Politics

Whatever one's opinion of the Muslim attacks and the perpetrators behind them, one thing is without dispute - the French response, which has been to quickly impose unlimited emergency laws, is nothing short of the second coming of "Operation Gladio."

In addition to warrantless searches and raids, France's state of emergency laws allow the government to put people under house arrest, seal the country's borders and ban demonstrations. The laws were created during the Algerian war in 1955.

I come here today not to praise Trump but not to bury him either: the longer his vicious vanity campaign lasts, the more calamity Trump brings to the insular, reactionary Republican brand. Trump = mayhem. His meteoric rise, though apparent only in the poll-iverse, has gone where no celebrated agent provocateur has gone before: not Palin nor Cain, Carson, Gingrich, Sanctorum or Huckabee unify foes like |Trump.

Moments ago, the latest high profile media figure to boldly go into the rapidly spreading Trump "ban Muslims" scandal, was none other than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in a post on his social network, took the other side of Trump declaring that "Muslims are always welcome here" and that Facebook will "fight to protect your rights and create a peaceful and safe environment for you." It was not immediately clear if the "community" he was welcoming Muslims to is the United States or the online world of Facebook ad clickers. 

While Hillary Clinton may have had some entertaining problems when using her Blackberry (or was that iPad) as US Secretary of State, one thing she excelled at was nepotism.

According to the latest set of emails released by the State Department, and first reported by the Daily Caller, Hillary intervened in a request forwarded by her son-in-law, Marc Mezvisnky, on behalf of a deep-sea mining firm, Neptune Minerals, to meet with her or other State Department officials.

Washington's strategy so far is injecting the proverbial Empire of Chaos logic into Syria; feeding the flames of internal chaos, a pre-planned op by the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the endgame being regime change in Damascus. An Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline is unacceptable in the Beltway not only because US vassals lose, but most of all because in currency war terms it would bypass the petrodollar.