But the resulting so-called chaos is very far from a negative result; it is certainly not the “worst possible outcome”. Remember, Italy is well-accustomed to operating without a sitting government.
Recall that when we previewing the possible outcomes of Italy’s government stalemate, in which president Mattarella had threatened to veto the choice of Paolo Savona as economy minister due to his anti-Euro/establishment sentiment, we said that the most likely – and market friendly – outcome, was for President Mattarella to give in to public pressure and the threat of a new election, averting a potential constitutional crisis. We also said that the second most likely outcome, and potentially far worse for markets, was that “if Mattarella and the coalition partners hold firm, we may be set for new elections, with M5S likely to repeat April’s success and Lega likely to increase its share of the votes, eating up Berlusconi’s party.”
Moments ago that’s precisely what happened, when Italy’s premier designate, Giuseppe Conte, 53, told reporters after meeting the head of state Sunday evening that he had handed back his mandate for forming “the government of change” to president Mattarella. “I can assure you that I did my utmost to try to fulfill this task” he added.
As we reported earlier, Mattarella, who is supposed to be impartial but appears to have been anything but in this case, and was tasked with naming the premier and ministers, earlier rejected the candidacy of economist Paolo Savona, 81, who has repeatedly urged the Italian government to plan for a euro-exit, and who has criticized what he says is German dominance over Europe.
In other words, Mattarella sided with Europe over Italy’s own choice.
“We worked for weeks, day and night, to ensure the birth of a government which defends the interests of Italian citizens. But someone (under pressure from whom?) said no to us,” Salvini wrote in a Facebook post, indirectly attacking the president’s veto of Savona.
“At this point, with the honesty, coherence and courage of always, you must now have a say,” Salvini added in a call for early elections.
Salvini’s scathing attack on the president continued: “If a government has to start conditioned by threats from Europe, that government won’t be backed by the League.” The League leader then said he’d seek a full mandate in the event of new elections.
This betrayal of Italy by Mattarella is neither unforeseen nor unexpected. Everyone knew he was EU-owned. Salvini and La Lega were fully prepared to go back to the polls, knowing that this possibility would only strengthen the euroskeptics’ position, which is why they refused to back down over the Finance Ministry. I tend to doubt 5 Stelle are shedding any tears over the chance to increase their numbers in the Parliament either.
The bigger issue though, the thing now looming over his entire presidency, is the wide ranging conspiracy engineered by senior elements of the intelligence community. A few months ago it looked like a handful of radicalized mid-level bureaucrats. What’s becoming clear is this was a conspiracy hatched by the men at the top of the intelligence community, with help from the White House, to not only help Hillary Clinton, but engineer a coup after the election to get rid of Trump. This reality has to color any assessment of Trump.
Think about the stones it takes to face off against the intel community. They literally know all of your secrets. In the case of Trump, they have the secrets of his friends, family and business associates. Even if they can’t ruin him, they can ruin people he knows. It was 18 months ago that Chuck Schumer warned Trump about doing this. When Schumer said, “Intel officials ‘have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you’” he was not being flippant or rhetorical. We now know the intel community has been at this for a while.
It’s not just the fact that the intel community has the capacity to spy on everyone and appears to be spying on everyone. It’s that these are vicious, craven people lacking a moral compass. It’s ironic that James Comey was fond of accusing his people of lacking a moral compass, when it is now clear the guy is a sociopath incapable of knowing right from wrong. Clapper and Brennan have no scruples whatsoever. There’s also the fact that on the CIA side, they still have guys who kill people on behalf of the American deep state.
This is exactly right. That’s why I’ve been recommending cutting President Trump considerable slack from the start. You cannot reasonably judge a performance when you do not know the degree of difficulty involved.
Giuseppe Conte, 53, approved as the next prime minister of Italy by its president. He leads a rag-tag coalition of far-right and anti-establishment parties. They want to deport immigrants and hand out £14.9b in universal basic income. Mr Conte’s government was also seen as highly eurosceptic, particularly in choosing Paolo Savona as economy minister. Minister for industry between 1993-94, he was staunchly opposed to signing the Maastricht Treaty and said he considered the euro currency a ‘German cage’.
His planned appointment, and the coalition’s victory, was mat with dismay by European leaders. Conte’s appointment could herald an end to more than two months of political uncertainty in the eurozone’s third-biggest economy.
But he must now finalise his cabinet, the subject of days of tough negotiations between the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far-right League.
The list of ministerial candidates must then be endorsed by head-of-state President Mattarella before it can seek parliamentary approval. Italian media reported League chief Matteo Salvini would become interior minister and Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio have the economic development ministry.
That’s big, because it means the Euro and immigration will be controlled by La Lega, not Cinque Stelle. It looks like Cinque Stelle wants to blow out the EU budgetary limits and hand out money to low-income Italians while La Lega gets rid of the invaders, both Eurocrats and Africans. It’s not a done deal yet, because Mattarella has to sign off on Savona and Salvini and he will be under tremendous pressure from the EU not to do so, but Salvini has made it clear that if he doesn’t, La Lega will simply force another election that will only strengthen the alliance’s hand.
This is a potentially better outcome than I had expected before the elections.
Italians threaten to defy EU rules by kicking out 500,000 immigrants, tearing up spending plans and forging links with Russia
Last week the parties said they would renegotiate EU rules that require migrants to be dealt with by the first country they arrive in. They also pledged to build more detention centres and review the policy of rescuing migrants whose boats capsize. Italy has been on the front line of the EU’s migrant crisis, with hundreds of thousands making the journey across the Mediterranean from North Africa.
Lega leader Matteo Salvini has said an estimated 500,000 undocumented migrants in Italy must be deported ‘as a priority’. He told supporters he would rid the country of ‘delinquents’. The parties have also warned they will ignore Brussels rules on spending designed to prevent another eurozone crisis. They reject what they call the EU’s ‘austerity’ measures and want to renegotiate Italy’s debts.
Luigi Di Maio, the Five Star leader, said money to fund tax cuts would be found through investments and upcoming negotiations on the EU budget.
Euroskepticism has been on the rise throughout Italy since the Euro was forced on the country. Now the nationalists of both Left and Right have come to power even earlier than expected by virtue of joining forces. And once other Europeans see how the Italians improve their quality of life without migrants and Eurocrats, I expect they will follow suit.
Nationalists need to learn from the Italian example that an opponent from the other side of the political spectrum is not necessarily an enemy, unlike the globalists, who are the enemies of every nation.
Stefan Halper was not the only spy that the Federal agencies attempted to insert into the Trump campaign:
At least one additional government “informant” attempted to infiltrate the Trump campaign under President Barack Obama, former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo revealed exclusively on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” Monday night.
“Let me tell you something that I know for a fact,” Caputo told host Laura Ingraham. “This informant, this person that they tried to plant into the campaign — and even into the administration, if you believe Axios — he’s not the only person who came at the campaign. And the FBI is not the only Obama agency who came at the campaign.
“I know because they came at me,” Caputo added. “And I’m looking for clearance from my attorney to reveal this to the public. This is just the beginning.”
This is already far worse than Watergate, and we don’t even know the half of it yet.
Something very significant has just happened, something with global ramifications has just happened, and what that is is that the United States has finally lost its perceived moral superiority. It has lost the perceived moral high ground that it possessed for most of the last 50 or 60 years.
We’ve been arguing for decades that the US system is better than the Chinese system, that it’s better than the Soviet Union, that it’s better than the other competing systems, in fact, that’s where Francis Fukuyama came up with this idea of the End of History. Because what the End of History meant is that the neo-liberal world order had triumphed finally, once and for all. Now, we know that’s not true, Fukuyama himself has been backtracking on on that just because he wants to maintain his intellectual credibility, but what we’re seeing is that the United States system is just as corrupt as everywhere else.
You know I was reading a book called Il Gattopardo by an Italian writer and it’s a fascinating book because the author was a member of the Italian aristocracy himself, although he was writing about his grandfather who was a member of the Sicilian royal house, and what was fascinating to me, and what was very significant is the way that the unification vote in Sicily completely destroyed the faith of the Sicilian people of this particular town in the system because the guy who was conducting the vote falsified it. It was the very first chance they had to vote, they were voting on the unification of Italy which is called the Risorgimento, and all the different towns and and principalities and so forth were given the opportunity to vote on unification. In that town, the vote was reported as unanimous even though a number of people voted no, and knew they voted no. And the prince is talking to his gamesman, who admitted that he had voted no, and the prince realizes that through that act of faithlessness, through that act of corruption, through that desire to present a united, unanimous front, the people conducting the vote had rendered the entire process corrupt and false.
And that’s exactly what has happened with the revelations that the FBI was using the swamp creature Stefan Halper to interfere with the most recent presidential election, to interfere in the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But the damning thing the thing that is going to do, and is currently doing so much international damage are the revelations that Halper has been engaged in this activity since the Carter Administration.
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This is the passage from Il Gattopardo, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, to which I referred with regards to the false reporting of the vote that took place in Donnafugata, and was reported by Don Calogero Sedara as 512 Yes, 0 No. Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, smells a rat despite having voted yes to unification himself, and asks his ferociously loyal attendant, Don Ciccio, how he voted.
The cool air had dispersed Don Ciccio’s somnolence and the massive grandeur of the Prince dispelled his fears; now all that remained afloat on the surface of Don Ciccio’s conscience was resentment, useless of course but not ignoble. He stood there, spoke in dialect, and gesticulated, a pathetic puppet who in some absurd way was right.
“I, Excellency, voted ‘no.’ ‘No,’ a hundred times ‘no.’ I know what you told me: necessity, unity, expediency. You may be right; I know nothing of politics. Such things I leave to others. But Ciccio Tumeo is honest, poor though he may be, with his trousers in holes” (and he slapped the carefully mended patches in his shooting breeches), “and I don’t forget favors done me! Those swine in the Town Hall just swallowed up my opinion, chewed it, and then spat it out transformed as they wanted. I said black and they made me say white! The one time when I could say what I thought, that bloodsucker Sedara went and annulled it, behaved as if I never existed, as if I never meant a thing! I, Francesco Tumeo La Manna, son of Leonardo, organist of the Mother Church at Donnafugata, a better man than he is! To think I’d even dedicated to him a mazurka I composed at the birth of that . . .” (he bit his thumb to rein himself in), “that mincing daughter of his! “
At this point calm descended on Don Fabrizio, who had finally solved the enigma; now he knew who had been killed at Donnafugata, at a hundred other places, in the course of that night of dirty wind: a new-born babe: good faith; just the very child who should have been cared for most, whose strengthening would have justified all the silly vandalisms. Don Ciccio’s negative vote, fifty similar votes at Donnafugata, a hundred thousand “nos” in the whole Kingdom, would have had no effect on the result, would in fact have made it, if anything, more significant; and this maiming of souls would have been avoided.
Six months before they used to hear a rough despotic voice saying, “Do what I say or you’ll catch it!” Now there was an impression already of such a threat being replaced by the soapy tones of a moneylender: “But you signed it yourself, didn’t you? Can’t you see? It’s quite clear. You must do as we say, for here are the I.O.U.s; your will is identical with mine.”
Don Fabrizio had always liked Don Ciccio, partly because of the compassion inspired in him by all who from youth had thought of themselves as dedicated to the arts, and in old age, realizing they had no talent, still carried on the same activity at lower levels, pocketing withered dreams; and he was also touched by the dignity of his poverty. But now he also felt a kind of admiration for him, and deep down at the very bottom of his proud conscience a voice was asking if Don Ciccio had not perhaps behaved more nobly than the Prince of Salina. And the Sedaras, all the various Sedaras, from the petty one who violated figures at Donnafugata to the major ones at Palermo and Turin, had they not committed a crime by choking such consciences?
Don Fabrizio could not know it then, but a great deal of the slackness and acquiescence for which the people of the South were to be criticized during the next decades was due to the stupid annulment of the first expression of liberty ever offered them.
Events appear to be moving forward at last. The God-Emperor has tweeted:
I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!
Let the signed executive orders flow like a mighty river.
The mysterious professor who spied on the Trump campaign for the FBI is identified:
In mid-July 2016, a retired American professor approached an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.
The professor took the opportunity to strike up a conversation with Carter Page, whom Trump had named a few months earlier as a foreign policy adviser.
But the professor was more than an academic interested in American politics — he was a longtime U.S. intelligence source. And, at some point in 2016, he began working as a secret informant for the FBI as it investigated Russia’s interference in the campaign, according to people familiar with his activities.
The role played by the source is now at the center of a battle that has pitted President Trump against his own Justice Department and fueled the president’s attacks on the special counsel’s investigation. In a Thursday tweet, he called the probe “a disgusting, illegal and unwarranted Witch Hunt.”
In recent days, Trump and his allies have escalated their claims that the FBI source improperly spied on the campaign.
“Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” he tweeted Friday. “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story. If true — all time biggest political scandal!”
There is no evidence to suggest someone was planted with the campaign. The source in question engaged in a months-long pattern of seeking out and meeting three different Trump campaign officials.
The Washington Post — after speaking with people familiar with his role — has confirmed the identity of the FBI source who assisted the investigation, but is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.
The source declined multiple requests for comment. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.
Page was one of three Trump advisers whom the FBI informant contacted in the summer and fall of 2016 for brief talks and meetings that largely centered on foreign policy, according to people familiar with the encounters.
“There has been some speculation that he might have tried to reel me in,” Page, who had numerous encounters with the informant, told The Post in an interview. “At the time, I never had any such impression.”
In late summer, the professor met with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis for coffee in Northern Virginia, offering to provide foreign-policy expertise to the Trump effort. In September, he reached out to George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign-policy adviser for the campaign, inviting him to London to work on a research paper.
It wasn’t too hard to work out this “secret FBI source” thanks to a Daily Caller article linked on Drudge directly below the Washington Post piece.
Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered — and he would accept — during the presidential campaign.
The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.
Halper’s September 2016 outreach to Papadopoulos wasn’t his only contact with Trump campaign members. The 73-year-old professor, a veteran of three Republican administrations, met with two other campaign advisers, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned.
The Washington Post’s feeble attempt to spin this is particularly amusing when it goes to the trouble to underline, “There is no evidence to suggest someone was planted with the campaign.” They can’t even name the guy, but they are certain that no evidence concerning the nature of his involvement with the Trump campaign will be found?
Anyhow, Stefan Halper is a card-carrying neocon and Deep State operative. This is a MUCH bigger deal than Watergate ever was, and indicates that a serious fumigation of the FBI and other federal agencies is in order.
UPDATE: Holy cats, there is NO WAY this guy’s actions were even remotely innocent.
Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.
Michigan’s first-ever Muslim candidate for governor, Dr. Abdul al-Sayed, took a shot at fellow gubernatorial candidate Patrick Colbeck on Thursday that some Republicans are saying was below the belt.
Colbeck, speaking at a candidate’s forum in East Lansing, expressed his concerns about Sharia law and the extremist Muslim Brotherhood’s tactic of civilization jihad. Colbeck took exception with an article he says was planted by Sayed supporters in the left-of-center website Buzzfeed, which painted Colbeck as a fringe extremist using “unfounded conspiracy theories” against Sayed.
“What I have not heard is the Republicans on this panel, decisively and swiftly call out this kind of Islamophobia, this kind of racism, in the context that they are wanting to represent the state that has the highest per-capita number of Muslim Americans in the country. Now you may not hate Muslims, but I’ll tell you, Muslims definitely hate you!”
Remember, diversity is the USA’s strength! This should end well.
Kurt Schlichter points out that Christians are not obliged to give their enemies a free hand in ruling over them. Especially not in a democracy:
There are a lot of people frustrated that Christians back Trump and refuse to let his personal life be used as a wedge to pry off their support. They are mad that Christians are not playing their role as defined by their enemies. Christians are supposed to be scandalized and give up and lose. But they won’t.
Now, let’s understand this basic concept – Jesus was not some sort of whiny wimp who refused to confront the establishment and took comfort in his own righteousness while leaving others to do the heavy lifting. Jesus made people angry, because that’s what happens when you defy bad people. Being a Christian does not mean that you have to shrug and let the likes of Hillary Clinton be elected so she and her minions can fire up her anti-faith pogrom against those of us who dare worship God and not the elite she represents. Maybe you didn’t notice, but they do not accept the concept that we have any legitimate interests or rights. They hate us. And, if we are weak and stupid enough to allow them to take power, they will act on their bigotry and prejudices. Baking cakes is only the start.
Resistance is not merely an option. It is a duty. And resistance to evil – because the desire to suppress our faith is evil – is not somehow unchristian because it can be aesthetically displeasing. Fighting back is not always pretty. Jesus cleared the temple of moneychangers. He made a mess and got people angry. He didn’t sit on the sidelines and write ponderous articles lambasting the people tossing over the tables because “We’re better than that.”
Everyone seems to want to tell Christians that they are obligated to give in. There’s always some IPA-loving hipster who writes video game reviews when he’s not sobbing alone in the dark because no one loves him tweeting “Oh, that’s real Christian!” whenever a conservative fights back. I know that when I need theological clarification, I seek out the militant atheist who thinks Christ was a socialist and believes that the Golden Rule is that Christians are never allowed to never offend anyone.
The more evil the authorities, the more children of the Devil are in power, the more that the genuine Christian who is actually willing to follow the example of Jesus will increasingly tend to run afoul of them. Which is why, as imperfect an instrument as he may be, as imperfect an instrument as he is, Donald Trump is, as Schlichter points out, a rowboat sent by God to an America drowning in evil, both foreign and domestic.