White House

Forget The White House... Hillary is heading to The Big House...

Having told Jimmy Kimmel that he "would love to" appoint Sarah Palin to his cabinet, The Washington Post asks (and answers), just what would a trump cabinet look like?

The so-called “trustees” of the social security system issued their annual report last week and the stenographers of the financial press dutifully reported that the day of reckoning when the trust funds run dry has been put off another year - until 2034. So take a breath and kick the can. That’s five Presidential elections away!

...Except that is not what the report really says.

With everyone asking 'what can derail this?', perhaps, there is something. As Politico reports, the massively influential Koch brothers are freezing out Donald Trump from their influential political operation - denying him access to their state-of-the-art data and refusing to let him speak to their gatherings of grass-roots activists or major donors.

How many more blind eyes can the press (or "we, the people") turn?

To let the media tell it, recent "attacks" - including a suicide bombing that killed 32 people earlier this month - have prompted Turkey to officially join the fight against ISIS. In reality, Ankara's motivations can be explained not by a desire to rid the world of "terrorists", but by considerations of political expediency and by an autocrat's insatiable thirst for power.

After two years and a massive 167,000 signatures, FirstLook reports that The White House has officially denied a hugely popular whitehouse.gov petition calling for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be “immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon,” saying thanks for signing, but no, stating that "Mr. Snowden’s dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work day in and day out to protect it." While acknowledging that "this is an issue that many Americans feel strongly about," Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s advisor on homeland security and terrorism, said in a statement, "we live in a dangerous world."

Amid the 16 (yes sixteen!) candidates for Republican Presidential nominee, there is one, and only one, that stands above the rest in terms of sheer un-filtered, un-political, and some would say un-presidential outspoken-ness. In an oustanding aggregation of abuse, The Hill has documented Donald Trump's Top 30 insults (so far in the 2016 campaign alone).

As dozens now vie for residence in the big white one of Pennsylvania Avenue, MarketWatch, courtesy of LoanDepot.com and CoreLogic, unveil the homes (since most own more than one) and mortgages of the 2016 presidential candidates. With homeownership rates at multi-decade lows, and the American Dream disappearing for most, it appears it pays to be in government - from Trump Tower and Clinton's Compounds to Bernie Sanders' underwater mortgages and Carly Fiorina's five fireplaces...

If Trump took up a Third-Party, it might be the biggest shot we have at saving the country insofar as it would at least turn Capitol Hill into a new playing field. It really would not matter who the Third-Party candidate would be, Washington needs to be shaken and stirred vigorously to let these people know being a “representative” is supposed to be OF THE PEOPLE, not of yourself, the Party, and government.

Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Islamabad, and New Delhi have been actively establishing interlocking security guarantees. They have been simultaneously calling the Atlanticist bluff when it comes to the endless drumbeat of attention given to the flimsy meme of Iran’s "nuclear weapons program."  And a few days before the Vienna nuclear negotiations finally culminated in an agreement, all of this came together at a twin BRICS/SCO summit in Ufa, Russia -- a place you’ve undoubtedly never heard of and a meeting that got next to no attention in the U.S.  And yet sooner or later, these developments will ensure that the War Party in Washington and assorted neocons (as well as neoliberalcons) already breathing hard over the Iran deal will sweat bullets as their narratives about how the world works crumble.

Here we now call market deflation by the sobriquet “volatility”, as in “major market indices suffered from volatility today, down almost one-half of one percent”, where a down day is treated as something akin to the common cold, a temporary illness with symptoms that we can shrug off with an aspirin or two. You can’t be in favor of volatility, surely. It’s a bad thing, almost on a par with littering. No, we want good things and good words, like “wealth effect” and “accommodation” and “stability” and “price appreciation”. As President Snow says in reference to The Hunger Games version of a political utility, “may the odds be always in your favor”. Who doesn’t want that?

As President Obama completes the re-fueling ahead of the second leg aboard Air Force One on his way to Kenya to visit extended family (and we are sure to do some America-related business), concerns over security have been dismissed after the President's schedule was leaked this week by a Kenyan airline. However, as China Daily reports, Susan Rice, the National Security Adviser said that Obama will not visit his family's ancestral village of Kogelo due to "time and logistical reasons."

Earlier we asked in "one may wonder if NATO-member Turkey's land invasion of Syria, which many have said was long overdue following months of rhetoric and belligerent posturing, under the pretext of ISIS "liberation", has just begun." A following report from the WSJ largely answers our question: citing unnamed defense officials, WSJ reports that after months of negotiations, "Turkey has agreed to let the U.S. military carry out airstrikes against Islamic State fighters from a U.S. air base near the Syrian border."

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), once seen as a cornerstone of America’s energy security, is losing its shine in Washington.