White House

Un-Photoshopped Reuters photo sums up US foreign policy perfectly as Abdul Latif bin Rashid Al Zayani, representing the Gulf Co-operation Council, appears to leave U.S. President Barack Obama hanging during a welcome ceremony at the White House this week.

There is a specter haunting America... and all the developed nations of the world. It is the specter of a debt revolution.  Few in the White House realized they had made such a calamitous mistake when the president ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold. And yet it created a world in which parents and grandparents could prey on their grandchildren... for the next 44 years. And it’s still not over.

The US House of Representative just approved (by a vote of 269 to 151) the $612 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) funding moar warmongery for fiscal year 2016. However, the vote came short of a veto-proof majority and since the administration opposes the defense policy bill - for its alleged budgeting "gimmicks," as well as its provisions for arming Ukrainian forces - we suspect President Obama is preparing to unleash the veto pen.

"...if anyone didn’t think the president was going to f##k [the Pakistani military] they are out of their mind. He was always going to f##k them.... The White House has been very clever about this. They have gone after me personally. They don’t like me boo hoo hoo.... Don’t turn this into some sort of profound anti-American statement."

It would appear someone at NBC News got a rather large tap on the shoulder. In what is a stunning reversal of their confirmation that President Obama lied and lying about the killing of bin Laden, NBC News has updated their original story - that "two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a 'walk in' asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding" - to this - "Sources say that while the asset provided information vital to the hunt for bin Laden, he was not the source of his whereabouts." As Slate concludes, while NBC’s story doesn’t use the word correction or retraction, that’s what this appears to be.

• Amtrak train in Philadelphia wreck was traveling at twice speed limit (Reuters)
• The engineer has no recollection of the crash and “no explanation” for what happened (WSJ)
• Taliban claim attack on Afghan guesthouse that killed 14 (Reuters)
• Chicago’s Junk Rating From Moody’s Puzzles Investors (BBG)
• House votes to end spy agencies' bulk collection of phone data (Reuters)
• Wesley Clark: The Penny-Stock General (BBG)
• AOL’s Armstrong to Leave $213 Million Richer After Verizon Deal (BBG)

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

While apparently the US does not have its hands full already with orchestrating (and profiting from) two proxy regional wars, one in Ukraine and one in the Middle East, and feels compelled (by shareholders of US "defense" companies) to prove to the world it has long since lost its globocop status when China roundly ignores American threats, China wasted no time to do just that and overnight Beijing strongly condemned a proposed U.S. military plan to send aircraft and Navy ships near disputed South China Sea islands to contest Chinese territorial claims over the area. It didn't end there and China escalated verbally to a near breaking point when Beijing urged “relevant countries to refrain from taking risky and provocative action.”

It looks like all those ‘conspiracy nuts’ who took issue with the “official” story following the President’s original announcement of bin Laden’s death were not so crazy after all. There’s a reason millions of Americans have lost trust in their government, and especially with the sitting President of the United States. It’s because we have been consistently lied to about anything and everything of any significance.

Just days after Japanese PM Shinzo Abe leaves Washington (having stepped up his nation's military assertiveness), The Wall Street Journal reports that the US Secretary of Defense has asked staff for military options in the South China Sea (as we have detailed China's land reclamation efforts): U.S. MAY USE MILITARY TO CONFRONT CHINA IN SPRATLY ISLANDS DISPUTE: WSJ Having ironically commented on China's "bullying," it appears Nobel-Peace-Prize winner President Obama is preparing for an even bigger objective, amid China's rising threat to USD dominance (with Yuan liberalization and AIIB success).

Moments ago, in an embarrassing setback for the president, Senate Democrats in a 52-45 vote - short of the required 60 supporters - blocked a bill that would give President Barack Obama fast-track authority to expedite trade agreements through Congress, a major defeat for the president and his allies who "say the measure is necessary to complete a 12-nation Pacific trade deal that is a centerpiece of the administration’s economic agenda." But don't count it out yet: the WSJ cites Mitch McConnell who told reporters shortly before the vote, which he expected to lose, that “This issue’s not over" adding that "I’m hopeful we’ll put this in the win column for the country sometime soon.”

If anyone expected the Obama administration to admit that, as Seymour Hersch alleged last night, it had openly lied and fabricated the entire account of Osama bin Laden killing - perhaps the most defining narrative of Obama's entire first term, we have some bad news: it won't.

"The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? It was inevitable that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash... High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no." - Seymour Hersh

Hillary Clinton's family charities failed to live up to transparency promises made to the Obama administration during her tenure as Secretary of State, Reuters reports, noting that disclosures related to foreign donors are still not available on the Clinton Foundation's website. Meanwhile, New York Magazine tells the story of how the Foundation attempted to bully an influential charity monitor after winding up on its 'naughty' list.

Te most shocking development took place yesterday when the US State Department, via spokesman Jeff Rathke, told reporters that while it "regrets" that it did not get to review the new foreign government funding, it does not plan to look into the matter further, spokesman Jeff Rathke said on Thursday. "The State Department has not and does not intend to initiate a formal review or to make a retroactive judgment about items that were not submitted during Secretary Clinton's tenure," Rathke told reporters. And while the "unbiased" media kept its mouth shut, on person who did speak up was AP's Matt Lee who asked why the State Department wouldn't investigate further to determine if the tens of millions of dollars in donations had influenced her decisions while she was SecState.