Highmark

I just did. I'm for cutting everything in govt. Our current model is not sustainable. We even have to make cuts to SS and Medicare but those should be done after cutting EVERYTHING ELSE. People should look at the military spending when it comes to anything else. Once its started its extremely hard to go backwards. Its one of the main reasons I don't support a single payer system. Once its in place we are stuck with it whether its a failure or not.

I fully support a 25-50% cut in military spending in some way shape or form. I am not in agreement with Trump in military spending increases except to take care of our soldiers and pay them more. Time for the world to take care of itself.

I wonder if these cuts are in growth or overall. The media loves to play word games with these. I hope they really are in overall size not just growth. Dems always used that play on words to act like they were making govt smaller. Federal spending for 2017 was suppose to be around $4.15 trillion or about $13,000 per fucking person. Add in state and local and you have spending at around $22,000 per person. FUBAR. $88,000 in govt spending per family of 4.

So you're against taking better care of our soldiers?

Not even CNN or MSNBC is picking this up. Silly MC.

Anyone watch Live PD on A&E on Friday and Saturday nights? I seriously question some of the police tactics but damn does everyone ride around with drugs in their cars? Biggest problem I have is they "make contact" and immediately ask to search the car. Smelling pot is one thing but they virtually ask everyone to search their vehicle.

No doubt, especially coming on here and reading MC's drivel.

The New York Times ran a front page article entitled "Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides" in its January 20th edition: The January 20th New York Times story reports that "American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort..." The report goes on to say that "intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House." Right from the NYTimes article. Now why would this information be provided to the WH if it didn't originate with the WH? If the WH was not directing the wiretapping wouldn't it say "shared with the WH?"

NOW NOTE HOW FOX NEWS TREATS TRUMP LIKE A FAVORITE CHILD. The dont ask him why mad such a slanderous lie.....they let him off. He has zero evidence Obama had him under surveillance.....zero. Now a bipartisan investigation committee says they have zero information Obama had his "wires tapped" They guy should be sued and impeached. Whats hilarious is you guys believe the IC.

Somehow, the Washington Times had gotten its hands on the surreptitious recording. I authenticated the conversation, and parts of it were published by the newspaper, which provided online links where readers could listen to me talking with Mr. Qaddafi. The reporters did not say, nor did I ask, who had made the tape. But the paper’s stories referenced “secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.” I have only my suspicions about their true provenance. The quality of the recordings was excellent on both ends of the call. If sources had indeed discovered the tapes in Tripoli, there is no plausible explanation for how they would have chosen the Washington Times to carry the story. And which foreign intelligence service conceivably could have been interested in my phone call, had the technology to intercept it, and then wanted to leak it to the newspaper? There’s a simpler explanation: I believe the tape was made by an American intelligence agency and then leaked to the Times for political reasons. If so, this episode represented a gross violation of the separation of powers. Shortly after the Times story was published, I alerted congressional leaders to the breach and then let the matter rest, assuming that a series of routine Freedom of Information Act requests I had made in 2012 before leaving office would provide answers.

Had 4 days of awesome riding at Togwotee with my oldest son. Snow was set up but we still had a riot. Pictures and video from out there never does it justice.

Silly left wing media. http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2017/02/14/gorka-fake-news-left-media-attempts-smear-sebastian-gorka-nazi-sympathizer/ The media, and the left in general, are attempting to smear former Breitbart editor Sebastian Gorka, who serves as Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States, as a Nazi sympathizer. As any of his Breitbart News colleagues could testify, Gorka is not only pro-Israel but “pro-Jewish,” and defends both against the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. But facts do not matter to the left and the mainstream media in their efforts to frighten the public and harass the administration. The ridiculous accusation is based on a medal that Gorka was seen wearing at an inaugural ball. Eli Clifton of the LobeLog blog wrote on Sunday that Gorka “has appeared in multiple photographs wearing the medal of a Hungarian group listed by the State Department as having collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.” Clifton notes that the medal is associated with a military order, the “Hungarian Order of Heroes, Vitezi Rend” created after the First World War. He goes on to speculate (wrongly — see below) that the medal could have been won by Gorka’s grandfather. The order, he adds, was later associated with Hungary’s Nazi-aligned government during the Second World War, and later banned by the Soviets. But Clifton notes: “The order was awarded to members of the Hungarian diaspora and individuals in Hungary since 1983.” Clifton does not bother to report why the order was awarded then, or even why the “Hungarian diaspora” existed in the first place; he shows no interest in the order as an anti-communist symbol, merely noting that the Soviets banned it. And of course Clifton offers no evidence — none at all — that Gorka, or his antecedents, had any kind of empathy for the Nazi regime or its views. Clifton could have consulted Gorka’s book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, to know more about his background. His father grew up during the Nazi siege of Budapest and later joined the anti-communist resistance. He was betrayed by Kim Philby, a British double agent for the Soviet Union, arrested and tortured. Talking Points Memo, while echoing Clifton’s false attack on Gorka, notes that it was Gorka’s father who won the award, which by then was an anti-communist symbol: “Gorka’s late father, Paul, fled Hungary for the United Kingdom during a failed 1956 revolt against the Soviet-imposed government. The flyleaf of Paul Gorka’s book ‘Budapest Rising’ identifies him as a recipient of the Order of Vitéz ‘for his bravery during the Resistance'” — i.e. the resistance against Soviet communism, which Gorka discusses in his book. Ironically, when Eli Clifton was at the left-wing Center for American Progress, he himself was involved in a damaging scandal about antisemitism at its ThinkProgess blog in 2011-2012. At the time, the Jerusalem Post noted: “The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee have all termed the anti-Israeli rhetoric of Jilani and fellow CAP writers Eli Clifton, Ali Gharib, Matt Duss and Ben Armbruster to be infected with Jew-hatred and discriminatory policy positions toward Israel.” So it is unclear why Clifton’s false accusations of Nazi ties are being treated as credible. (Clifton is now a reporter at the Nation Institute, a non-profit associated with the left-wing magazine.) Clifton’s slander was picked up by the Southern Poverty Law Center, retweeted by Chelsea Clinton, reiterated by left-wing publications like Talking Points Memo, and elevated by mainstream sources like the Times of Israel and Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. None bothered to check the underlying claim of Gorka’s alleged Nazi sympathies.

Mic drop end of thread..

The hate for Trump is so large in the IC (deep state) no way incriminating evidence would not have been leaked.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/03/10/dennis-kucinich-im-no-fan-trumps-but-hes-got-point-about-wiretapping.html President Trump’s assertion that his phones at Trump Tower were tapped last year has been treated as hilarious—and in some circles as beyond contempt. But I can vouch for the fact that extracurricular surveillance does occur, regardless of whether it is officially approved. I was wiretapped in 2011 after taking a phone call in my congressional office from a foreign leader. That a secret recording had been made of this call was revealed to me by the Washington Times in 2015, a full two years after I left office. The newspaper’s investigative reporters called me, saying they had obtained a tape of a sensitive telephone conversation that they wanted me to verify. When I met them at a Chinese restaurant in Washington, they played back audio of a call I had taken in my D.C. congressional office four years earlier. The call had been from Saif el-Islam Qaddafi, a high-ranking official in Libya’s government and a son of the country’s ruler, Moammar Qaddafi. At the time I was leading efforts in the House to challenge the Obama administration’s war against Libya. The Qaddafi government reached out to me because its appeals to the White House and the State Department to forestall the escalating aggression had gone unanswered. Before taking the call, I checked with the House’s general counsel to ensure that such a discussion by a member of Congress with a foreign power was permitted by law. I was assured that under the Constitution a lawmaker had a fundamental duty to ask questions and gather information—activity expressly protected by the Article I clauses covering separation of powers and congressional speech and debate. I could and did ask questions of the younger Mr. Qaddafi. On the Libyan end, the risk of the conversation was that whatever phone was used to call my office might serve as a homing beacon for a drone strike. That possibility was minimized, I was told, by calling me on a cellphone that was used only once and then discarded. Somehow, the Washington Times had gotten its hands on the surreptitious recording. I authenticated the conversation, and parts of it were published by the newspaper, which provided online links where readers could listen to me talking with Mr. Qaddafi. The reporters did not say, nor did I ask, who had made the tape. But the paper’s stories referenced “secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.” I have only my suspicions about their true provenance. The quality of the recordings was excellent on both ends of the call. If sources had indeed discovered the tapes in Tripoli, there is no plausible explanation for how they would have chosen the Washington Times to carry the story. And which foreign intelligence service conceivably could have been interested in my phone call, had the technology to intercept it, and then wanted to leak it to the newspaper? There’s a simpler explanation: I believe the tape was made by an American intelligence agency and then leaked to the Times for political reasons. If so, this episode represented a gross violation of the separation of powers. Shortly after the Times story was published, I alerted congressional leaders to the breach and then let the matter rest, assuming that a series of routine Freedom of Information Act requests I had made in 2012 before leaving office would provide answers. Five years later I am still waiting for FOIA responses from some of the intelligence agencies. I cannot say with assurance that my Libya call was the only one intercepted. I have never gone public with this story, but when I saw the derision with which President Trump’s claims were greeted—and notwithstanding our political differences—I felt I should share my experience. When the president raised the question of wiretapping on his phones in Trump Tower, he was challenged to prove that such a thing could happen. It happened to me.

Of course they couldn't be "grim" on the level of spying that the IC is doing on our people.

Reality is Obamacare is failing. Any refusal to admit it is being obtuse.

And this whole time we were led to believe the FBI and NSA was only chartered to spy on us in the US and CIA was outside the US.

The one thing I fear of Trump is caving to the warhawks like McCain and Graham in order to get tax cuts, repeal and replace and the wall done. Wasn't Graham just at the WH recently?

You don't have to love the man to appreciate what he is standing for. I didn't hate Obama, I hated his policies. I don't hate Trump or like things he has said but I like his policies. I like that he's putting a HUGE effort forward to get things done that he campaigned for. That is refreshing. What I find hilarious is guys like you who said they would vote for Clinton for a 3rd term who actually did grab women by the pussy instead of just saying they did yet claiming Trump is a piece of shit and Clinton wasn't. That's fucking funny.

Kind of thinking the same thing. Funny how their "anonymous sources" are always without doubt and anyone else is a joke.

Oops.

I actually watch MSNBC, CNN and Fox. All three are amusing in their own way. I watch more CNN and MSNBC on election night than anything. God damn that was fun.

See that where they hired actors to play out the debates where the actress played Trump and actor played Hillary. They said and even tried to portray the same body language to prove it was more Hillary being a woman than anything. It completely backfired and they people still preferred "Trump" even though the actress played him.