which would hand China an easy political and economic win.
Then there is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, now routinely challenging the U.S. and its allies. How to count the ways. There was the armed seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea; Moscow’s military support of the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine; overt and covert intimidation of the Baltic states; the dispatch of fighter and bomber aircraft to avert the defeat of Syria’s Assad; sales of sophisticated weaponry to Iran.
There is Russia’s luring the U.S. secretary of state into believing that a cease-fire in Syria is just around the corner—if only the U.S. would do more, or less, depending on the issue; the cyberattacks on the U.S., including possible attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election; and covert efforts to aggravate division and weakness with the European Union and inside European countries. And there is the dangerously close buzzing of U.S. Navy ships in the Baltic Sea and close encounters with U.S. military aircraft in international airspace.
The only thing longer than the list of hostile Russian actions abroad is the list of repressive actions inside Russia to stifle dissent and strengthen Mr. Putin’s security services-run state. Mr. Putin will continue to behave aggressively until confronted and stopped.
No one in the West wants a return to the Cold War, so the challenge is to confront and stop Mr. Putin’s aggressions while pursuing cooperation on international challenges that can only be addressed successfully if Russia is at the table—from terrorism to climate change, from the Syrian conflict to nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. Again, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. Trump has expressed any views on how they would deal with Mr. Putin (although Mr. Trump’s expressions of admiration for the man and his authoritarian regime are naive and irresponsible).
North Korea and Iran are sworn enemies of the U.S. North Korean potentate Kim Jong Unis building more nuclear weapons for his arsenal even as he develops ballistic missiles that now, or very soon, can reach all of our allies (and U.S. military forces) in Asia. During the first term of the next president these missiles will be able to reach the U.S. mainland.
On his good days, Kim Jong Un appears to outsiders as a cartoonish megalomaniac; on his bad days, he seems to yearn for a Gotterdammerung finale in which a perishing North Korea takes a lot of Asians and Americans with it. Or is he simply continuing to pursue a strategy designed to preserve his rule and North Korea’s independence through nuclear blackmail? The new U.S. president could face an early North Korean provocation against the South, the Japanese or us, and for sure will be confronted by a long-term strategic nuclear threat to our allies and to America.
While Mrs. Clinton gave a speech on Iran over a year ago, she has since offered no inkling of her views and has said little about North Korea. Mr. Trump has said nary a word on the challenge posed by either country.
Both candidates have spelled out how they would deal with ISIS, and terrorism more broadly, but their approach in essence sounds like what President Obama is doing now—with more ideological fervor and some additional starch. Neither has addressed what the broader U.S. strategy should be toward a Middle East in flames, from Syria to Iraq to Libya, and where Gulf Arab states worry about their own stability amid growing doubts they can rely on the U.S.; both Egypt and Turkey are ruled by increasingly authoritarian strongmen; and an Israeli-Palestinian conflict further from resolution than ever.
Mr. Trump has suggested we should walk away from the region and hope for the best. This is a dangerous approach oblivious to the reality that what happens in the Middle East doesn’t stay in the Middle East. Mrs. Clinton has ruled out putting U.S. ground troops in Iraq and Syria “ever again.” That is a politically driven categorical declaration of a sort no president (or candidate) should make, and it raises the question whether she would pull out the 5,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq. She has expressed no new ideas to deal with the boiling caldron that is today’s Middle East.
Each of these challenges may require the use of the American military, the most powerful the world has ever seen. The president commands some two million men and women in uniform, and every previous president would attest that the decision to put those lives at risk is the weightiest burden of office. Yet neither candidate has seriously addressed how he or she thinks about the military, the use of military force, the criteria they would apply before sending that force into battle, or broader questions of peace and war. Based on what each candidate has said and done, who can we trust with the lives of young Americans in uniform?
Both candidates have a credibility problem in foreign affairs. Mrs. Clinton was the senior-most advocate for using the U.S. military to bring ill-fated regime change in Libya and, further, failed to anticipate the chaos that would follow—the same failure she and other Democrats hung around the neck of the Bush 43 administration in post-Saddam Iraq. She was for trade agreements before she turned against them in this election campaign, just as she voted for the Iraq war in 2003 and then, several years later—in her first campaign for president—opposed the troop surge there. She has much-discussed credibility issues apart from national security, but these also influence foreign perceptions of reliability and trust.
When it comes to credibility problems, though, Donald Trump is in a league of his own. He has expressed support for building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico; for torturing suspected terrorists and killing their families; for Mr. Putin’s dictatorial leadership and for Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent successes against terrorism. He also has said he is for using defense spending by NATO allies as the litmus test on whether the U.S. will keep its treaty commitments to them; for withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe, South Korea and Japan and for the latter two developing nuclear weapons—a highly destabilizing prospect.
Mr. Trump has been cavalier about the use of nuclear weapons. He has a record of insults to servicemen, their families and the military, which he called a “disaster.” He has declared our senior military leaders “reduced to rubble” and “embarrassing our country” and has suggested that, if elected, he will purge them—an unprecedented and unconscionable threat. As of late, he appears to be rethinking some of these positions but he has yet to learn that when a president shoots off his mouth, there are no do-overs.
Mr. Trump is also willfully ignorant about the rest of the world, about our military and its capabilities, and about government itself. He disdains expertise and experience while touting his own—such as his claim that he knows more about ISIS than America’s generals. He has no clue about the difference between negotiating a business deal and negotiating with sovereign nations.
All of the presidents I served were strong personalities with strongly held views about the world. But each surrounded himself with independent-minded, knowledgeable and experienced advisers who would tell the president what he needed to hear, not what he wanted to hear. Sometimes presidents would take their advice, sometimes not. But they always listened.
The world we confront is too perilous and too complex to have as president a man who believes he, and he alone, has all the answers and has no need to listen to anyone. In domestic affairs, there are many checks on what a president can do; in national security there are few constraints. A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America.
I understand the broad anger and frustration against political leaders in both parties. I have written about my disgust as secretary of defense as I watched politicians repeatedly place re-election above the nation’s best interests. Polls make clear that most Americans are dissatisfied with the two major party candidates for president. But as I used to say in the Pentagon, we are where we are—not where we might wish to be. We have to make a decision. Perhaps the debates, if the candidates focus on substance rather than personal attacks, will clarify the choice.
Mrs. Clinton has time before the election to address forthrightly her trustworthiness, to reassure people about her judgment, to demonstrate her willingness to stake out one or more positions on national security at odds with her party’s conventional wisdom, and to speak beyond generalities about how she would deal with China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the Middle East—and international trade. Whether and how she addresses these issues will, I believe, affect how many people vote—including me.
At least on national security, I believe Mr. Trump is beyond repair. He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.
Mr. Gates served eight presidents over 50 years, most recently as secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Receipt and Payment Details
Airfare $114.96 Fed Excise Tax $8.64 Segment Fees $16.00 PFC $18.00 Sept 11 Security Fee $22.40 Carry-on Bag $60.00 Carrier Usage Charge $52.00 Credit Card Surcharge $9.34 Total Trip Cost: $301.34
Payment Type Visa - 5331
Payment Date 9/16/2016
Amount $301.34 Total Paid: $301.34
Balance Due $0.00
+
No comments:
Post a Comment