The Donald Trump thread

Damn...
Put her out to pasture.

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(Yesterday 11:45 PM)kosko Wrote:  

(Yesterday 08:11 PM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

Breitbart, Sean Spicer Wrote:Exclusive – Sean Spicer: Huawei, the Threat that Is Hiding in Plain Sight

This makes Huawei 5G acutely dangerous.

For you see, while Huawei claims to be just another independent telecom company, that’s just not the case.

China’s 2017 Intelligence Law clearly states that any “organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with” China’s security services. That law applies to Huawei and all Chinese companies.
...
“Chinese-designed 5G networks will provide near-persistent data transfer back to China that the Chinese government could capture at will,” they warned.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/...ain-sight/

Spicer, you magnificent cuck, the US government cooperates with tech corporations to have backdoors in operating systems, clouds, phones, TVs, microchips, cars and mobile towers to spy on the entire world - and you're trying to scare us about Huawei? Fuck off.

Apple and Google want their own spy tech and not the Chinese tech. All this hysteria is just to throttle Huawei agreessive push into the USA market. Chinese phones have cracked the code of offering good tech and features for cheap and Apple and Google can't compete if similar power of phones from China sell for a quarter of the price as the Apple.

I don't mind if our Chinese overlords get all my nudes from girls - they're meant for sharing anyways.

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I wonder how US Evangelicals feel about this, since many of them backed Bush in the Invasion. Is Trump doing anything about this?

Iraq's Christians 'close to extinction'

Quote:The Archbishop of Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, has accused Britain's Christian leaders of failing to do enough in defence of the vanishing Christian community in Iraq.

In an impassioned address in London, the Rt Rev Bashar Warda said Iraq's Christians now faced extinction after 1,400 years of persecution.

Since the US-led invasion toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, he said, the Christian community had dwindled by 83%, from around 1.5 million to just 250,000.

"Christianity in Iraq," he said, "one of the oldest Churches, if not the oldest Church in the world, is perilously close to extinction. Those of us who remain must be ready to face martyrdom."

He referred to the current, pressing threat from Islamic State (IS) jihadists as a "final, existential struggle", following the group's initial assault in 2014 that displaced more than 125,000 Christians from their historic homelands.

"Our tormentors confiscated our present," he said, "while seeking to wipe out our history and destroy our future. In Iraq there is no redress for those who have lost properties, homes and businesses. Tens of thousands of Christians have nothing to show for their life's work, for generations of work, in places where their families have lived, maybe, for thousands of years."

IS, known in the Arab world as Daesh, was driven from its last stronghold at Baghuz in Syria in March after a massive multinational military campaign, effectively spelling the end of its self-declared "caliphate".

Before that, it had already been expelled from Iraq's second city of Mosul in July 2017.

But churches, monasteries and homes belonging to Christian families have been decimated and thousands of families have not returned.

This week the archbishop warned of what he said were a growing number of extremist groups that asserted that the killing of Christians and Yazidis helped to spread Islam.

'Political correctness'

The archbishop went on to accuse Britain's Christian leaders of "political correctness" over the issue - he called the failure to condemn extremism "a cancer", saying they were not speaking out loudly enough for fear of being accused of Islamophobia.

"Will you continue to condone this never-ending, organised persecution against us?" he said. "When the next wave of violence begins to hit us, will anyone on your campuses hold demonstrations and carry signs that say 'We are all Christians'?"

His views on political correctness are shared in part by the Bishop of Truro, the Rt Rev Philip Mounstephen, who chairs the Independent Review into the Foreign Office's response to the persecution of Christians worldwide.

"I think the archbishop is right that a culture of 'political correctness' has prevented Western voices from speaking out about the persecution of Christians," he says. "I think though this is mainly to do with a reluctance borne of post-colonial guilt."

Bishop Mounstephen maintains that Christian persecution needs to be viewed from a global perspective and has multiple causes.

"If we only consider it in the light of Islamic militancy," he says, "we let a lot of other people off the hook who should otherwise be held to account."

Taking a historical perspective, the Archbishop of Irbil lamented the fact that in centuries past there was a happy period of fruitful cooperation between Christians and Muslims in Iraq, a time that historians have referred to as the Islamic Golden Age.

"Our Christian ancestors shared with Muslim Arabs a deep tradition of thought and philosophy," says Archbishop Warda. "They engaged with them in respectful dialogue from the 8th Century.

"A style of scholastic dialogue had developed, and which could only occur because a succession of caliphs [Islamic political and religious leaders] tolerated minorities. As toleration ended, so did the culture and wealth which flowed from it."

'Moment of truth'

Elsewhere in the Middle East it is a mixed picture for Christians in 2019.

Egypt's Copts, who constitute at least 10% of the country's 100 million-plus population, have come under sustained attack from jihadists who have bombed their churches and attempted to drive them out of northern Sinai.

But in February Pope Francis made a historic three-day visit to the UAE - the first ever by a pontiff to the Arabian Peninsula - in which he held a mass attended by an estimated 135,000 mostly migrant Catholics.

And in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and a country that has enforced a narrow, austere interpretation of Islam for the last 40 years, the first Coptic Christian mass was allowed in December.

In Syria, the Christian minority felt deeply threatened by the largely Islamist element amongst the rebel groups. With President Assad's forces now in the ascendant, as a result of some often brutal tactics, Syria's Christians may be breathing a small sigh of relief.

In Iraq though, the outlook for Christians remains bleak. Sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims persist and there are still unknown numbers of IS fighters hiding out in the north and west of the country.

Archbishop Warda has reached a bitter conclusion about what the future holds.

"Friends, we may be facing our end in the land of our ancestors. We acknowledge this. In our end, the entire world faces a moment of truth.

"Will a peaceful and innocent people be allowed to be persecuted and eliminated because of their faith? And, for the sake of not wanting to speak the truth to the persecutors, will the world be complicit in our elimination?"

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Christians are murdered, bombed and attacked daily in Egypt, a country Westerners believe to be a paradise. I think its safe to say Christians in Syria and Iraq are subject to requirements.

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Trump makes dent in political alignment of liberal 9th Circuit

Quote:by Melissa Quinn | May 23, 2019 01:43 PM

Young, conservative judges appointed by President Trump might tip the country's most liberal federal appeals court to political balance.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is on track to have 13 Republican appointees among its 29 full-time judges once the Senate confirms Trump’s latest nominee to the San Francisco-based court and the president fills one remaining vacancy. With 16 judges tapped by Democratic presidents, the 9th Circuit is the closest it’s been in more than two decades to achieving an ideological balance.

When Trump took office in January 2017, 18 of the judges on the 9th Circuit were named by Democratic presidents, and seven were appointed by Republicans. Trump also inherited four open seats on the federal appeals court.

Now, more than two years into his first term, Trump has tapped six judges to the San Francisco-based court, which is the country’s largest federal appeals court and has been described as the most liberal. The Senate confirmed two of those nominees — Kenneth Lee and Daniel Collins — this month, and the Senate Judiciary Committee held a confirmation hearing for another 9th Circuit pick, Daniel Bress, on Wednesday.

“That kind of fortifies it in a different direction,” said Adam Feldman, founder of Empirical SCOTUS, a blog focused on the high court. “That’s the intention for sure.”

The retirement of Judge Alex Kozinski in 2017 following allegations of sexual harassment, and the unexpected 2018 death of Judge Stephen Reinhardt, considered to be the “liberal lion” of the 9th Circuit, created two additional vacancies for Trump to fill.

While Trump’s picks for the 9th Circuit will likely affect the court’s political alignment, Feldman noted it’s difficult to predict how they will rule, particularly since those appointed to the court by Trump have done minimal work so far.

“But as a general matter, we see that there’s a high correlation of Republican nominees sticking together and Democratic nominees sticking together on panels and en banc votes, so the likelihood is that’s going to push the 9th Circuit further to the right,” Feldman said. “How far is anyone’s guess, but just the sheer number of appointments is staggering.”

Over the course of their eight years in office, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama each tapped seven judges for the 9th Circuit.

But Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at left-leaning think tank the Brookings Institution, cautioned against drawing broad conclusions about a rightward shift in the 9th Circuit’s jurisprudence as Trump fills the court with his picks.

“The real question is will they be judges on the Right like Reinhardt was on the Left — very aggressive and very liberal who works very hard to put his mark on the court — or will they be something else,” he said. “I think it’s too soon to say. If we have this conversation in 10 years, it’ll take a different course.”

States, individuals, and organizations seeking to undo Trump’s policies have found a haven for their legal challenges in the 9th Circuit, which has reviewed and subsequently struck down a number of the president’s initiatives.

A recent analysis showed the 9th Circuit has ruled against the Trump administration 29 times, more than any other federal appeals court in the country.

In 2017, the San Francisco-based court invalidated Trump’s travel ban, which placed travel restrictions to the U.S. on five Muslim-majority countries, and last year, it blocked the Trump administration from rolling back the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Created by Obama in 2012, DACA protects immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children from the threat of deportation.

The Supreme Court, however, reversed the 9th Circuit’s ruling in the travel ban case in June and upheld the president’s order.

Trump's losing streak before the 9th Circuit has prompted him to call the court a "big thorn in our side" and "a complete and total disaster."

Cases that come before the 9th Circuit are heard by three-judge panels of active judges and judges who have taken senior status, the latter of which are evenly split between those named by Republicans and Democrats. With the number of Republican-appointed judges poised to reach 13, the odds of drawing a panel with more than one judge tapped by a GOP president, or with more than one Trump appointee, are now greater, Wheeler said.

That could prove to be beneficial to the Trump administration, particularly as legal challenges related to the president's wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and new asylum policies weave their way through the lower courts.

“That parity makes a big difference," Feldman said. "And the hope and expectation is that it will."

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Quriouser & quriouser.

Yes, yes black pillers. Until there are actual arrests & jail sentences, there is still more to be done...

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