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Donald Trump seems to be facing more hostility than his GOP predecessors regarding coverage by the liberal media. “Mr. Trump won in part due to the country’s distrust and disappointment in traditional politicians, yet the media continue to hammer him for not behaving like one,” writes Jason L. Riley in the WSJ. For example, according to the media, “Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks pose threats to the country ranging from merely
grave to existential.”
Even as McDonald’s is replacing human cashiers with automated kiosks as unions push for a $15 minimum wage, the media is up in arms. The claim is that Andy Puzder, who believes a minimum wage hike will be bad for business.
Oklahoma’s AG Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick for the EPA, is a climate change “denier” according to the press, for writing that scientists “continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”
Dr. Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, has no expertise in the housing policy run by a government agency, which as Mr. Riley notes, “is apparently more difficult than brain surgery.”
Elaine Chao, Trump’s pick to run the Transportation Department, is an “insider” because she has too much experience in government.
Because his company does business with Russia, Exxon Mobil’s chief exec Rex Tillerson should not be Secretary of State.
Yes, Donald Trump has said many foolish, inappropriate comments about women, minorities and immigrants. But he still got elected. Read more here from Jason Riley.
Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Jason Riley on why the president elect doesn’t care about talking heads and elite opinion.
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 The commandant of the Marine Corps wants Marine Corps ground units to be able to target enemy ships without having to rely
on air support.
Gen. Robert Neller has been a champion of innovation since he assumed command of the Corps in 2015, promoting efforts to integrate drones with small infantry units and to get experimental technology into the hands of quick-learning Marines. A new focus, he revealed earlier this month at the U.S. Naval Institute’s annual defense forum in Washington, D.C., involves finding a way to fire anti-ship cruise missiles out of existing Marine Corps artillery
equipment.
“We’re looking at munitions and capabilities that can be fired out of existing things,” he told reporters during the conference. “I would love to have an anti-ship cruise missile I could shoot out of a HIMARS launcher. So if the Marines, for example, were to go to seize and secure an advance expeditionary amphibious base and the adversary had ships, rather attack them with an airplane, I’d like to be able to have some way to
defend from the shore.”
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 Mr. Buchanan reminds us of what Bob Gates said in February 2011 to the cadets at West Point, “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to
again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Buchanan, regarding Aleppo, writes:
Bashar Assad is Russia’s ally and provides Putin with his sole naval base in the Med. Assad’s regime is the source of Hezbollah’s resupply and weapons to deter, and, if necessary, fight Israel.
To Iran, Assad is an ally against Saudi Arabia and the Sunni awakening and a crucial link in the Shiite Crescent that extends from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut.
All have greater stakes in this civil war than do we, and have been willing to invest more time, blood and treasure. Thus they have, so far, prevailed.
The lessons for Trump from the Aleppo disaster?
Do not even consider getting into a new Middle East war — unless Congress votes to authorize it, the American people are united behind it, vital U.S. interests are clearly imperiled, and we know how the war ends and when we can come home.
For wars have a habit of destroying presidencies.
Korea broke Truman. Vietnam broke Lyndon Johnson. Iraq broke the Republican Congress in 2006 and gave us Obama in 2008.
And the Iran war now being talked up in the think tanks and on the op-ed pages would be the end of the Trump presidency.
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 Here wsj.com
explains what Moscow’s special forces teams have been up to in Syria.
Russian special-operations forces have played a pivotal part in the Syrian ground offensive to retake Aleppo, a role shielded by secrecy about their operations there.
In the wake of Russia’s punishing aerial bombardment, Russian special forces have been operating in Aleppo for almost two months, helping the Syrian army with a focus on targeting rebel leaders in the eastern half of the city, according to two experts on Russia’s military.
The elite troops are the same forces that carried out Moscow’s surprise annexation of Crimea in 2014. They are modeled on U.S. special-operations units—who also have a presence in Syria.
The presence of Russian special forces underscores the strategic importance for the Kremlin to make sure Aleppo is firmly in the hands of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before the allies seek to restart any negotiations on Syria’s future.
“Special operations soldiers are the people that are customized to neutralization” of terrorists, the Russian Federation Council Defense and Security Committee Chairman Viktor Ozerov told Interfax on Monday. “This is no military operation. This is a special operation.”
Russian special-operations forces typically serve high-intensity operational deployments of a few months, a rotation schedule that is modeled on the U.S. military’s elite special-operations teams. The Russians have closely studied the American experience as part of a multibillion-dollar military modernization project that began earlier in the decade.
In 2012, Gen. Nikolai Makarov, then chief of the Russian General Staff, traveled to U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters in Florida to meet with military officials, according to the State Department.
The trip was meant to download Americans’ experience with special forces to help Russia create a similar force, an official close to the U.S. military said
.“From the helmets to the kit, they look almost identical,” the official said.
Mr. Bukkvoll said the forces in Syria are likely comprised of three groups, including the special forces unit of Russia’s military intelligence; another special-operations unit along the lines of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force; and a unit called zaslon, or “screen,” which gives protection to civilian leaders and diplomatic installations.
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UPDATE: December 19, 2016
The New York Times has reported that there is opposition within the ranks of GOP Senators to confirming John Bolton’s appointment as deputy secretary of state. The NYT also reports that Rex Tillerson, who has been tapped for the lead role at the State Department, also doesn’t appear keen on having Bolton as his second in command. Perhaps the greatest negative factor in weighing Bolton is his support from Weekly
Standard editor and leading neocon, William Kristol, who the NYT quotes saying “I like John Bolton and hope he gets a senior position.”
More from the NYT:
Though Mr. Bolton, 68, is admired by conservatives like Mr. Kristol who agreed with the Bush administration that American military intervention was a necessary force for promoting stability throughout the world, there are also many Republicans who want to leave the Bush years in the past.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump professed to be one of them. He called the war in Iraq “a big fat mistake” and accused the Bush administration of lying to the American people about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass
destruction.
The selection of Bolton would be a stick-in-the-eye to Americans who voted for Trump based on his promises to avoid foreign entanglement.
UPDATE: December 14, 2016
It appears today that John Bolton will be chosen by Donald Trump as his Deputy Secretary of State. There couldn’t be a worse choice. Appointing Bolton would be a breach of trust with voters who supported Trump for his promises of a less aggressive foreign policy. Bolton is a neocon of the first order and we would oppose any confirmation attempt by the Senate.
On This Week, Senator Rand Paul said he’s an automatic “no” vote on any confirmation for Bolton:
Originally posted November 14, 2016.
My friend Jon Basil Utley calls this perfect. WE DO NOT APPROVE BOLTON. Far from it! Trump may as well have Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer running foreign policy. That’s not what Americans voted for.
Nearly all of Donald Trump’s appointments to his transition team are very encouraging. Indeed, I have known many of them for years. But he could undermine his whole agenda by allowing neocons back into their former staffing and leadership role over Republican foreign policy. The New York Times reported how many are now scrambling to get back into their old dominant positions. And now National Review, which supported
all the disasters in Iraq, has come out to promote Bolton for secretary of state.
I have written about the neocons for many years. Their originators were former leftists who later became anti-communists. After the collapse of communism, they provided the intellectual firepower for hawks and imperialists who wanted an aggressive American foreign policy. Having lived and done business for many years in the Third World, I thought they would only bring about disasters for America. What especially interested me was their almost total lack
of experience in and knowledge about the outside world, particularly Asia and Latin America. I even set up a web page called War Party Neoconservative Biographies as I researched their education and experience.
Brilliant academics as many of them were, their “foreign” experience was at best a semester or two in London or, for the more daring, some studies in Paris or, for the Jewish ones, a summer on a kibbutz in Israel. They are above all Washington insiders. John Bolton is very typical. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale, then Yale Law School, time with a top Washington law firm, and then various academic and political appointments, but no foreign
living or work experience. Also, as sheltered intellectuals, often in cluttered small offices, many found it exciting to imagine themselves ruling much of the world, like the old Roman proconsuls. Long ago Peter Viereck explained them with his observation about the vicarious “lust of many intellectuals for brute violence.” No wonder they urged Bush on to his disastrous war and occupation policies. Even before Iraq they were first urging dominance over Russia and then military
confrontation with China, when a U.S. spy plane was collided by a Chinese fighter plane. It wasn’t just the Arab world which was in their sights.
I write about all this based on my own experience of studying in Germany and France, working 15 years in South America, and speaking four languages fluently.
Trump appointments so far are really showing his focus upon getting America back on track with faster economic growth, which has been so stunted by Obama’s runaway regulatory regime. To understand their costs, see analysis in the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s “Ten Thousand Commandments.” But more unending wars will continue to sap America’s strength and prejudice the
world’s former goodwill toward our nation. Empires all eventually make a transition from where they are profitable to when they become destructively bankrupting. Few would now doubt that America has crossed this threshold. When it costs us a million dollars per year per man to field combat infantry in unending wars, we will face economic ruin just like happened with the Roman
Empire.
Amb. Bolton on potentially joining Trump’s cabinet
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At last Friday’s press conference, President Obama stated that any attempt by a foreign power to affect U.S. elections is unacceptable and “shouldn’t be a partisan issue.” Mr. Obama also reported that last fall in China he told Mr. Putin “to cut it out” and “there were going to be some serious consequences if he did not.”
 Although, as the WSJ points out, “there never seem to be foreign-policy consequences in this Administration, from the red line in Syria to industrial spying.”
This lack of accountability has done real damage to national security, but it did only marginal damage to Mrs. Clinton’s White House hopes.
The President also explained that the emails stolen from John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee were “not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.” He said intelligence and law enforcement were “playing this thing straight” and disclosed sufficient information about the hacks for “the American public to make an assessment as to how to weigh that going into the election.”
Mr. Obama conceded that some of the leaked content was “embarrassing or uncomfortable” but all in all “pretty routine stuff.”
President Obama Holds a Press Conference
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 There will be a huge divergence in paths taken by the Super States vs. the others. One of the others is Connecticut where, it’s capital, Hartford, is becoming even more dependent on its suburbs. Hartford, and other cities like it, are turning into parasites, attempting to feed off the success surrounding them. The Wall Street Journal reports:
When the Nutmeg State’s next legislative session begins in January, lawmakers will face two crises: a budget shortfall of more than $1 billion and the looming insolvency of Hartford, the capital city. Though it doesn’t make many national headlines, Hartford’s budgetary challenge—taxed to the max, junk-rated and facing escalating deficits—ranks among the most serious of any American city. Bankruptcy might be the only way
out.
Hartford’s mayor, Luke Bronin, knows that a bailout from the cash-strapped state government is not a likely option. So he has turned to the suburbs for support in stabilizing the city’s budget. At a town meeting Monday evening in Rocky Hill, a pleasant bedroom community to the south, Mr. Bronin spoke in grand terms about how “investing in getting cities strong helps economic growth for the state as a whole.”
The mayor has talked up a “regional” solution to the city’s woes. Interpretations vary as to what that means, but Mr. Bronin has floated the idea of a regional sales tax. If it is to help Hartford’s bottom line, however, it would have to entail some sort of redistribution from higher-income areas.
Suburban taxpayers are perplexed as to how and why they should be responsible for Hartford’s long record of mismanagement. Even after closing a $49 million deficit for the current fiscal year, Mr. Bronin projects growing gaps between expenditures and revenues. Four years from now they will top $70 million, in a total budget of about $560 million. Hartford also owes $410 million in unfunded retirement liabilities and $562 million in bonded debt,
according to its most recent audit. Moody’s downgraded Hartford’s credit rating to junk in October.
Below Bronin makes arguments along the same lines to a meeting in West Hartford.
Special Community Meeting with Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin
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 Shane Ellison, known as The People’s Chemist (Read his book Over-the-Counter Natural Cures), is a former chemist for Big Pharma. He quit when he discovered the drugs he was creating for pharmaceutical companies were nothing but toxins. Here’s Shane’s take on aspirin:
In the past few years, Dr. Karen M. Starko has written about the deadly effects of aspirin during this rush to protect profits. Her writings suggest that during the 1918 “calamity,” aspirin probably did more harm than good. More specifically, aspirin — NOT the flu — is most likely what killed many of the people who took it during the so-called, “historical flu outbreak.”
Taking aspirin is practically a death sentence — in slow motion. In fact, my kids aren’t allowed to take it for aches or pains. Aspirin is banned in our household, for obvious safety reasons (We use www.GetReliefFX.com instead.)
No amount of aspirin is safe. In clinical trials, guess which group has the most deaths?
The treated group.
Try telling that to a hypnotized, brainwashed American public that has a steamy love affair with their “baby” aspirin – another marketing brain child of Bayer. Good luck!
Make no mistake: sick people need aspirin the way healthy people need a heart attack!
Think anything has changed since 1918? Of course not. As a chemist for Pharma, I’ve seen cancer causing drugs be approved for cancer treatments. I’ve watched the FDA and Pharma work together to approve fast-acting pain killers that are addictive and deadly…
And today, people are STILL being overdosed with NSAIDs like aspirin.
CCHR: The Psycho/Pharmaceutical Industry with Shane Ellison
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 Eggs? Well, yes, eggs are good for you, writes Dr. Al Sears on U.S. Wellness’s website. It’s not just the protein in eggs that makes them so healthy. Eggs are what Dr. Sears calls “nature’s vitamin package. They have every vitamin you need — all the B vitamins and vitamin C. They even have the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K
that are so hard to come by in the modern world.” What’s more, eggs have every amino acid you need in exactly the ratio you need it. Humans also digest the protein from eggs better than from meat or fish.
But, you ask, what about cholesterol and its link to heart disease? According to Dr. Sears, neither cholesterol nor eggs cause heart disease?
A study from Harvard followed 118,000 men and women for 14 years. It found no link between eating eggs and the risk of heart disease or stroke.
In fact, another study of almost 600,000 people found that eating one egg a day actually lowered the risk of stroke by 12%.
But before you head out to one of the big box grocery stores, there are a few things to keep in mind in before choosing which eggs to buy. What you don’t want are factory-raised eggs that have been laid in filthy environments by chickens confined to hundreds of cages stacked sometimes two stories high. The chickens raised in those environments are “25 times more likely to become contaminated with salmonella than free-roaming chickens.”
And eggs from factory-raised chickens have far less omega-3s, antioxidants, nutrients and protein than eggs from their free roaming sisters. Here’s what Dr. Sears suggests:
- Look for eggs labeled “Pastured” or “Pasture Raised.” I call them the “Rolls Royce” of eggs. They have much higher nutrient levels and less chance of passing along disease. Pastured chickens live on small farms where they run around freely. Each day they’re herded in small groups to fresh pastureland. They have fresh greens to eat and a clean environment.
These chickens have plenty of space, sunshine and a natural diet to eat.
- Don’t get pastured confused with “free-range.” The USDA allows a “free-range” label if the chicken coop has a door to the outside. But that doesn’t mean the chickens actually ever see the light of day.
- If you can’t find pastured eggs, my second choice is organic. Organic eggs come from cage-free hens fed organic, vegetarian feed. Neither the hens nor their feed are subjected to antibiotics, hormones or pesticides.
Read more on the marketing fraud of eggs here.
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