The RPI Challenge

Ever since the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it has been an article of faith that Americans should thank the troops for their service in those two countries. Yet, with the exception of libertarians and few leftists, the fact is that during the two decades of death, injury, suffering, destruction, and out of control federal spending and debt that threatens to send the government into bankruptcy, the overwhelming majority of Americans never openly demanded that the US government bring...

Since September 17, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has pumped billions of dollars into the repurchasing (repo) market, the first such intervention since 2009. The Fed has announced that it will continue to inject as much as 75 billion dollars a day into the repo market until November 4.The repo market provides a means for banks that are temporarily short of cash to obtain short-term (usually one day) loans from other banks. The Fed’s interventions were a response to a sudden cash...

Start with the initial headline, in the story the Washington Post “broke” on September 18th: TRUMP’S COMMUNICATIONS WITH FOREIGN LEADER ARE PART OF WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINT THAT SPURRED STANDOFF BETWEEN SPY CHIEF AND CONGRESS, FORMER OFFICIALS SAY The unnamed person at the center of this story sure didn’t sound like a whistleblower. Our intelligence community wouldn’t wipe its a** with a real whistleblower. Americans who’ve blown the whistle over serious offenses by the federal government...

The debate over what actually occurred on 9/11 and, more to the point, who might have been behind it, continues to preoccupy many observers worldwide. There is considerable legitimate concern that the commission that reviewed the incident engaged in a cover-up designed either to excuse a catastrophic failure on the part of the United States’ national security apparatus, or even connivance of federal agencies in the attack itself. And then there is the issue of possible foreign government...

There are some serious questions around the Biden family involvement in the Ukraine that the media have not picked up on. The first regards the ownership of the company which hired Joe Biden's son Hunter for an exorbitant amount of money while Joe Biden ran the US Ukraine policy. The second question is about the firing of the Viktor Shokin, the former Prosecutor General of the Ukraine. Trump accuses Joe Biden of having intervened in favor of his son's sponsor to get Shokin fired. The timeline...

The controversy swirling around the phone conversation between the US President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky regarding the business interests of former vice-president Joe Biden’s son is having a salutary effect on the conflict in Ukraine. The US Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker has resigned from his official position once it transpired that his name appeared in the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s dealings with Zelensky. (Meanwhile, Trump’s personal...

When you’re several decades older than Greta Thunberg, her impassioned warning of impending doom hits you differently than it may college students or early twentysomethings just a few years older than she. In a word, it sounded “familiar.” I’m not just talking about the climate change movement, nor exclusively about the left side of the political spectrum. I’ve been hearing about impending doom that can only be averted by massive increases in the size and scope of government my whole life,...

I confess that I still don’t get what exactly is going to be the particular offense for which President Trump is going to be impeached. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of impeaching Trump and removing him from office, but only for grave crimes, such as waging war illegally (i.e., without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war), wreaking death, suffering, and destruction in those wars, committing countless assassinations, and violating provisions in the Bill of...

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death. It happened in Rome. It’s happening again. At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a...

Photo: White HouseThe news is dominated by “the whistleblower,” the CIA officer who reported to the CIA Inspector General (IG) that President Donald Trump may have committed a crime during a conversation with the president of Ukraine. I’ve been fascinated by the story for a couple of reasons. First, as a whistleblower and a former CIA officer, I know what must have been going through the guy’s mind as he was coming to the decision to make a report on the president of the United States. That...

You don’t need to be a supporter of President Trump to be concerned about the efforts to remove him from office. Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced impeachment proceedings against the President over a phone call made to the President of Ukraine. According to the White House record of the call, the President asked his Ukrainian counterpart to look into whether there is any evidence of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election and then mentioned that a lot of people were talking about...

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your Twitter account has just been closed. Why? Daniel McAdams: In August I was watching a segment of the Sean Hannity program while at a friend’s house and noticed that despite an hour of Hannity ranting against the “deep state” in the US, he was wearing a lapel pin bearing the seal of the US Central Intelligence agency, which most would agree is either the center or at least an important hub of the US “deep state” itself. I tweeted about this strange anomaly and as a...

Notice something important about the hoopla regarding President’s Trump withholding of US foreign aid to Ukraine while he was requesting Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden for possible corruption: Nobody in Washington, D.C., or within the establishment press is questioning the concept of foreign aid itself. Foreign aid has become such an established and accepted way of inducing foreign regimes to comply with the dictates of US officials that the thought of...

In the months leading up to a CIA whistleblower's hearsay complaint about President Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the US intelligence community quietly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers must provide first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings, according to The Federalist's Sean Davis. Then, on September 24 - days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public - a new version of the whistleblower complaint form...

US President Donald Trump has one thing in common with his critics: both double or even triple down rather than admit failure, as shown by impeachment hearings in Washington and a continued campaign for regime change in Venezuela. At the UN General Assembly this week, the US relentlessly promoted Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, while issuing sanctions against the actual government in Caracas. Guaido declared himself “interim president” in January with the support of the...