Summations Only

Hi Jon Are you saying we have not lost any soldiers in Syria?The Kurds were fighting when we got there. Therefore we helped them.We did not have to go into Syria.God Bless

Hi Jon That is a big assumption. Because it is a family feud.Until the families decide to stop fighting each other they will continue to fight. They will not be stopped by outsiders. I was 3rd Army for 4 years trained as a snipper but never had to go to Korea. Before they can do that they have to stop killing each other. There are 3 groups in Syria the SDF which was fighting ISIS the YPG who Turkey believes are just an extension of the PKK which is the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party.They are citizens of Syria. There are many Kurds who are citizens of TurkeyGod Bless

Hi Dr The U.S. and Turkey was talking about a 20 mile deep buffer zone between Syria and Turkey. Both had agreed it should be there. Turkey wanted the buffer between them and the Kurds. Also they wanted it to build settlements for the 2 million Kurdish and Syrian refugees in Turkey to be returned too their own country.Somehow those talks and agreements went sour and Turkey decided to secure the zone by themselves. Probably due to some of the red tape that would be required if the U.S. was involved.So yes I believe just as President Trump believed that Turkey was going to establish the zone that had been agreed upon. So the choice then became whether to allow Turkey to carry out those plans or to go to war with them.God Bless

and yet nothing happened until trump told the turks it was ok and walked away from the kurds. The idea that turkey is willing to go to war with the us is ridiculous.Edited by DrJones*, : No reason given.

If your principles include a government free of corruption, then he is tearing down those principles. Everyone does have free speech. Unless you are a Kurd or an immigrant. That's being threatened by tariffs put in place by Trump. We've had borders for the entire existence of our country, an no one is saying that we shouldn't have borders. That conflicts with his pro-life position since this will require letting illegal aliens die outside of hospitals. He doesn't think his political allies like Manifort should be convicted felons because they are above the law. He is about to be impeached for breaking some of the most important and foundational laws of our land, the solicitation of foreign governments for interference in our elections. What you just wrote is one of the biggest falsehoods I have seen, and that is saying something. He denigrates the FBI and CIA on a regular basis. The problem is that he considers the law as part of that establishment. He has abused his offic to openly solicite foreign interference in our elections to make it an unfair playing field. This is about the only one I can agree with so far. I guess you guys don't mind electing the most corrupt president in history, as long as you get a wall. Not really."Foreign investment in the United States grew at a slower annual pace in the first two years of Mr. Trump’s tenure than during Barack Obama’s presidency, according to Commerce Department data released in July. Growth in business investment from all sources, foreign and domestic, accelerated briefly after Mr. Trump signed a $1.5 trillion tax-cut package in late 2017 but then slowed. Investment growth turned negative this spring, providing a drag on economic output."
Trump’s Push to Bring Back Jobs to U.S. Shows Limited Results - The New York Times Trump is actively trying to move people off of Medicare."Watch out, older Americans and people with disabilities! President Trump just announced a plan to give corporate health insurers more control over your health care. His new executive order calls for market-based pricing, which would drive up costs for everyone with Medicare, eviscerate traditional Medicare, and steer more people into for-profit Medicare Advantage plans."
Opinion | Watch Out, Seniors! Trump Just Launched a Stealth Attack on Medicare | Diane Archer For the record, I am paying your Social Security. It is not a savings account but a pay-as-you go system where working people pay benefits to retirees. Also, this:"Donald Trump won’t say it, but Republicans in the Senate will: Social Security and Medicare would be on the chopping block in a second Trump term. Pointing to rising deficits, Republican senators have all but promised to gut entitlements if Trump gets four more years.Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the second-ranking Senate Republican, expressed hope to the New York Times that Trump would be interested in reforming Social Security and Medicare. Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) was even more optimistic. We’ve brought it up with President Trump, who has talked about it being a second-term project, Barrasso said. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has made no secret of wanting to cut Social Security. "
Trump's Second-Term Plan For Social Security: Starve The Beast Medicare-for-all would not be a federal government takeover of healthcare. We already are a socialist country, as evidenced by the very things you want such as Social Security and Medicare. Those are socialist programs. What in the heck does that mean? How would changing to non-fossil fuel power generation be comparable to going back to the 1800's?Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Not at all to defend Trump, but it seems that in this instance he's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.If he retains the troops we hear plaintiff cries of "Endless Wars!" If he brings the troops back we hear plaintiff cries about abandoning the Kurds.Personally, I think leaving a small but very capable detachment to stabilize the region is advisable. We forget that ISIS is nothing more than AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) which was the brainchild of Zarqawi. After the Surge in Iraq, the US listened to plaintiff cries about endless wars, pulled out against the advice of the top brass, and then ISIS metastasized like a cancer in the absence of direct intervention. And we see what they were capable of doing without the US presenceThe Kurds have been doing most of the heavy lifting. We've assisted primarily in air support, something the Kurds don't have, but they've been doing most of the grunt work.Turkey and the YPG have had a long dispute regarding land. While its true that YPG have committed acts of terrorism against Turkey it is also true that Turkey has committed war crimes against YPG and other Kurdish offshoots.Seems like Turkey was more than happy to allow the Kurds to kill both ISIS and Assad loyalists, since all three are hostile to Turkey. Now that the Syrian government is in bad shape and ISIS is all but defeated, now Turkey has the onus to wipe out the last of their enemies -- the Kurds.I think it would have been better to keep a small element of US forces embedded in Syria, especially with how fragile that region is right now. You end up spending ten times you set out to save in terms of money and US lives when you leave it unchecked.

Turkey opens fire on United States Special Forces in northern Syria: report

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According to Newsweek, the Turkish government’s bombings against Kurdish allies are now striking against American soldiers.

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Citing both Iraqi Kurdish intelligence officials and Pentagon officials, the report said that special forces in the Mashtenour hill in the city of Kobani fell under artillery fire from Turkey, which is conducting their so-called Operation Peace Spring against the Kurdish people.

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President Donald Trump gave the go-ahead to Turkey after he wanted to get off the phone with an angry Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan. He had threatened he would storm the border to create his so-called safe zone.

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According to a senior Pentagon official, the Turkish forces should have been aware of where the U.S. was positioned down to the grid. So, it’s unclear why they would begin firing on the American soldiers. There were somewhere between 15 and 100 troops in the area, the official said, describing it as a small number below company level".

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Yeah, this is working out great. Another Trump fumble. Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Senate report has a clear verdict: Russians meddled in 2016; Rudy's conspiracy theory is crap

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So, perhaps it's not surprising that a significant story with serious political ramifications got overlooked. It wasn't sexy or exciting and it didn't contain a lot of new facts, but it stands out because it reflects a rare bipartisan congressional effort at executive oversight. I'm speaking of the second report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 Election.

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Unfortunately for all the conspiracy theorists, like every single investigation that came before, this one found that Russia's infamous troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, "sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin." This must have come as no surprise to Robert Mueller's prosecutors, who found exactly the same thing and even indicted 12 Russian operatives for these crimes.

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After two years of investigation, hundreds of interviews and a massive search of documents, this is the second piece of what is expected to be a five-part report about the full implications of the Russian effort in 2016. The first report found that the Russian government had launched a sophisticated disinformation campaign and a plan to attack the elections systems in various states. It too concluded that these efforts were designed to hurt Clinton's campaign and help Trump's. This report was about the Russian project to sow chaos and discord through social media.

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There were no dissenters from the report's conclusions, even among the Trump supporters on the committee like Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has vociferously defended the president against those who say he abused his power in his call for the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden. Another Republican on the panel, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, has said that Trump was joking when he called for China to do the same but he signed the report as well.

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The committee offered a number of recommendations that will obviously be ignored by Republicans, who seem to believe that foreign interference will accrue to their benefit, which is probably true. First of all, the report says the Trump administration should "reinforce with the public the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election," which literally made me laugh out loud. The most serious purveyor of disinformation, propaganda and the sowing of division is the president himself. The Russians surely take their lead from him.

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As Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., put it, It’s time for Trump to stop using Twitter to play into our adversaries’ hands. With every deranged tweet, he advances foreign interests by dividing Americans. That would be a feature, not a bug, for this administration.

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The Senate report also calls for campaigns to be on the alert for propaganda and be cautious about what they share on social media. It recommends that the administration create an interagency task force to deter and monitor any online interference from foreign actors. Unsurprisingly, they did not endorse Russian President Vladimir Putin's repeated offer to form a joint U.S.-Russia cybersecurity partnership, a prospect that seemed to make Trump very excited.

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This report couldn't come at a worse time for Trump and his top consigliere, Attorney General William Barr, who has been traveling the globe seeking to prove that the "Deep State" spied on the Trump campaign without a "proper predicate." This stems from several right-wing theories claiming that the CIA and allied agencies engaged in a series of elaborate traps to frame Trump and the Russian government for the 2016 election interference

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Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Trump says he doesn't want any ISIS prisoners to escape during Turkey's offensive, but a new video is said to show just that

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• A video released by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) reportedly shows prisoners escaping in the aftermath of an attack near Qamishli, Syria on Friday. Reports of the prison break or whether the prisoners were affiliated with ISIS have not been independently verified.
• ISIS has indicated that it plans to stage prison breaks across Syria and Iraq in order to regroup and build their forces.
• The video of the alleged ISIS jailbreak emerged on the same day that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that "the president wants to make very clear it is imperative that Turkey not allow even a single ISIS fighter to escape."
• Both experts and US officials have indicated that the US's withdrawal of troops from this region of Syria could jeopardize the SDF's ability to guard the thousands of ISIS prisoners detained there

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Gosh, who could possibly have seen this coming?

He absolutely abhors the principles of the America I grew up in. He only thinks of himself and his ego (crowd size obsession for example). He knowingly lies and makes promises he cannot keep or refuses to keep the ones he made. Remember:
He campaign on having a health care plan that covered more people with better coverage at less cost than Obamacare?
He would totally eliminate the federal debt in eight years?
Mexico would pay for the border wall?
His tax cut would go to the middle class & not the wealthy? NO - he is anti-abortion because his base is. He is trying to slash health care and support for the poor. His rhetoric is inflammatory at a time when right-wing terrorism and mass killings are growing in the US. He wants to shove more illegal immigrants into concentration camps with minimal facilities for health & safety. He wants to ship them back to unstable countries while slashing funding for stabilizing those countries. No we don't. The growth in jobs is focused on low wage jobs without benefits. The annual deficit is over a TRILLION PER YEAR with no end in sight. The infrastructure is falling apart and he has done NOTHING. He promised that Mexico would fund the wall construction, not the US. He is building a wall by stripping funding from other needed projects. He had two years of Republican control of House & Senate. If he was a true leader and actually concerned with the wall before the 2018 mid term election beating, he would have gotten funding then. With TRILLION dollar deficits and skyrocketing total debt on top of lack of investment in infrastructure, education, and research, our economy will stagger along with massive cuts to both Medicare and Social Security. At 80 years old, you probably won't see it. I'm 55 and will. My son is 21 and has a limited future unless we change course.

Sorry, but you are understating your case. A plan, like his other plans, that he would not describe until after you had voted him in. And even then he has not presented any plan. Kind of like his promise to release his taxes after having been elected and has never done; as we see, he is desperate to keep anyone from ever seeing his tax returns.I noticed that as part of his campaign for reelection was getting started he promised a wonderful new health care plan which he won't describe to us until after he's been reelected. Haven't heard him repeat that same old lie again, so someone must have warned him that we would see through his lie this time. And to add insult to injury, he went to celebrate it at Mar-A-Lago where his opening line to his rich friends was boasting of how much richer he had just made them all.And he has tried to promise big tax cuts for the middle class since then, but just how big and how it would work has to wait until we reelect him. Part of that diverted funding from the defense budget came from about 25 defense projects in Europe that are part of the European Reassurance Initiative and European Deterrence Initiative programs where went into place in response to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and for the purpose of strengthening Europe's defense against Russian incursions. So Trump not only robs those needed programs for his wall, but he also weakens NATO in order to benefit Russia; who says that Trump cannot multitask? Using the trillion-dollar deficit as a excuse for cutting Medicare and Social Security is a vicious lie on so many levels. Such cuts could never possibly have any effect on the deficit.First, both programs are funded by special dedicated payroll taxes that are only used for those programs, plus insurance premiums paid by recipients for Medicare Part B (Parts C and D are private medical insurance). The deficit is from the underfunding of the general fund, which has nothing to do with the funding of these two programs. Cutting them will have zero effect on the deficit.Second, so many of the "entitlement" programs that Trump's administration and GOP congress insist must be cut because of the deficit account for such small parts of the budget that eliminating them would accomplish nothing for the deficit, kind of like trying to save the Titanic by bailing it out with a single bucket. It turns out that more than half the budget goes to defense with huge chunks of that going to contractors and enormous appropriation projects. A lot of substantial and effective cuts could be made to the defense budget with affecting military readiness. For that matter, in diverting funding from defense for his stinkin' wall, Trump didn't take away any money from the contractors or appropriations programs, but rather directly from the military and our service members, thus reducing military readiness.We need to review this Robert Reich video again, "Where Your Tax Dollars Really Go":

Hi 14174 Did you even read my post and understand what I was telling Phat?Do you claim to be a Christian? If you did you would understand that Phat was calling the Christians nuts that were supporting Trump.So Phat wanted to know why evangelical Christians support Trump.I am a Pastor but I don't claim to be a Christian as my definition of Christian is much stricter than what is generally held. My definition is a person that is living a life like Christ. I am a born again child of God but I am far from being Christlike. I am working on it.Definition of Pro-Life: opposing abortion and euthanasia.
Actually Pro-Life will overlook abortion for rape and incest.
I am anti-abortion: My view is that anyone who aborts a birth after the 23 male and 23 female chromosomes mix and become 46 chromosomes which is a life, commits murder. Anyone who assists in an abortion is also guilty of murder. If two people rob a store and one shoots and kills a person they both are tried for murder. I believe a person who is convicted of murder should forfit their life. So yes I believe in capital punishment and it should be used for a capital crime.So Trump is a long way from what I believe but I can live with that. Because he is not nearly as far away as any alternative at present.Pro-choice is choosing to do what you think is right.I even believe in choice. If you don't want to produce children then don't have sex or if you do use protection. Heck they give away birth control pills to 8th graders. I lived and worked in a foreign country for 15 years. When I first went overseas I have to pass a physical, and have a clean police record. My employer had to purchase a work permit for me at a cost of $1250 plus a $450 deposit so if the government wanted to deport me. My employer had to furnish me a place to live that had to pass government inspection at anytime they wanted to check it out. They had to furnish me with health insurance. They had to furnish me with a living wage. My work permit had to be renewed every year and a clean police record. If the record was not clean the permit would not be renewed.Any employer who hired a worker who was not a citizen that did not have a permit was fined a huge fine for the first offense for each person without a permit. The second offence the fine was doubled, and was doubled thereafter until they decided it was too expensive to work people who did not have permits. That was usually after the first offense.When my wife joined me she had to have a permit to just live there and could not work. She had to be covered by my insurance. It was private insurance. I had a total knee replacement operation and a partial knee replacement and they did not cost me one penny.During my entire stay in the foreign country I could not cost the government one penny.We have laws that was signed into law by Bill Clinton that would solve our immigration problems if they were enforced. Most folks probably don't even know they exist. In the last 6 months Mexico has funded a wall that has reduced the illegal entries into our country by 1/2. They have 27,000 soldiers on their southern border. That is a pretty good wall. But for the problem to be fixed we have to remove the incentives. Well we doubled the deficit under Obama and looks like we will add at least 8 trillion under Trump. But if we don't stop spending more than we have coming in it will never change until we go bankrupt.And if you think it is bad now just wait until a person is elected as our president and has a senate and house to support them in giving away free stuff.There is no such thing as free in this world.
Free education does not exist. Somebody has to pay the bill.
Free health care does not exist. Somebody has to pay the bill.
There is no such thing as free money. Somebody has to earn it.
There is no such thing as free energy. Everything has a cost.Every dollar that the government spends on illegal aliens has to either be collected from the citizens or borrowed from someone.Since only 35.3 % of the civilian non-institutional population are working the income stream is very narrow. It hasn't helped that we have disposed of some 30 million taxpayers we would have at present by abortion. That would increase the tax base by 1/4 of the present base. Then you add the effect on the GDP due to consumption and we would be in a lot better shape. but still a long way from reducing our debt.There is only one way to reduce debt and that is to spend less than you take in.The problem with government is that the money that is spent is collected from others therefore those that spend it are not careful with how they spend other peoples money.We have billions of dollars that are wasted. Once I heard a senator say that a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon it adds up to real money. You are probably right on this. But as of right now there is supposed to be over 3 trillion dollars in the SS trust fund. But all that is there is IOU'S from the federal government. In other words they have spent the money and now the government has to pay interest on that money. But that is the problem when you handle other peoples money. If you were a lawyer, accountant or banker and done what they have done you would go to jail.God Bless

No. Try reading for comprehension. If not for the Kurds MANY MORE OF OUR SOLDIERS would have had to fight and die. Maybe. Irrelevant. We did go into Syria (justified or not) and enlisted the Kurds to fight and die in our stead and then stabbed them in the back.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Part of the job of the trust fund's trustees is to invest that money wisely and safely. What could be more safe than US government bonds? If the government is going to default on those, then Social Security will be the least of our worries.But then that is Trump's business model, isn't it? I seem to recall that he did say that he'd run the country like a business. His way of running a business is to suck out of it all the cash that he can and then declare bankruptcy. If he's such a bad businessman that he can make a casino fail, then what hope does a country have against him?

While stiffing the suppliers and subcontractors.