Michael Moore

Nuclear Power – Still Our Best Hope

Published by Papa Giorgio

While I disagree with the points regarding the “Climate Crisis,” this video is solid in it’s dealing with the fears of nuclear power safety issues and how many are frightened by misinformation. They link to two other videos that are worth a watch as well. They are:

  • Worst Nuclear Accidents in History (YOUTUBE);
  • The Economics of Nuclear Energy (YOUTUBE).

The Truth About Nuclear Energy

How Dangerous Is Nuclear Waste?

Even environmentalists concede that nuclear power is a clean source of abundant, reliable energy. But they stop short of supporting it. Why? Because of the “waste problem.” But how real are their concerns? James Meigs, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, answers this question.

Nuclear Energy: Abundant, Clean, and Safe

If you truly want to save the planet from global warming, there’s one energy source that can do it. It’s not wind or solar. It’s not coal, oil or natural gas, either. So what is it? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, has the answer in this important video.

The above video mentioned Will Siri, the President of the Sierra Club a few decades ago. Here is an excerpt from Michael Shellenberger’s article from FORBES (via CLIMATE DEPOT):

…In the mid-1960s, the Sierra Club supported the building of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant to replace fossil fuels. “Nuclear power is one of the chief long-term hopes for conservation,” argued Sierra Club President Will Siri in 1966.

“Cheap energy in unlimited quantities is one of the chief factors allowing a large, rapidly growing population to set aside wildlands, open space and lands of high-scenic value,” added Siri, who was a biophysicist, mountaineer, and veteran of the Manhattan Project….

* THE BONUS BELOW WILL EXPLAIN THE FRUITION OF WILL SIRI’S POSITION – JUMP

And there is a letter the ANS is floating around as well that many are signing:

The letter: Already signed by such notables as James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Richard Muller, Meredith Angwin, and James Hopf, the Generation Atomic letter notes that, in its early years, the Sierra Club supported nuclear technology.

“Early in the technology’s history, the Sierra Club recognized nuclear energy’s power-dense and emission-free environmental benefits,” the letter states. “Many of the Sierra Club’s members at the time were strong advocates for the energy source. Among them were Will Siri, the club’s president at the time, and the photographer and Sierra Club board member Ansel Adams.”

(AMERICAN NUCLEAR SOCIETY)

The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste

Nuclear waste is scary. Maybe you’ve seen it as glowing green goop in The Simpsons, or as a radioactive threat on the news. Either way, you likely know it has been a major block to the use and improvement of nuclear power. Over the last few decades, experts, politicians and the public have had heated debates over what to do with this radioactive material created by nuclear power plants.

But what if there were a way to not just store nuclear waste, but actually USE it?

This video is about the effort to make electricity out of nuclear waste. Really. It turns out, we developed the tools to do this decades ago. This story is about a technology we left behind and the people who want to bring it back.

This Environmentalist Says Only Nuclear Power Can Save Us Now

Michael Shellenberger believes The Green New Deal’s focus on wind and solar is a waste of time and money.

Calling climate change an existential threat to humanity, congressional Democrats introduced a policy proposal in February called the Green New Deal, which would mandate that 100 percent of U.S. energy production come from “clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources” like wind and solar by the year 2050.

But some environmentalists say Green New Dealers are neglecting one obvious source of abundant clean energy already available: Nuclear power, which an accompanying Green New Deal FAQ explicitly states should be phased out alongside fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal.

“If you want to save the natural environment, you just use nuclear. You grow more food on less land, and people live in cities. It’s not rocket science,” says Shellenberger. “The idea that people need to stay poor… that’s just a reactionary social philosophy that they then dress up as a kind of environmentalism.”

Watch the above video to learn more about the history of nuclear energy and to hear more from Shellenberger about his case for nuclear, as well as his response to concerns about radiation, nuclear weapons, and the economic viability of nuclear energy. The video also features solar energy advocate Ed Smeloff, who served on the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District board during the shutdown of California’s Rancho Seco nuclear plant and who makes the argument that nuclear power simply can’t compete in the marketplace.

PANDORA’S PROMISE:

This documentary film is about nuclear energy and other energy sources. Its central argument is that nuclear power, which still faces historical opposition from environmentalists, is a relatively safe and clean energy source which can help mitigate the serious problem of anthropogenic global warming. The film emphasize that more deaths is caused by coal powered power plants than nuclear power plants.

— PART ONE —

— PART TWO —

— PART THREE —

The below deals with the broken promises and the amount of land in the United States in order to reach a “net zero” dream. This is actually merely a combining of a few of my past posts under one umbrella.

* BONUS *

“Apocalypse Never” – Michael Shellenberger Talks With Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager had Michael Shellenberger on his show to discuss his new book entitled “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” (Amazon: ). In an article by Michael, you see him transitioning into a “Bjorn Lomborg” type of category. Here is the opening paragraph of that article:

  • On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. (ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS)

Facts through reason and common sense have made it through to this gentleman, and this is nice to hear. In another review of the book, it is noted that Mr. Shellenberger is a long time environmentalist and contributed “rationalism [that] is in woefully short supply in present day environmental discourse. Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never succeeds in providing a welcome boost” Here is the opening of that review:

The way to a cleaner, sustainable planet is not to eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear power, but rather to expand their use, especially in developing countries to bring economic growth and prosperity, the way such sources did for the developed world.

This is one of the primary themes in the new book, Apocalypse Never, written not by a “climate denier” or “corporate shill.” Instead, author Michael Shellenberger is a 30-year environmental activist with street cred in various causes including saving California’s redwood forests and co-founding a “progressive Democratic, labor-environment push” in 2002 for the New Apollo Project, a renewable energy initiative that long predated the Green New Deal. He also is a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment.”…..

(PA PUNDITS – Peter Murphy)

Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?

Do wind turbines and solar farms hold the keys to saving the environment? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress and noted climate activist, used to think so. Now he’s not so sure. He explains why in this important video. (See my previous Prager audio with Michael)

The West’s Green Delusions Empowered Putin | Shellenberger

  • “It was the West’s focus on healing the planet with ‘soft energy’ renewables, and moving away from natural gas and nuclear, that allowed Putin to gain a stranglehold over Europe’s energy supply.” — Michael Shellenberger

Armstrong and Getty read some of Michael Shellenberger’s article titled, “The West’s Green Delusions Empowered Putin“. An article of similar nature is found over at THE FEDERALIST, and it is titled: “Stop Letting Environmental Groups Funded By Russia Dictate America’s Energy Policy“.

Both are must reads.

State Sized Chunks Land for a Zero-Carbon Economy

Why were federal tax subsidies extended for wind and solar by Congress? Again. For the umpteenth time! We are against subsidies because they distort markets. Those politicians who support these market-distorting policies should at least be forced to answer the question: “How much is enough?” Taxpayers have been subsidizing wind and solar corporations for more than 40 years! These companies have gotten fat and happy on your money, and Congress keeps giving them more of it. This video is based on a Texas Public Policy Foundation report that explains why it’s long past time to stop wind and solar from stuffing their bank accounts with your tax dollars.

  • To give you a sense of scale, to replace the energy from one average natural gas well, which sits on about four acres of land, would require 2,500 acres of wind turbines. That is a massive amount of land. You would have to cover this entire nation with wind turbines in an attempt to replace the electricity that we generate from coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, and even that would not get the job done. (CFACT)

This is from a recent BLOOMBERG article:

At his international climate summit in April, President Joe Biden vowed to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. The goal will require sweeping changes in the power generation, transportation and manufacturing sectors. It will also require a lot of land.

Wind farms, solar installations and other forms of clean power tend to take up more space on a per-watt basis than their fossil-fuel-burning brethren. A 200-megawatt wind farm, for instance, might require spreading turbines over 13 square miles (36 square kilometres). A natural-gas power plant with that same generating capacity could fit onto a single city block.

Achieving Biden’s goal will require aggressively building more wind and solar farms, in many cases combined with giant batteries. To fulfill his vision of an emission-free grid by 2035, the U.S. needs to increase its carbon-free capacity by at least 150%. Expanding wind and solar by 10% annually until 2030 would require a chunk of land equal to the state of South Dakota, according to Princeton University estimates and an analysis by Bloomberg News. By 2050, when Biden wants the entire economy to be carbon free, the U.S. would need up to four additional South Dakotas to develop enough clean power to run all the electric vehicles, factories and more.

Earth Day 2021 is April 22nd. Therefore, eco-activist groups will be preaching the gospel of wind & solar power and the importance of biodiversity. What those trying to “save the planet” fail to understand (or more likely ignore) is that these two priorities are in direct conflict. Wind & solar require far more land than nuclear, natural gas and coal power. They are also far more destructive to regions of high biodiversity as well as large birds, bats and endangered species. As we celebrate Earth Day, let’s consider the significant environmental consequences of attempting to provide electricity through low density, unreliable sunshine and breezes.

Vice President Joe Biden aims to be the most progressive president on the issue of climate change. The man who spent most of 2020 hiding in the basement believes the future of energy is renewable energy like wind and solar. Biden should go back to the basement, watch Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans,” and rethink his advocacy for renewable energy. Wind and solar are not the answer, and the idea of converting our fossil fuel-based economy into renewables could be a devastating take-down to society.

Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.

Remember when Google joined the common sense era?

FLASHBACK

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

[…..]

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)

  • What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
  • Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
  • Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
  • Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)

Marie Antoinette Democrats: Let Them Drive EVs

Published by Papa Giorgio

(WESTERN JOURNAL HAS MORE)

This was floating around Facebook, But I wanted to get something a tiny bit more substantial than FB. To wit: THE VERMONT DAILY CHRONICLE:

Tesla said it best in referring to batteries as an Energy Storage System. They do NOT make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an electric vehicle (EV) is a zero-emission vehicle…not. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are in fact coal-powered…let that sink in.

Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.

There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single use. The most common single use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals. Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, they will continue to leak like the ooze in a ruined flashlight. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.

In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about these is that ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.

But that is not the half of it. For those excited about EV, a closer look at batteries along with windmills and solar panels is highly recommended. These three technologies share environmentally destructive embedded costs.

Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it: embedded costs and operating costs. Embedded costs are those that happen before point of sale such as fuel costs, equipment, labor, transportation, etc. For example, a typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. 

Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells. This should concern you. All those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. 

All told, it would take 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery. Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material.

Despite the fact California is the only state which requires batteries be recycled, they are building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco which they intend to power from solar panels and windmills. This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. 

The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride which are highly toxic. Also, silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.

Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weigh 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last only 15 to 20 years. The used blades cannot be recycled. And sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.

There may be a place for these technologies, but looking beyond the myth of zero emissions, it is predicted EVs, solar panels and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become more apparent. 

This is always a favorite of mine… and remember, I have a rather large post detailing ARE ELECTRIC CARS “CLEAN”?.

A Previous Post

Vice President Joe Biden aims to be the most progressive president on the issue of climate change. The man who spent most of 2020 hiding in the basement believes the future of energy is renewable energy like wind and solar. Biden should go back to the basement, watch Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans,” and rethink his advocacy for renewable energy. Wind and solar are not the answer, and the idea of converting our fossil fuel-based economy into renewables could be a devastating take-down to society.

Remember when Google joined the common sense era?

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

[…..]

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)

  • What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
  • Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
  • Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
  • Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)

Delusional Democrats Pipe-Dreams About Renewable Energy | Larry Elder

Published by Papa Giorgio

Vice President Joe Biden aims to be the most progressive president on the issue of climate change. The man who spent most of 2020 hiding in the basement believes the future of energy is renewable energy like wind and solar. Biden should go back to the basement, watch Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans,” and rethink his advocacy for renewable energy. Wind and solar are not the answer, and the idea of converting our fossil fuel-based economy into renewables could be a devastating take-down to society.

Remember when Google joined the common sense era?

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

[…..]

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)

  • What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
  • Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
  • Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
  • Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)

The Truth About Canadian Healthcare

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Just Updated)

Why can’t America’s healthcare system be more like Canada’s? Here’s a better question: why would you want it to be? French-Canadian entrepreneur Alain Lambert has first-hand experience with both Canada’s and America’s healthcare systems, and he offers some cautionary tales. Canadian-style healthcare might not be as good for your health as you think.

This next short video is by filmmaker Stuart Browning, who provides a cautionary lesson about a politicized health care system where politicians and bureaucrats determine medical priorities. See more at Dr. Brownings (dated) SITE.

See Also:

Stossel: Government-run health care may mean waiting in line for care. (ABC News blocked this from playing on my site, so click through to watch it at YouTube):

Claude Castonguay, the father of the Canadian Health Care system, and a model adopted by the NHS in Britain, has said his model is failing:

Just yesterday, I wrote about how unpopular the British healthcare system has become. Today comes news that the man largely responsible for Canada’s conversion to a single-payer health care system has admitted the system’s failure:

“Back in the 1960s, (Claude) Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.”

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

As more and more nations throughout the world seek to infuse more private, market-based solutions into their government-controlled healthcare systems, for some reason lefties in this country want to make the same mistake that countries like Canada made decades ago…

(CR ONLINE)

One person eventually wrote a book about their experience, noting in a CITY JOURNAL article:

…I was once a believer in socialized medicine. I don’t want to overstate my case: growing up in Canada, I didn’t spend much time contemplating the nuances of health economics. I wanted to get into medical school—my mind brimmed with statistics on MCAT scores and admissions rates, not health spending. But as a Canadian, I had soaked up three things from my environment: a love of ice hockey; an ability to convert Celsius into Fahrenheit in my head; and the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people. When HillaryCare shook Washington, I remember thinking that the Clintonistas were right.

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks….

One of David Gratzer’s books opened my eyes to what was going on up in Canada and gave me ammunition to respond to silly liberal emotive arguments. The book is “Code Blue: Reviving Canada’s Health Care System.” But, many people believe the Michael Moore’s of the World:

Some More Videos

Obamacare, Trumpcare, Ryancare, Berniecare. Doesn’t matter what you call it, when you hand over control of healthcare to the Government through a single-payer, universal system: it sucks. Allow me, someone who grew up with socialized medicine in Montreal, Canada, explain why.

Government-controlled health care in Canada is “great unless you need it.” Ralph Weber, a Canadian medical refugee, explains why he and his family got the medical care they needed, not in Canada, but in the United States. Is Canada style waiting lists and rationing headed south, with the passage of ObamaCare?

This is another video I wish to save and it comes from CATO Institute. See more here “featuring Stuart Browning with a critique of SiCKO“. I believe the longer video is gone — sad. See more at Dr. Brownings (dated) site.

Trump Supporters Are Racist – Michael Moore

Published by Papa Giorgio

Campus Reform Editor-In-Chief Lawrence Jones recently joined Fox and Friends to discuss Michael Moore’s comments accusing Trump supporters of being racist.

Who Are The 1% | How Much Do The 1% Earn? (OWS Response 2011)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Originally posted October 26, 2011 — edited slightly)

NEWSBUSTERS Comments on the above video:

According to our friends at Celebrity Net Worth, Moore’s fortune currently totals $50 million:

Fahrenheit 911 raked in $230 million in theaters and another $3 million in DVD sales. After the theaters take their traditional 50% cut, that leaves roughly $130 million. Take away marketing, production and distribution expenses and Moore is conservatively left with $80 million. Moore was able to secure a deal from Miramax which guaranteed him 27% of his film’s net revenues, or roughly $21.6 million. Michael also was entitled to 50% of the profits of Sicko which are estimated to be $17 million.

Moore wants to dress and act as if he’s just a regular guy part of the 99 percenters, but he is every bit a multimillionaire doing everything in his power to make more money for himself. He invests his fortune in stocks – including the Left’s most-hated company Halliburton! – and isn’t pro-union when it comes to managing his own business.

(read more)


The TEA Party embodies the order of a republic, | The O.W.S. embodies the chaos of a “democracy”

This causes a question, the question is, “how much does the 1% earn…. and who are the 1%” Thanks to the Financial Samurai

WHAT THE TOP 1%, 5%, 10%, 25% and 50% MAKE IN AMERICA

Based on the Internal Revenue Service’s 2010 database below, here’s how much the top Americans make:

  • Top 1%: $380,354
  • Top 5%: $159,619
  • Top 10%: $113,799
  • Top 25%: $67,280
  • Top 50%: >$33,048

— SUMMARY OF FEDERAL INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAX DATA, 2010 

Based on a previous 500+ survey study on Financial Samurai in 2009, about 80% of readers are in the Top 25%.  Good to know that many of you are doing well.  The table also tells us a number of things about equality or inequality, namely that the Top 1% of tax payers pay 38% of all income taxes.  You can also see that the Top 50% of tax payers pay practically all of the nation’s taxes (97.30%), which once again shows that 40-45% of American income earners pay zero taxes.

If you do another little exercise and compare your Top 25% of American income to the Top 10 per capita income countries in the world, you can once again see further how lucky most of us are. If only we can get all American wage earns to pay some taxes, it would go a long way to help shoring up our budget.  Congress is bickering over cutting $40 billion to $60 billion a year.  All we have to do is make the bottom 50% who pay no taxes pay just $43 a month in taxes and we’d raise $60 billion a year right there.

[….]

THE RICH WILL ALWAYS PAY MORE THAN THEIR FAIR SHARE

As the economy continues to recover, it’s likely that the top 1% of income earners will likely pay an even higher percentage share of overall income taxes than 38%.  If things were fair, they would only have to pay 20% of total income taxes since 20% is their share of total income.  Alas, the rich pay almost double what they owe.

On the flip side, the bottom 50% who earn 12.75% of total earnings only pays a paltry 2.7% in total taxes.  Inequality is wrong and we should treat everybody equally.  The government should try to fix the imbalance by increasing the breadth of working Americans who pay taxes to 100% so that everybody pitches in.  If all working Americans in the bottom 50% paid taxes, the 10% gap in what they should be paying should narrow.

With the economy suffering, It doesn’t makes sense if you are in the bottom 50% who isn’t paying their fair share of taxes to go after the top 50%, let alone the top 1% who are paying way more than their share of income.  Trying to squeeze people even more when you’re not paying any taxes, or paying very little is a throwback to tyranny.

(read more)

Financial Samuri has two follow up stories that are really good:

  1. When It Comes To Money, Shouldn’t We Trust Rich People Who’ve Been Poor?
  2. Who Are The Top 1% Income Earners?

Both are good articles that are poignant. But here is a portion from that first one that many do not ask:

It’s trendy to rage against the top 1% nowadays.  We’ve discussed how the world will go through further employment pain thanks to the decline in the stock markets, EuroZone debt crisis, US state-level budget problems, and political impotence.  Things are not pretty to say the least.

From my rental property article, you discover that the top 1% are a couple who met in law school at 25 and are now 28 year old 2nd year associates making $380,000 combined.  The top 1% is also the 28 year old Google software engineer from Caltech who brings in $450,000 a year and has $400,000 in savings.  The top 1% is the 35 year old cardiologist who is finally making over $300,000 a year after 11 years of post high school education and 3 years of residency work at $60,000 a year.  By the time he’s 45, he will probably make over $1 million dollars.

Where else can we find the top 1%?  Oh yeah, MBA grads who join Wall Street firms such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs at the standard $150,000 base salary and $30,000 sign-on bonus at age 29-30.  But, you knew this already since that’s who so many people are demonstrating against.  If they can last through the treacherous ups and downs of the markets, the multiple rounds of layoffs every year, the intense pressure of 60-80 hour work weeks, not to mention all the internal political landmines, they too will make over $380,000 a year by the time they are 35 year old second year Vice Presidents.

THE TOP 1%: COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE

Public Schools: Public colleges regularly pay their employees hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.  The best paid University of California employee is Jeff Tedford, with a salary of $3 million a year coaching football.  Not bad for a job many would say they’d love to do for much less.  Practically every single Top 25 head coach in football and basketball makes multiple-six figures.  The UC’s last President earned $900,000 and UCSF’s Chancellor, Susan Desmond-Hellman made $450,000.

Politicians: In September 1999, President Clinton signed legislation that increased the presidential salary to $400,000, effective January 2001.  This presidential pay raise was the first since 1969, when the president’s salary was raised from $100,000 to $200,000. Adjusted for inflation, $200,000 in 1969 would be worth $930,232 today. On top of the salary and expense accounts, both the U.S. president and vice president are given free housing with plenty of amenities. The White House has 132 rooms, 32 bathrooms, a movie theater, bowling alley, billiards room, tennis court, jogging track and putting greens.  Pretty good perks!

Online Infopreneurs:  Bloggers making over $380,000 a year are a dime a dozen.  Here are some that make the list: Heather Armstrong (Dooce), Darren Rowe (Pro Blogger), Michael Arrington (Tech Crunch), Pete Cashmore (Mashable), John Chow (John Chow), J. Shoemoney (Shoemoney), Perez Hilton (Perez Hilton), Ben Huh (Cheezeburger Network), Peter Rojas (Gizmodo), Leo Babauta (Zen Habits), and many top personal finance bloggers.  There are hundreds more that we’ve never heard of.

TV Journalism: Anchorwomen and men make well over $380,000 at all the major stations in all the major cities.  Katie Couric sealed an eye-popping $75 million, 5 year contract for CBS.  Political comedian, Jon Stewart from the Daily Show makes around $15 million a year and has a net worth north of US$50 million.  Jon makes his money making fun of politicians and rich people. Documentary-maker, Michael Moore, has made millions from railing against the car, food, and finance industries.  Oprah is the queen of them all with mega-billions.

Executives: We then come to all the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies who on average make a somewhat outrageous $10 million a year.  If you include the CFOs, COOs, and all other C-level execs, we’re talking about thousands who make in the multi-millions.  These aren’t the top 1%.  These are the top 0.1%!  Many Directors and VP of Fortune 500 companies all make well over $380,000.  You don’t have to be a C-level executive to get there.

Internet Start-Ups: And then there are the founders of all the great internet/tech companies you see today: Apple, Zynga, Twitter, Google, Youtube, eBay and so forth.  They are the creators of the tools you use everyday to communicate and entertain yourself with.  There are thousands more you’ve never heard of, who get acquired by the gorillas and make millions too.

Professional Sports: Every starting NFL player makes well over $380,000.  So do all the members of every NBA team and European soccer league.  Men and women who hit fuzzy green balls and whack dimply white balls earn over $380,000.  It’s hard for a Nascar and Indy driver not to make over $380,000.  Finally, baseball players have incredible multi-year guaranteed contracts that make all other sports envious!  They are in the top 1%.

Entertainment Media: When you come home from a long days work and switch on the tube, the stars of your favorite TV sitcoms are well into the top 1%.  When you take your significant other to the movies on a Saturday night to watch the highly anticipated Big Momma’s House III, the actors are all in the top 1%.  They entertain you and make you laugh, and you go out and support them as a result.

THE TOP 1% ARE EVERYWHERE

The top 1% of income earners are everywhere.  They walk among us peacefully, and often times invisible to you and me.  Why are we trying to hunt them down?  They have worked hard to get to where they are and many of them employ thousands of the rest of us 99%.  Many of them entertain us with their movies, or their witty morning banter.  Some of us even fix our broken bones.  Even more donate a significant amount to charity.  Shouldn’t we say “thank you” to the top 1% instead of eviscerating them?

(read more)

NEWER VIDEOS

 

Democrat and Hollywood Hypocrisy – Harvey Weinstein

Published by Papa Giorgio

Larry Elder takes us on a Democrat infested mine-field courtesy of Harvey Weinstein. For more on the mentioned “Nuts or Sluts defense,” see Larry’s detailed explanation HERE. And more anti-woman positions by Hillary, see HERE.

Gay Patriot grabs this excerpt to point to how good of a progressive Weinstein was….

In 2015, [Weinstein’s] company distributed “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about campus sexual assault. A longtime Democratic donor, he hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in his Manhattan home last year. He employed Malia Obama, the oldest daughter of former President Barack Obama, as an intern this year, and recently helped endow a faculty chair at Rutgers University in Gloria Steinem’s name. During the Sundance Film Festival in January, when Park City, Utah, held its version of nationwide women’s marches, Mr. Weinstein joined the parade.

ALSO…

Election of Bush Irks My Son’s Art Teacher

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is imported from my old blog [11-13-2006]

for inclusion in my .com’s posting (posted here February 2011)

(added some updates at the bottom)

INTRODUCTION

This paper is in response to a conversation about voting in my son’s VISUAL ARTS CLASS that climaxed with the teacher saying “that the only reason that President Bush won the 2000 election in Florida was that he had a brother as governor and that some votes were not counted.” (I am assuming that because the teacher mentioned the two together – that is, disenfranchisement and Governor Jeb Bush – that she believes in a conspiracy through all levels of the Florida government and Supreme Court to make sure that then Governor George W. Bush would win the election. This is the clear implication of what was said in the classroom.) The Military vote, point-in-fact, is the only provable vote that was withheld.

I wish to say here that any teacher has the right to own her or his opinion. We all have that right, you, me, anyone. However, one cannot own his or her own facts. And this is where the teacher may have crossed the line when she said (mind you I am going off what my son told me, as I was not there in the classroom at the time), “the only reason Bush won…”, you see, this goes beyond opinion within the realm of impressionable seventh-graders. Unchallenged in this environment, teachers in many classrooms in this valley and elsewhere get away with bringing a point of view that is unfounded by the facts of a reasonable investigation of “what did happen” in Florida. It isn’t nearly as infamous as the teacher put it.

I will use a partial excerpt from a paper I wrote to my son’s sixth-grade computer teacher (who was really a parent volunteer). Obviously this incomplete outlook on the election is widespread enough for me to respond to it almost every year since. I will explain some of the reasoning behind this apparent acceptance of something so easily explained away once the panorama of facts about the Florida recount are brought together rather than isolated, such as in Fahrenheit 911.

RECOUNT ~ THE SKINNY

Eight counties were recounting ballots in Florida. All eight counties were using different standards to determine which ballots were to be allocated to Gore and which were to be allocated to Bush. First and foremost, all eight counties were Democratic counties, they had Democrats who were in charge of that counties election, and democrats devised the ballots themselves years before. Republicans were in the minority in these districts. This is rarely addressed. This aside, what would have been the outcome if the counts were allowed to continue? I want to answer this with an example (used in a prior letter to a teacher) from a poli-sci class I took at C.O.C.:

… last week I went to visit the professor at C.O.C. to give him a paper I wrote for his amusement, when I walked in the classroom the students were discussing the fact that President Bush went before the 911 Commission with Dick Cheney, one girl asked if Cheney had to hold Bush’s hand – sarcastically of course. Another student mentioned that Bush was not under oath or in a public setting for his hearing. I asked to interject; the professor gave me the green light, so I mentioned that President Clinton was not under oath, nor was his hearing public, and that he took along Bruce Lindsey and Sandy Burger. I then turned to the girl and asked if Bruce had one hand while Sandy had the other – sarcastically of course. Laughs abounded again.

Another student blurted out that Bush stole the election in the Florida debacle – so called. I responded simply to him that the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and four Florida newspapers: the Orlando Sentinel, the Palm Beach Post, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times all recounted the votes multiple times, and each time Bush came out the winner. (In fact, they recounted the votes for the entire state eight-times and Bush won all eight-times. They did it eight-times so they could try each of the different counting “techniques” that each of the eight counties were using in their recounting efforts due to Gore bringing the matter into our courts.)[1] This is not including the military vote that Gore successfully withheld a part of, which would have even widened Bush’s lead considerably. This student had never heard a good response to this objection that he had been blurting out for four years to conservative classmates, friends and family…

This answers one aspect of the problem in regards to what would have happened. However, I want to explain why Florida was so “close.” I have a documentary that shows the actual graphics displayed by ABC, NBC, etc, during the original counting of the Florida ballots, what did their numbers show? At no time during the entire period of ballot counting in Florida was Bush ever behind in actual hard votes cast! One vote tally showed a 100,000-vote lead, another showed 150,000 lead prior to its drop.

TIME ZONES

The real problem lies in Florida being in two time zones. So when the polls closed in the eastern side of the state, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and the like (except FOXNews), all said the polls had closed in Florida. Then CBS called Florida for Gore even though the hard tally count said otherwise, the other media moguls followed. The voters in the western part of Florida turned away from the polls in droves.

These voters who were told that Florida had already been called for Gore, and that the polls were closed, lived in a part of the state that is predominately Republican. Three groups did separate investigations into what type of voters decided not to go to the polls. All three came to the separate conclusion that anywhere between 5,000 to 10,000 Republican votes over the “disparaged” total [which included voters from both parties] were lost to this miscall by the media. So, if one were to add the military vote kept out by Gore and the lost votes from the western part of Florida, the gap in Bush’s lead would have been beyond the state recount minimum.

In fact, no news organization put Florida back into Bush’s column until after the polls closed across the country. The media outlets up to this point all mentioned that without Florida, Bush would lose the election, even FOX. The amount of Republicans deciding it useless to go to the polls in other time zones has not been calculated. I believe, though, it would mirror the three separate organizations that tallied western Florida’s disparaged voters, but on a grander scale. In fact, I believe that the popular vote would also be in Bush’s hands in 2000 if the media had not so egregiously miscalled the state of Florida. (Keep in mind this is my “opinion” based on the voters reactions, both Democratic and Republican, tallied by scientific means from three organizations investigations in western Florida. You see, this is opinion based on logic and science, not un-founded paranoia and suppositions alluded to by my son’s teacher.)

Again, though, even with all the above put aside, Bush won all the recounts, and the New York Times simply states that if the recount was allowed to continue by the U. S. Supreme Court that Bush would have been the clear winner.

WHY THE BAD CALL?

Part of the miscall in the 2000 election can be tied directly to the early miscall in the 2004 election, in way of example. “Exit Polling” is the main culprit in this aspect of the problem. MSNBC and FOXNews had computer models of who was winning this time around that included the Exit Polling information. This skewed the election as going strongly to John Kerry. In fact, Kerry was gearing his thinking to a win. However, when MSNBC, FOXNews, ABC, CBS, and the like, dropped the Exit Polling info from their computer models half-way through the day, Bush surged about 5-percentage points.

These statistics were even worse during the 2000 election, allowing for the early and thus incorrect call for Florida. Let me state once again unequivocally, in the hard tallying of actual votes minus Exit Polling data, both in the 2004 election as a whole, and specifically in the 2000 debacle, Bush was never behind in the count.

5 TO 4, OR 7 TO 9

Some are under the impression that the U.S. Supreme Court was split on the final decision along party divisions that had the five “conservative” Judges voting along demagogic lines for Bush, and the four “liberal” Judges for Gore. This is in fact untrue. On the heart of the case (that is, equal protection for the voter as well as for Bush and Gore) the U.S. Supreme Court was almost unanimous. A seven/two split! The most liberal Supreme Court Judge agreeing that the eight differing standards in what is and is not acceptable for a Gore/Bush ballot allocation shouldn’t be allowed to continue.

These seven Judges took into consideration the Constitutional aspects of the problem, as well as the Florida Constitution’s limitations to time in regards to a recount. All seven agreed that there was insufficient time to bring a fair and homologous procedure to all these eight (and possibly more) counties.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

So why all the “hub bub, bub?” Partisan politics, period! I can speak from experience, using in fact, an example from my own past. When Clinton became president, there were documentaries released by the “right” that had all kinds of conspiracy theories as to all the “misdealings” within the history of the Clintons political road to the Whitehouse. The most popular of them being The Clinton Chronicles. This montage of clippings, newspaper headlines, testimonies, and video shown in this documentary is quite convincing at first glance. And I was convinced. However, as I am one to poke and prod (which is why my home library has ballooned to over 3,000 books and hundreds of video/DVD documentaries), the conspiracies revolving around the Clintons have been shown quite baseless. What are, if any, the equivalent to the Clinton based documentaries? Michael Moore!

FAHRENHEIT 911

While space here is limited to the subject at hand, that is, the Florida recount, I am open to discussion about any “fact” thought to be authoritative that was presented in any of Moore’s documentaries.[2]

Near the beginning of Fahrenheit 911 we are shown a newspaper headline that states Gore won one of the recounts in Florida. Yes, an actual photo of a newspaper headline, or so we are led to believe. What isn’t shown is the original article. In fact, this wasn’t an article at all!

What it was, was a letter to the editor from a reader of a newspaper who wrote in responding to the recounts all going Bush’s way. This person was a private citizen whose letter was placed in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the opinion part of the newspaper. What Moore did was take this column-and-a-half letter to the editor, expand and enlarge the headline to stretch across the entire top of the “page,” even going so far as changing the font, and then spreading out and enlarging the letter portion to more columns, thus making it look like a newspaper headline. In other words, Michael Moore used deception to tweak information to legitimize his view that Gore won the election. Which ALL investigations have shown to be false.

And I do mean all. For instance, all the examples of people being stopped from voting by force in Florida have proven vacuous. One example:

POLICE ROADBLOCKS

One story still mentioned by partisans today, and mentioned by Moore is that of a roadblock by police officers stopping black voters from making it to the polls. When a civil rights group went down to Florida and held hearings on this (and other) matter[s], they found that there was a robbery nearby, and the police were setting up a perimeter to catch the suspect.

In fact, the possible[3] irony of all this is that most likely, taking into consideration the racial population in the area where this crime was committed, and that a disproportionate number of crimes committed by said racial group that populates this area of Florida all point to the disenfranchisement of these minority voters by a fellow minority resident. Irony at its best… if proven true that is.

TO CONCLUDE

So the point of this long, drawn-out response to a statement made as a fact in my son’s seventh-grade Visual Arts class, is this:

When statements like these are made as de-facto-truth – de-facto because when the teacher is in a position of authority over these malleable young minds and are given the benefit of the doubt by the students thinking that these adults have researched what they state as fact within the realm of the classroom in a fashion deserving that of an adult mind – when in fact they are easily dismissed as “other-than,” then we as parents must not allow such misstatements to be made without challenge.

The matter of who won the Florida recount has been put to rest, almost four years ago. Partisan politics keeps it alive however. And to engender students to look upon their President, no matter what political affiliation that President finds himself or herself to be aligned with, with suspicion is a serious matter. This is not the place for a teacher to steer their students towards unfounded opinions based on unsupported suspicions that would cause or call into question the respect due a President in the classroom setting.

While a parent has the right to engender whatever they wish with their own children, the teacher must be diligent to keep such misgivings about such matters to themselves and their own children, teachers lounge, or wherever such opinions are relevant or warranted. I am not angered by such an opinion stated within the classroom, in fact, I have come to expect it. I only wish that the teacher[s] understand that when they speak on such matters, that they do so in a manner that engenders our sons and daughters understanding of government, rather than the political opinions of said teacher[s].

I hope to hear back from the school on this matter. I also invite those teachers on the Heart Team who enjoy political discussion as much as I do to feel free to open up lines of communication with me. I don’t bite. Sometimes within the limited time people have and the demographic they find themselves in, their opinions are passed unchallenged or without taking into consideration another point of view. I understand this.

“Thank You! ~ Much Thought, Sean G”

Thank you for you patience in reading this parent’s rebuttal and concern about something said in the classroom. I hope this letter will engender positive discussion among the teachers on my son’s team, and a greater understanding of an excitable topic.

Footnotes

[1] In fact, there is no newspaper headline in the entire United States that showed Gore ahead in any of the recounts. I will deal with the only headline produced that showed gore ahead, it can be found in Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 911.

[2] My e-mail address is at the top of the page. I will discuss these matters as I have here: in a calm, logical manner that takes the sociological extremisms (e.g., The Clinton Chronicles on one side versus Fahrenheit 911 on the other) from both sides into consideration. For instance: in a recent poll, 29% of Democrats polled believe Bush stole the 2004 election. No evidence of foul play, just paranoia that any sociologist could do a doctoral thesis on.

[3] I am only guessing here and do not know all the parameters of the case – more of a thought experiment.

UPDATES

This first addendum comes from NEWSBUSTERS: (May 2008)

….The lead of an April 4, 2001 USA Today story headlined, “Newspapers’ recount shows Bush prevailed,” by reporter Dennis Cauchon:

George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida’s disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used, the first full study of the ballots reveals. Bush would have won by 1,665 votes — more than triple his official 537-vote margin — if every dimple, hanging chad and mark on the ballots had been counted as votes, a USA TODAY/Miami Herald/Knight Ridder study shows. The study is the first comprehensive review of the 61,195 “undervote” ballots that were at the center of Florida’s disputed presidential election….

That look was followed in November by an analysis by a consortium of media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN and AP. It determined that George W. Bush still would have won under either legally possible recount scenario which could have occurred: The Florida Supreme Court ordered recount of undervotes statewide or Gore’s request for a recount in certain counties. The New York Times led its November 12, 2001 front page article, “Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” by reporters Ford Fessenden and John M. Broder:

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.

Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court’s order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.

Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations….

This from PBS NEWS HOUR (April 2001):

In the first full study of Florida’s ballots since the election ended, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled “undervotes” — ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through — to be counted.

The study, conducted by the accounting firm of BDO Seidman, counted over 60,000 votes in Florida’s 67 counties, tabulating separate vote totals in several standards categories.

While the USA Today report focused on what would have happened had the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount not been halted by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Herald pointed to one scenario under which Gore could have scored a narrow victory — a fresh recount in all counties using the most generous standards.

In their reports, the newspapers assumed counts already completed when the court-ordered recount was stopped would have been included in any official count. Thus, they allowed numbers from seven counties — Palm Beach, Volusia, Broward, Hamilton, Manatee, Escambia and Madison — to stand, but applied the most inclusive standards to votes in the rest of the state. If those numbers did not stand, the Herald reported, a more generous hypothetical revisited recount would have scored the White House for Gore — but with only a 393-vote margin.

Under most other scenarios, the papers reported, Bush would have retained his lead…..

HEH, here is a VERY recent update via PJ-MEDIA (August 2017):

Al Gore told Bill Maher on his HBO “Real Time” show that he thinks he carried Florida in the 2000 election.

Gore also believes that rising temperatures will doom mankind to extinction unless we revert economically to the Middle Ages. Which ignorant belief is dumber?

[…..]

Anyone not named Al Gore (or apparently, Bill Maher) knows that two independent studies by media organizations proved that Bush won the 2000 race in Florida and hence, the election.

The most comprehensive review was done by a consortium of media companies, including:

  • The [New York]Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and CNN. The group hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in January to examine the ballots.

The consortium examined the 43,000 ballots that remained to be counted when the Supreme Court stopped the process. They determined:

Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court’s order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.

Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.

Another media group headed up by USA Today and the Miami Herald also conducted an extensive study and came to the same conclusion:

A USA Today/Miami Herald/Knight Ridder study after the election concluded in May 2001 that Bush would have won a hand count of Florida’s disputed ballots, called “hanging chads,” if a standard advocated by Gore had been used.

“Bush would have won by 1,665 votes — more than triple his official 537-vote margin — if every dimple, hanging chad and mark on the ballots had been counted as votes,” the study concluded.

But liberals hate it if they’re not being seen as suffering under the yoke of oppression. The election was stolen! Gore should have been president!

We’re seeing the exact same effort to delegitimize Trump. Hillary didn’t lose the election. Trump colluded with the Russians and stole it! Outrage! Call for a special counsel. Start the impeachment!

Democrats never change…..

Dispelling the “CIA Trained-Funded Bin Laden/Taliban” Myth/Mantra

Published by Papa Giorgio

Politicians and leaders from both sides of the aisle make mention of this myth that we funded/created Al Qaeda via weapons, training, and money to the likes of Osama Bin Laden. The Daily Caller in 2013 notes some of the positions:

…in just a one-month span, Sen. Paul has — not once, but twice — advanced a conspiracy theory that says that during the Reagan era, the U.S. funded Osama bin Laden.

During John Kerry’s secretary of state confirmation hearing, Paul said ”We funded bin Laden” — a statement that prompted Foreign Policy magazine’s managing editor, Blake Hounshell, to fire off a tweet saying: “Rand Paul tells a complete falsehood: ‘We funded Bin Laden.’ This man is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

But that didn’t discourage Paul. During a much anticipated foreign policy speech at the Heritage Foundation today, Paul doubled down, saying: “In the 1980’s the war caucus in Congress armed bin Laden and the mujaheddin in their fight with the Soviet Union.”

The only problem is that this is, at best, highly speculative — and, at worst, the perpetuation of an outright myth.

This also puts Paul in the same camp as Michael Moore, who said: ““WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!”….

…read it all…

And, this is the crux of the matter: truthers took Michael Moore’s non-evidential presentations and statements and ran with them.

Another example that shows this myth isn’t necessarily one owned by strictly by politicians, as, this conversation on a friends FaceBook shows:

Antony: failed foreign policy means today’s buddies are tomorrows boogiemen.

Hunlsy: I just love the fact they’re fighting us with the weapons and training that we gave them.

Antony: Oh where oh where did Iran get those P3s and F-14 Tomcats?

Antony: it was the US – we used to be buddies with Iranians too. We played both sides of the Iran/Iraq war, which predicated Gulf I.

Hunsly: Likely from the Russians. Regardless, we’re fighting a group, not a country. This group makes all of its IEDs & buys all of their weapons with the money that we gave them.

Here is my short intercept of the above conversation. More info will follow it:

Weapons
This is somewhat of a myth — that we sold the majority of weapons to the Taliban, to Iraq, and the like. For instance, in the following graph you can see that (in the instance of Iraq, which I was told over-and-over-again was weaponized by the U.S.) you have to combine the U.K. and the U.S. to equal 1%.

Iraqi Weapons

Moral Position
Much like us supporting Stalin in defeating Hitler, we were aligned with people whom we didn’t see eye-to-eye with in order to beat the USSR during the Cold War (WWIII)… a war that was fought from 1947–1991.

History
And thirdly, the Taliban didn’t exist when Reagan said this:

Reagan didn’t say that about the Taliban because the Taliban didn’t exist yet. He said that of the Mujahedin, the same men who would later go on to fight the Taliban under the name “Northern Alliance”

The Afghan Northern Alliance, officially known as the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (Persian: ‏جبهه متحد اسلامی ملی برای نجات افغانستان‎ Jabha-yi Muttahid-i Islāmi-yi Millī barā-yi Nijāt-i Afghānistān), was a military front that came to formation in late 1996 after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) took over Kabul. The United Front was assembled by key leaders of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, particularly president in exile Burhanuddin Rabbani and former Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Initially it included mostly Tajiks but by 2000, leaders of other ethnic groups had joined the Northern Alliance. This included Abdul Rashid Dostum, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Abdul Qadir, Sayed Hussein Anwari and others.

The Northern Alliance fought a defensive war against the Taliban government. They received support from Iran, Russia, India, Tajikistan and others, while the Taliban were backed by al-Qaeda. The Northern Alliance was mostly made up of ethnic Tajiks, but later included Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Pashtuns. The Taliban government was dominated by Pashtuns with other groups being the minority. After the US-led invasion and establishment of the Karzai administration in late 2001, the Northern Alliance broke apart and different political parties were formed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Alliance

The mujaheddin fighters who had previously defeated the communist government and formed the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA) came under attack and in 1996 lost the capital to the Taliban. At this juncture the Mujahedin resorted to the creation of UIF because Rashid Dostum and other warlords who belonged to various tribes but to no specific political party did not want to recognize the ISA as a legal entity, so the defeated government devised a military strategy to utilize these forces while not offending their political sensibilities.

In October 1996 in Khinjan, Ahmed Shah Massoud and Dostum came to an agreement to form the anti-Taliban coalition that outside Afghanistan became known as the Northern Alliance.

CNN was doing a special on Afghanistan and Peter Bergen asked for questions from viewers that he would answer. One of the questions is as follows:

  • “If it’s true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn’t still?” ~ Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada

Peter Bergen responds:

This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.

The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There’s no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn’t have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn’t have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.

The real story here is the CIA didn’t really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.

One person in a forum that was similarly challenged pointed out that this surely wasn’t the Taliban because they hated women in any position of authority — look at the pic at the top again.

As you read on, keep in mind Mr. Bergen was not a fan of conservatives, or Republicans. With that in mind, enjoy the rest, it is posted here so it will never disappear on me:

U.S. government officials and a number of other parties maintain that the U.S. supported only the indigenous Afghan mujahideen. They deny that the CIA or other American officials had contact with the Afghan Arabs (foreign mujahideen) or Bin Laden, let alone armed, trained, coached or indoctrinated them. Scholars and reporters have called the idea of CIA-backed Afghan Arabs (foreign mujahideen) “nonsense”,[6] “sheer fantasy”, and “simply a folk myth.”

They argue that:

  • with a quarter of a million local Afghans willing to fight there was no need to recruit foreigners unfamiliar with the local language, customs or lay of the land
  • with several hundred million dollars a year in funding from non-American, Muslim sources, Arab Afghans themselves would have no need for American funds
  • Americans could not train mujahideen because Pakistani officials would not allow more than a handful of U.S. agents to operate in Pakistan and none in Afghanistan;
  • the Afghan Arabs were militant Islamists, reflexively hostile to Westerners, and prone to threaten or attack Westerners even though they knew the Westerners were helping the mujahideen.

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri says much the same thing in his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner.

Bin Laden himself once said “the collapse of the Soviet Union … goes to God and the mujahideen in Afghanistan … the US had no mentionable role,” but “collapse made the US more haughty and arrogant.”

According to CNN journalist Peter Bergen, known for conducting the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997,

The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There’s no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn’t have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn’t have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. The real story here is the CIA did not understand who Osama was until 1996, when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.

Bergen quotes Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Afghan operation between 1983 and 1987:

It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers’ money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan’s policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan.

Marc Sageman, a Foreign Service Officer who was based in Islamabad from 1987–1989, and worked closely with Afghanistan’s Mujahideen, argues that no American money went to the foreign volunteers.

Sageman also says:

Contemporaneous accounts of the war do not even mention [the Afghan Arabs]. Many were not serious about the war. … Very few were involved in actual fighting. For most of the war, they were scattered among the Afghan groups associated with the four Afghan fundamentalist parties.

No U.S. official ever came in contact with the foreign volunteers. They simply traveled in different circles and never crossed U.S. radar screens. They had their own sources of money and their own contacts with the Pakistanis, official Saudis, and other Muslim supporters, and they made their own deals with the various Afghan resistance leaders.”[14]

Vincent Cannistraro, who led the Reagan administration’s Afghan Working Group from 1985 to 1987, puts it,

The CIA was very reluctant to be involved at all. They thought it would end up with them being blamed, like in Guatemala.” So the Agency tried to avoid direct involvement in the war, … the skittish CIA, Cannistraro estimates, had less than ten operatives acting as America’s eyes and ears in the region. Milton Bearden, the Agency’s chief field operative in the war effort, has insisted that “[T]he CIA had nothing to do with” bin Laden. Cannistraro says that when he coordinated Afghan policy from Washington, he never once heard bin Laden’s name.

Fox News reporter Richard Miniter wrote that in interviews with the two men who “oversaw the disbursement for all American funds to the anti-Soviet resistance, Bill Peikney – CIA station chief in Islamabad from 1984 to 1986 – and Milt Bearden – CIA station chief from 1986 to 1989 – he found,

Both flatly denied that any CIA funds ever went to bin Laden. They felt so strongly about this point that they agreed to go on the record, an unusual move by normally reticent intelligence officers. Mr. Peikney added in an e-mail to me: “I don’t even recall UBL [bin Laden] coming across my screen when I was there.

Other reasons advanced for a lack of a CIA-Afghan Arab connection of “pivotal importance,” (or even any connection at all), was that the Afghan Arabs themselves were not important in the war but were a “curious sideshow to the real fighting.”

One estimate of the number of combatants in the war is that 250,000 Afghans fought 125,000 Soviet troops, but only 2000 Arab Afghans fought “at any one time”.

According to Milton Bearden the CIA did not recruit Arabs because there were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight. The Arab Afghans were not only superfluous but “disruptive,” angering local Afghans with their more-Muslim-than-thou attitude, according to Peter Jouvenal. Veteran Afghan cameraman Peter Jouvenal quotes an Afghan mujahideen as saying “whenever we had a problem with one of them [foreign mujahideen], we just shot them. They thought they were kings.”

Many who traveled in Afghanistan, including Olivier Roy[20] and Peter Jouvenal, reported of the Arab Afghans’ visceral hostility to Westerners in Afghanistan to aid Afghans or report on their plight. BBC reporter John Simpson tells the story of running into Osama bin Laden in 1989, and with neither knowing who the other was, bin Laden attempting to bribe Simpson’s Afghan driver $500 — a large sum in a poor country — to kill the infidel Simpson. When the driver declined, Bin Laden retired to his “camp bed” and wept “in frustration.”

According to Steve Coll, author of “Ghost Wars”, the primary contact for the CIA and ISI in Afghanistan was Ahmed Shah Massoud a poppy farmer and militia leader known as the “Lion of the Panjeer”. During the Afghan Civil War which erupted once the Soviets had left, Massoud’s army was routed by the Taliban (who were being helped by Pakistan’s ISI) and restricted to the northern region of the country. A loose entente was formed with several other native tribal militias which became known as the Northern Alliance who operated in opposition to the Taliban. On September 10, 2001 a camera crew was granted access to Massoud under the premise they were interviewing him for a documentary about the Mujahadeen. The crew members were actually Al Qaeda operatives who detonated a bomb killing themselves and Massoud. The purpose of the assassination was to eliminate a key ally for the US in anticipation of an invasion in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks which were to take place the following day.

(Northern Alliance ~ WIKI)

And here is another great post responding to the non-evidential/conspiratorial [leftists] on the subject:

“Osama bin Laden was trained and funded by the CIA” – you’ll read the claim everywhere, and it’s rarely opposed: everyone just seems to accept that it’s true. But why? How much evidence have you ever seen presented to support this?

The reality is that there are many people who say this is simply a myth. And we’re not just talking about neo-con friendly journalists, either.

Take Jason Burke, for instance, a major contributor to the BBC documentary “The Power of Nightmares”. In his book “Al Qaeda”, he wrote the following:

It is often said that bin Ladin was funded by the CIA. This is not true, and indeed it would have been impossible given the structure of funding that General Zia ul-Haq, who had taken power in Pakistan in 1977, had set up. A condition of Zia’s cooperation with the American plan to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet’s ‘Vietnam’ was that all American funding to the Afghan resistance had to be channeled through the Pakistani government, which effectively meant the Afghan bureau of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the military spy agency. The American funding, which went exclusively to the Afghan mujahideen groups, not the Arab volunteers [bin Ladin’s groups], was supplemented by Saudi government money and huge funds raised from mosques, non-governmental charitable institutions and private donors throughout the Islamic world. Most of the major Gulf-based charities operating today were founded at this time to raise money or channel government funds to the Afghans, civilians and fighters. In fact, as little as 25 per cent of the monet for the Afghan jihad was actually supplied directly by states.

Page 59, Al Qaeda: The true story of radical Islam, Jason Burke

Steve Coll, former Managing Editor of the Washington Post, also suggests bin Ladin passed largely unnoticed by the CIA, in his book “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001”:

…According to [Ahemd] Badeeb, on bin Ladin’s first trip to Pakistan he brought donations to the Lahore offices of Jamaat-e-Islami, Zia’s political shock force. Jamaat was the Pakistani offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood; its students had sacked the US embassy in Islamabad in 1979. bin Ladin did not trust the official Pakistan intelligence service, Badeeb recalled, and preferred to fund his initial charity through private religious and political networks.From the beginning of the Afghan jihad, Saudi intelligence used religious charities to support its own unilateral operations. This mainly involved funneling money and equipment to favoured Afghan commanders outisde ISI or CIA control… “The humanitarian aid-that was completely separate from the Americans”, Badeeb recalled. “And we insist[ed] that the Americans will not get to that, get involved–especially in the beginning,” in part because some of the Islamist mujahedin objected to direct contact with Western infidels…

In spy lexicon, each of the major intelligence agencies began working the Afghan jihad–GID [General Intelligence Department, Saudi Arabia], ISI and the CIA– began to “compartment” their work, even as all three collaborated with one another through formal liasons…

bin Ladin moved within Saudi intelligence’s compartmented operations, outside of CIA eyesight…

Page 86/ 87, Ghost Wars, Stevel Coll

In a Q&A session following the release of his book, Coll said:

Wheaton, Md.: There have been accusations from the left that have directly accused the CIA of funding and training bin Laden. Is there any truth to this ? Steve Coll: I did not discover any evidence of direct contact between CIA officers and bin Laden during the 1980s, when they were working more or less in common cause against the Soviets. CIA officials, including Tenet, have denied under oath that such contact took place. The CIA was certainly aware of bin Laden’s activities, beginning in the mid- to late-1980s, and they generally looked favorably on what he was doing at that time. But bin Laden’s direct contacts were with Saudi intelligence and to some extent Pakistani intelligence, not with the Americans.

Missouri EDU

Peter Bergen expanded on the supposed CIA/ bin Ladin links in his book, Holy War Inc:

But were the CIA and the Afghan Arabs in cahoots, as recent studies have suggested? One author charges: “The CIA had funded and trained the Afghan Arabs during the war”. Another refers to “the central role of the CIA’s Muslim mercenaries, including upwards of 2,000 mercenaries in the Afghanistan war”. Both authors present these claims as axioms, but provide no real corroboration.Other commentators have reported that bin Ladin himself was aided by the CIA. A report in the respected British newspaper The Guardian states: “In 1986 the CIA even helped him [bin Ladin] build an underground camp at Khost [Afghanistan] where he was to train recruits from across the Islamic world in the revolutionary art of jihad”…Bin Ladin, meanwhile, had expoused anti-American positions since 1982, and thanks to the fortune derived from his family’s giant construction business had little need of CIA money. In fact, the underground camp at Khost was built in 1982 by an Afghan commander, with Arab funding.

A source familiar with bin Ladin’s organisation explains that bin Ladin “never had any relations with America or American officials… He was saying very early in the 1980’s that the next battle is going to be with America… No aid or training or other support have ever been given to bin Ladin from Americans.” A senior offical unequivocally says that “bin Ladin never met with the CIA.”

While the charges that the CIA was responsible for the rise of the Afghan Arabs might make good copy, they don’t make good history. The truth is more complicated, tinged with varying shades of grey. The United States wanted to be able to deny that the CIA was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). ISI in turn made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to fund the most Islamist and pro-Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charge arose that they were creatures of the CIA.

Former CIA officer Milt Bearden, who ran the Agency’s Afghan operation in the late 1980’s, says: “The CIA did not recruit Arabs,” as there was no need to do so. There were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight…

Moreover, the Afghan Arabs demonstrated a pathological dislike of Westerners. Jouvenal says: “I always kept away from Arabs [in Afghanistan]. They were very hostile. They would ask, ‘What are you doing in an Islamic country?” The BBC reporter John Simpson had a close call with bin Ladin himself outside Jalalabad in 1989. Travelling with a group of Arab mujahideen, Simpson and his television crew bumped into an Arab man beautifully dressed in spotless white robes; the man began shouting at Simpson’s escorts to kill the infidels, then offered a truck driver the not unreasonable sum of five hundred dollars to do the job. Simpson’s Afghan escort turned down the request, and bin Ladin was to be found later on a camp bed, weeping in frustration. Only when bin Ladin became a public figure, almost a decade later, did Simpson realise who the mysterious Arab was who had wanted him dead.

Page 67/68, Holy War Inc, Peter Bergen

This level of hostility to Westerners doesn’t suggest a warm working relationship with the US, and there’s some confirmation in a story retold by Richard Miniter:

…the handful of Americans who had heard of bin Ladin in the 1980’s knew him mainly for his violently anti-American views. Dana Rohrabacher, now a Republican congressman from Orange County, California, told me about a trip he took with the mujihideen in 1987. At the time, Rohrabacher was a Reagan aide who delighted in taking long overland trips inside Afghanistan with anti-Communist forces. On one such trek, his guide told him not to speak English for the next few hours because they were passing by bin Ladin’s encampment. Rohrabacher was told, “If he hears an American, he will kill you.” 

Page 16, Disinformation, Richard Miniter

Bin Ladin was himself asked about US funding by Robert Fisk:

Fisk: …what of the Arab mujahedin he took to Afghanistan – members of a guerilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the United States – and who were forgotten when that war was over? bin Ladin: “Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help…

Fisk interview, 1996

And Ayman al-Zawahiri, second-in-command of al Qaeda, explains more in his text “Knights under the Prophet’s Banner”. Here he claims the “Afghan Arabs” had plenty of funding from various Arab sources, and points to other indications that they never supported the US:

“While the United States backed Pakistan and the mujahidin factions with money and equipment, the young Arab mujahidin’s relationship with the United States was totally different.”Indeed the presence of those young Arab Afghans in Afghanistan and their increasing numbers represented a failure of US policy and new proof of the famous US political stupidity. The financing of the activities of the Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan came from aid sent to Afghanistan by popular organizations. It was substantial aid. “The Arab mujahidin did not confine themselves to financing their own jihad but also carried Muslim donations to the Afghan mujahidin themselves. Usama Bin Ladin has apprised me of the size of the popular Arab support for the Afghan mujahidin that amounted, according to his sources, to $200 million in the form of military aid alone in 10 years.

Imagine how much aid was sent by popular Arab organizations in the non-military fields such as medicine and health, education and vocational training, food, and social assistance (including sponsorship of orphans, widows, and the war handicapped. Add to all this the donations that were sent on special occasions such as Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha feasts and during the month of Ramadan.”

“Through this unofficial popular support, the Arab mujahidin established training centers and centers for the call to the faith. They formed fronts that trained and equipped thousands of Arab mujahidin and provided them with living expenses, housing, travel, and organization.”

Changing Bin Ladin’s Guard

About the Afghan Arabs’ relationship with the United States, Al-Zawahiri says in his book: “If the Arab mujahidin are mercenaries of the United States who rebelled against it as it alleges, why is it unable to buy them back now? Are they not counted now-with Usama Bin Ladin at their head-as the primary threat to US interests? Is not buying them more economical and less costly that the astronomical budgets that the United States is allotting for security and defense?”

“The Americans, in their usual custom of exaggeration and superficiality, are trying to sell off illusions to the people and are ignoring the most basic facts. Is it possible that Usama Bin Ladin who, in his lectures in the year 1987, called for boycotting US goods as a form of support for the intifadah in Palestine, a US agent in Afghanistan?….

“Furthermore, is it possible that the martyr-as we regard him-Abdallah Azzam was a US collaborator when in fact he never stopped inciting young men against the United States and used to back HAMAS with all the resources at his disposal?

“Is it possible that the jihadist movement in Egypt can be a collaborator movement for the United States when Khalid al-Islambuli and his comrades killed Anwar al-Sadat, even before the phenomenon of the Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan emerged?”

“Is it possible that the jihadist movement in Egypt can be a US collaborator movement when in fact it brought up its children, ever since the movement started, to reject Israel and all the agreements of capitulation to it and to consider making peace with Israel as a contravention of Islamic Shari’ah?”

Book, His Own Words: A Translation of the Writings of Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri

Richard Miniter has a little more on this in “Dispelling the CIA-Bin Ladin Myth“, and while you may not exactly trust the source, there were further comments worth at least a look on the US State Departments “Identifying Misinformation” site.

(Via 9/11 Myths)

Michael Moore Explains To Us Why Trump Will Win

Published by Papa Giorgio

Michael Moore explains to us why TRUMP will win. Keep in mind Moore is a Hillary guy, but this is his capitulation of sorts — even if to say he predicted it if Trump wins:

I think this is an aspect of what the pollsters aren’t catching. This “steel” and “factory” country of the Midwest. Life-long union members, voting for their best interests. This is why blacks may be voting for Trump in numbers not seen for a Republican candidate since the 1960s — via GATEWAY PUNDIT:

In the past month the number of black voters for Donald Trump has increased significantly.

At the beginning of October 9% of African Americans supported Trump.

Black Likely Voters for TRUMP @Rasmussen_Poll
Oct 3 – 9%
Oct 6 – 12%
Oct 7 – 13%
Oct 10 – 14%
Oct 11 – 19%
Oct 12 – 19%
Oct 13 – 24% !

— Ted Carroll (@mediainvestors) October 13, 2016

The number doubled and has leveled off at 16% support for Donald Trump.

Black Likely Voters for TRUMP @Rasmussen_Poll
Oct 17 – 17%
Oct 18 – 19%
Oct 19 – 18%
Oct 20 – 15%
Oct 21 – 16%
Oct 24 – 15%
Oct 25 – 16%

— Ted Carroll (@mediainvestors) October 25, 2016

This ought to keep Democrats up late at night.

Blacks today make up 22% of the Democratic vote.

November 8th will be a nail biter for sure!

Newsroom’s Anti-America Scene Bitch Slapped!

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • This television tirade would be of no matter had it stayed in the dystopic universe that is Hollywood, but alas, the [I]nternet has pushed the statement across borders and time. The temptation to go line by line and deconstruct this outburst will be resisted, and would do little but add credence to the inanity. It is, naturally, what is not said that is more important, more enlightening, and more reasonable. (U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT)

(See more at Louder with Crowder)

A thorough slap down and rebuttal to Jeff Daniels’ viral anti-America Newsroom scene, in which he claims that America is not the greatest country in the world. Here are a few examples of the “bait-n-switch” associated with the Newsroom rant:

TWO QUICK EXAMPLES

“Seventh in literacy”

The CIA’s World Factbook has literacy estimates for the nations of the world.  Wikipedia presents those statistics in a form that allows for easy interpretation.  The literacy estimates actually put the U.S. back in the pack numerically, but taking ties into account allows for putting the U.S. at No. 7.  The nations in the top 40 are all pretty close, well above 95 percent literate.  Andorra, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg all report 100 percent literacy.

In other words, we are statistically tied for the front spot. Here is another great example:

“Twenty-second in science”

McAvoy’s speech offers few clues about what measure backed this claim.  Scimago Lab ranks the U.S. a clear No. 1 in peer-reviewed science publishing.  A study released in 2010 dealing with 15-year-old students from 65 nations placed the U.S. at No. 22 in scholastic science achievement.

SAT2015bench

We are, as a country, leading the way in science for the world. Now, I agree that public schools are part of the problem, as the stat used for the Newsroom rant suggests. And just as a note, many “independent” schools that are in the top percentile are not “religious” strictly, but are the fruition of religious people in the community following a classical educational (Trivium) philosophy from the Middle-Ages via the Catholic Church. So, for instance, Trinity Classical Academy in our valley is following a Trivium model founded by religious people… but the school would not be considered “religious” like a Baptist school.

But when these independent or even “Baptist” students take their SATs, they do well above the public school child, often times with less money spent per pupil. In fact, a direct correlation can be made since the founding of the Dept of Education… and it is as more money is spent on education in the public arena, the worse the outcome. Again, to be clear, money is not the issue. Another myth is that we spend more on the military than education… also not true. It is philosophy.

STARTING POINTS

The right approach

Statistically judging the greatest nation ought to involve looking for a nation that ranks consistently high in favorable categories and consistently low in unfavorable categories, with each category weighted as to relative importance.  Important categories might include the size of the economy, worker productivity, quality of the education system, contributions to scientific research, charitable contributions, economic freedom and median income.

The U.S. ranks highly in each of those categories, even ones mentioned by McAvoy.  And the U.S. ranks No. 1 in another category that speaks to the U.S. standing among the nations:  net migration.  More people come to the U.S. than to any other country.

We won’t seek to make the case that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world.  But McAvoy said, among other things, that no evidence supports the claim that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world.  To the contrary, the U.S. consistently ranks high in desirable national statistics and consistently low in undesirable ones.  One can easily make a reasonable case for ranking the United States No. 1.

(Zebra Fact Check)

TWO MORE QUICK EXAMPLES

Here are a couple of “Deconstructions” via In the Margins: [Checking links…. this site is gone, so here below is all that exists on their post on this]:

Assertion #2: “We lead the world in only three categories. Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults to believe angels are real, and defense spending.”

False. The U.S. leads the world in a number of categories. Here are a few:

  1. GDP. The U.S. has the largest economy in the world.
  2. Military capability. As McAvoy points out, the U.S. spends a lot of money on its military. What he fails to mention is that those dollars haven’t been completed wasted, and that the country does possess considerable military might. One can easily argue that this isn’t a measure of a nation’s greatness (it’s obviously not on Zack’s list of criteria) but this isn’t what McAvoy is claiming. He’s asserting that the U.S. is only number one in those categories he lists. Now, if Sorkin wanted us to look upon McAvoy as a moron, it would be fine for the character to make a claim that’s so obviously false, but this doesn’t seem to be the intent.
  3. Nobel laureates. The U.S. has the greatest number of Nobel laureates by far (350). Only a few countries mage to break the 100 mark.
  4. Number of patents. At nearly 160,000, the U.S. leads the pack. It has almost as many patents as the #2 and #3 countries (Japan and Germany) put together.
  5. Number of immigrants. At 46 million, the U.S. has almost four times as many foreign-born citizens as the next country on the list (Russia).
  6. Number of Olympic medals. The U.S. has twice as many (about 2700) as the runner-up (Russia).
  7. Foreign aid donations. The U.S. gives $24 billion, almost twice as much as the runner-up (the UK).

Assertion #4: We No Longer Explore the Universe

This part of McAvoy’s rant is perhaps the most nonsensical. The character seems to hearkening to the day when millions of Americans spent the evening glued to their TV sets, watching U.S. astronauts set foot on terrain never before traversed by humankind. While it’s true that those days are gone—for the time being, anyway—the country continues to explore the universe as aggressively as ever. A few examples:

  1. Mars. Of the nine successful Mars missions this century, seven were launched by the U.S. Several are ongoing.
  2. The Solar System. The NEAR spacecraft explored the asteroid Eros. The Cassini-Huygens mission has performed over one hundred flybys of Saturn and Titan, returning specular photos and massive amounts of data.
  3. The Universe. The James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s successor, will be able to observe the formation of the first galaxies.

The fact that the general public knows little of these accomplishments makes them no less remarkable, and the notion of McAvoy being ignorant of them—given the manner in which the character is otherwise portrayed—simply makes no sense.

I partly agree with this one in the sense that our current administration has changed the philosophy of NASA:

…One of the more notorious of the administration’s outreach attempts was the failed NASA-Muslim outreach initiative. In July of 2010, NASA chief Charles Bolden said in an interview with Al-Jazeera,  

“When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things. One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.”

Former NASA chief Michael Griffin, who headed the space agency during George W. Bush’s second term, called the Muslim outreach initiative a “perversion” of the mission of NASA:

“NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Griffin said. “That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics.”…

(TRUTH REVOLT — Tapson, Mark (March 7, 2018). Announcement: TruthRevolt Closing Shop. Truth Revolt. Retrieved April 15, 2018. WESTERN JOURNAL has the story)

And really this circles back around to public education as well. Since the teachers unions and the Dept. of Education are increasingly worried about aspects of education that have more to do with art and social engineering rather than reading, writing, math, science, of course they will fall from scholastic grace.

STATS IN MOVIE SICKO

This is nothing new mind you… this “bait-n-switch.” For instance in Michael Moore’s Sicko he talked up Cuba’s infant mortality rate as better than most countries in the world and attributed that [laughably] to their great health care. But here we notice some number fudging:

…Although Cuba claims to have low infant mortality rates, doctors have said the data is misleading because when there might be indications of problems with the fetus, there is a widespread practice of forced abortions.

Julio Alfonso said, “We personally used to do 70 to 80 abortions a day.” Yanet Sanchez, a Cuban exile, said she was simply told to submit to an abortion. “They told me I should end the pregnancy,” said Sanchez. “It was my very first pregnancy. I wanted to have the child.”

Other doctors have said that if a child dies a few hours after birth, they don’t count it as ever having lived, which ultimately makes infant mortality in Cuba look better than that of the United States…

(ABC NEWS)

It seems ABC removed the text about abortions…. so I found that REDDIT preserved the quote as well:

The same can be said of DENTAL CARE.

WAR ON THE POOR?

This small statement by RESTORING LIBERTY on the poverty example from the Newsroom rant is another example of how the “War-on-Poverty” is a sort of “War-on-the-Poor,” like the minimum wage is:

…“War on Poor People,” that’s what we have? If so, blame the class warfare and welfare state created by those that Sorkin supports and adores as heroes on the left.  You want to start a “War on Poverty,” then deregulate, and reduce the tax burden on those doing the work and those starting the businesses that employ people.  Make a competitive environment for business, instead of casting them as the enemy, and you will have jobs and prosperity, and sense of self worth instilled in your citizenry.

You don’t “fight” poverty anyway, you increase prosperity…

Yep, that is a distinction leftist Democrats do not get:

(Above video) Larry Elder gets the Lo-Down of where we stand after we spent 22-trilion on fighting poverty from Robert Rector, a leading authority on poverty, welfare programs and immigration in America for three decades, is The Heritage Foundation’s senior research fellow in domestic policy. See HIS ARTICLE ON THIS.

WAGE GAPS

I will end with another example of how gender equality at the World Economic Forum is misused to make a political point rather than a factual point:

The “Global Index of Peace” works in similar fashion to the Global Gender Gap Study sponsored by the World Economic Forum. Professor, scholar, and feminist, Christina Hoff Sommers explains where such endeavors go wrong:

We can see that the idea that women are paid less than men (.76-cents for every man’s dollar) is a FALSE STAT MISUSED by the like of Hollywood AND Democrats.

Dispelling The “CIA Trained-Funded Bin Laden/Taliban” Myth/Mantra

Published by Papa Giorgio

Politicians and leaders from both sides of the aisle make mention of this myth that we funded/created Al Qaeda via weapons, training, and money to the likes of Osama Bin Laden. The Daily Caller in 2013 notes:

…in just a one-month span, Sen. Paul has — not once, but twice — advanced a conspiracy theory that says that during the Reagan era, the U.S. funded Osama bin Laden.

During John Kerry’s secretary of state confirmation hearing, Paul said ”We funded bin Laden” — a statement that prompted Foreign Policy magazine’s managing editor, Blake Hounshell, to fire off a tweet saying: “Rand Paul tells a complete falsehood: ‘We funded Bin Laden.’ This man is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

But that didn’t discourage Paul. During a much anticipated foreign policy speech at the Heritage Foundation today, Paul doubled down, saying: “In the 1980’s the war caucus in Congress armed bin Laden and the mujaheddin in their fight with the Soviet Union.”

The only problem is that this is, at best, highly speculative — and, at worst, the perpetuation of an outright myth.

This also puts Paul in the same camp as Michael Moore, who said: ““WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!”….

…read it all…

And this is the crux of the matter.

Truthers took Michael Moore’s non-evidential presentations and statements and ran with themAnother example that shows this myth isn’t necessarily one owned by strictly by politicians, as, this conversation on a friends FaceBook shows:

Antony: failed foreign policy means today’s buddies are tomorrows boogiemen.

Hunlsy: I just love the fact they’re fighting us with the weapons and training that we gave them.

Antony: Oh where oh where did Iran get those P3s and F-14 Tomcats?

Antony: it was the US – we used to be buddies with Iranians too. We played both sides of the Iran/Iraq war, which predicated Gulf I.

Hunsly: Likely from the Russians. Regardless, we’re fighting a group, not a country. This group makes all of its IEDs & buys all of their weapons with the money that we gave them.

Here is my short intercept of the above conversation. More info will follow it:

Weapons

This is somewhat of a myth — that we sold the majority of weapons to the Taliban, to Iraq, and the like. For instance, in the following graph you can see that (in the instance of Iraq, which I was told over-and-over-again was weaponized by the U.S.) you have to combine the U.K. and the U.S. to equal 1%.

Iraqi Weapons

Moral Position

Much like us supporting Stalin in defeating Hitler, we were aligned with people whom we didn’t see eye-to-eye with in order to beat the USSR during the Cold War (WWIII)… a war that was fought from 1947–1991.

History

And thirdly, the Taliban didn’t exist when Reagan said this:

Reagan didn’t say that about the Taliban because the Taliban didn’t exist yet. He said that of the Mujahedin, the same men who would later go on to fight the Taliban under the name “Northern Alliance”

The Afghan Northern Alliance, officially known as the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (Persian: ‏جبهه متحد اسلامی ملی برای نجات افغانستان‎ Jabha-yi Muttahid-i Islāmi-yi Millī barā-yi Nijāt-i Afghānistān), was a military front that came to formation in late 1996 after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) took over Kabul. The United Front was assembled by key leaders of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, particularly president in exile Burhanuddin Rabbani and former Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Initially it included mostly Tajiks but by 2000, leaders of other ethnic groups had joined the Northern Alliance. This included Abdul Rashid Dostum, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Abdul Qadir, Sayed Hussein Anwari and others.

The Northern Alliance fought a defensive war against the Taliban government. They received support from Iran, Russia, India, Tajikistan and others, while the Taliban were backed by al-Qaeda. The Northern Alliance was mostly made up of ethnic Tajiks, but later included Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Pashtuns. The Taliban government was dominated by Pashtuns with other groups being the minority. After the US-led invasion and establishment of the Karzai administration in late 2001, the Northern Alliance broke apart and different political parties were formed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Alliance

The mujaheddin fighters who had previously defeated the communist government and formed the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA) came under attack and in 1996 lost the capital to the Taliban. At this juncture the Mujahedin resorted to the creation of UIF because Rashid Dostum and other warlords who belonged to various tribes but to no specific political party did not want to recognize the ISA as a legal entity, so the defeated government devised a military strategy to utilize these forces while not offending their political sensibilities.

In October 1996 in Khinjan, Ahmed Shah Massoud and Dostum came to an agreement to form the anti-Taliban coalition that outside Afghanistan became known as the Northern Alliance.

CNN was doing a special on Afghanistan and Peter Bergen asked for questions from viewers that he would answer. One of the questions is as follows: “If it’s true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn’t still?”~ Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada

Peter Bergen responds:

This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.

The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There’s no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn’t have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn’t have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.

The real story here is the CIA didn’t really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.

One person in a forum that was similarly challenged pointed out that this surely wasn’t the Taliban because they hated women in any position of authority — look at the pic at the top again.

As you read on, keep in mind Mr. Bergen was not a fan of conservatives, or Republicans. With that in mind, enjoy the rest, it is posted here so it will never disappear on me:

Northern Alliance (WIKI)

U.S. government officials and a number of other parties maintain that the U.S. supported only the indigenous Afghan mujahideen. They deny that the CIA or other American officials had contact with the Afghan Arabs (foreign mujahideen) or Bin Laden, let alone armed, trained, coached or indoctrinated them. Scholars and reporters have called the idea of CIA-backed Afghan Arabs (foreign mujahideen) “nonsense”,[6] “sheer fantasy”,[7] and “simply a folk myth.”[8]

They argue that:

  • with a quarter of a million local Afghans willing to fight there was no need to recruit foreigners unfamiliar with the local language, customs or lay of the land
  • with several hundred million dollars a year in funding from non-American, Muslim sources, Arab Afghans themselves would have no need for American funds
  • Americans could not train mujahideen because Pakistani officials would not allow more than a handful of U.S. agents to operate in Pakistan and none in Afghanistan;[9]
  • the Afghan Arabs were militant Islamists, reflexively hostile to Westerners, and prone to threaten or attack Westerners even though they knew the Westerners were helping the mujahideen.

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri says much the same thing in his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner.[10]

Bin Laden himself once said “the collapse of the Soviet Union … goes to God and the mujahideen in Afghanistan … the US had no mentionable role,” but “collapse made the US more haughty and arrogant.” [11]

According to CNN journalist Peter Bergen, known for conducting the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997,

The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There’s no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn’t have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn’t have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. The real story here is the CIA did not understand who Osama was until 1996, when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.[8]

Bergen quotes Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Afghan operation between 1983 and 1987:

It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers’ money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan’s policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan.[12]

Marc Sageman, a Foreign Service Officer who was based in Islamabad from 1987–1989, and worked closely with Afghanistan’s Mujahideen, argues that no American money went to the foreign volunteers.

Sageman also says:[13]

Contemporaneous accounts of the war do not even mention [the Afghan Arabs]. Many were not serious about the war. … Very few were involved in actual fighting. For most of the war, they were scattered among the Afghan groups associated with the four Afghan fundamentalist parties.

No U.S. official ever came in contact with the foreign volunteers. They simply traveled in different circles and never crossed U.S. radar screens. They had their own sources of money and their own contacts with the Pakistanis, official Saudis, and other Muslim supporters, and they made their own deals with the various Afghan resistance leaders.”[14]

Vincent Cannistraro, who led the Reagan administration’s Afghan Working Group from 1985 to 1987, puts it,

The CIA was very reluctant to be involved at all. They thought it would end up with them being blamed, like in Guatemala.” So the Agency tried to avoid direct involvement in the war, … the skittish CIA, Cannistraro estimates, had less than ten operatives acting as America’s eyes and ears in the region. Milton Bearden, the Agency’s chief field operative in the war effort, has insisted that “[T]he CIA had nothing to do with” bin Laden. Cannistraro says that when he coordinated Afghan policy from Washington, he never once heard bin Laden’s name.[15]

Fox News reporter Richard Miniter wrote that in interviews with the two men who “oversaw the disbursement for all American funds to the anti-Soviet resistance, Bill Peikney – CIA station chief in Islamabad from 1984 to 1986 – and Milt Bearden – CIA station chief from 1986 to 1989 – he found,

Both flatly denied that any CIA funds ever went to bin Laden. They felt so strongly about this point that they agreed to go on the record, an unusual move by normally reticent intelligence officers. Mr. Peikney added in an e-mail to me: “I don’t even recall UBL [bin Laden] coming across my screen when I was there.[16]

Other reasons advanced for a lack of a CIA-Afghan Arab connection of “pivotal importance,” (or even any connection at all), was that the Afghan Arabs themselves were not important in the war but were a “curious sideshow to the real fighting.”[17]

One estimate of the number of combatants in the war is that 250,000 Afghans fought 125,000 Soviet troops, but only 2000 Arab Afghans fought “at any one time”.[18]

According to Milton Bearden the CIA did not recruit Arabs because there were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight. The Arab Afghans were not only superfluous but “disruptive,” angering local Afghans with their more-Muslim-than-thou attitude, according to Peter Jouvenal.[19] Veteran Afghan cameraman Peter Jouvenal quotes an Afghan mujahideen as saying “whenever we had a problem with one of them [foreign mujahideen], we just shot them. They thought they were kings.”

Many who traveled in Afghanistan, including Olivier Roy[20] and Peter Jouvenal,[21] reported of the Arab Afghans’ visceral hostility to Westerners in Afghanistan to aid Afghans or report on their plight. BBC reporter John Simpson tells the story of running into Osama bin Laden in 1989, and with neither knowing who the other was, bin Laden attempting to bribe Simpson’s Afghan driver $500 — a large sum in a poor country — to kill the infidel Simpson. When the driver declined, Bin Laden retired to his “camp bed” and wept “in frustration.” [22]

According to Steve Coll, author of “Ghost Wars”, the primary contact for the CIA and ISI in Afghanistan was Ahmed Shah Massoud a poppy farmer and militia leader known as the “Lion of the Panjeer”. During the Afghan Civil War which erupted once the Soviets had left, Massoud’s army was routed by the Taliban (who were being helped by Pakistan’s ISI) and restricted to the northern region of the country. A loose entente was formed with several other native tribal militias which became known as the Northern Alliance who operated in opposition to the Taliban. On September 10, 2001 a camera crew was granted access to Massoud under the premise they were interviewing him for a documentary about the Mujahadeen. The crew members were actually Al Qaeda operatives who detonated a bomb killing themselves and Massoud. The purpose of the assassination was to eliminate a key ally for the US in anticipation of an invasion in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks which were to take place the following day.

And here is another great post responding to the non-evidential/conspiratorial [leftists] on the subject:

Bin Laden trained and funded by the CIA

“Osama bin Laden was trained and funded by the CIA” – you’ll read the claim everywhere, and it’s rarely opposed: everyone just seems to accept that it’s true. But why? How much evidence have you ever seen presented to support this?

The reality is that there are many people who say this is simply a myth. And we’re not just talking about neo-con friendly journalists, either.

Take Jason Burke, for instance, a major contributor to the BBC documentary “The Power of Nightmares”. In his book “Al Qaeda”, he wrote the following:

It is often said that bin Ladin was funded by the CIA. This is not true, and indeed it would have been impossible given the structure of funding that General Zia ul-Haq, who had taken power in Pakistan in 1977, had set up. A condition of Zia’s cooperation with the American plan to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet’s ‘Vietnam’ was that all American funding to the Afghan resistance had to be channeled through the Pakistani government, which effectively meant the Afghan bureau of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the military spy agency. The American funding, which went exclusively to the Afghan mujahideen groups, not the Arab volunteers [bin Ladin’s groups], was supplemented by Saudi government money and huge funds raised from mosques, non-governmental charitable institutions and private donors throughout the Islamic world. Most of the major Gulf-based charities operating today were founded at this time to raise money or channel government funds to the Afghans, civilians and fighters. In fact, as little as 25 per cent of the monet for the Afghan jihad was actually supplied directly by states.

Page 59, Al Qaeda: The true story of radical Islam, Jason Burke

Steve Coll, former Managing Editor of the Washington Post, also suggests bin Ladin passed largely unnoticed by the CIA, in his book “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001”:

…According to [Ahemd] Badeeb, on bin Ladin’s first trip to Pakistan he brought donations to the Lahore offices of Jamaat-e-Islami, Zia’s political shock force. Jamaat was the Pakistani offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood; its students had sacked the US embassy in Islamabad in 1979. bin Ladin did not trust the official Pakistan intelligence service, Badeeb recalled, and preferred to fund his initial charity through private religious and political networks.From the beginning of the Afghan jihad, Saudi intelligence used religious charities to support its own unilateral operations. This mainly involved funneling money and equipment to favoured Afghan commanders outisde ISI or CIA control… “The humanitarian aid-that was completely separate from the Americans”, Badeeb recalled. “And we insist[ed] that the Americans will not get to that, get involved–especially in the beginning,” in part because some of the Islamist mujahedin objected to direct contact with Western infidels…

In spy lexicon, each of the major intelligence agencies began working the Afghan jihad–GID [General Intelligence Department, Saudi Arabia], ISI and the CIA– began to “compartment” their work, even as all three collaborated with one another through formal liasons…

bin Ladin moved within Saudi intelligence’s compartmented operations, outside of CIA eyesight…

Page 86/ 87, Ghost Wars, Stevel Coll

In a Q&A session following the release of his book, Coll said:

Wheaton, Md.: There have been accusations from the left that have directly accused the CIA of funding and training bin Laden. Is there any truth to this ? Steve Coll: I did not discover any evidence of direct contact between CIA officers and bin Laden during the 1980s, when they were working more or less in common cause against the Soviets. CIA officials, including Tenet, have denied under oath that such contact took place. The CIA was certainly aware of bin Laden’s activities, beginning in the mid- to late-1980s, and they generally looked favorably on what he was doing at that time. But bin Laden’s direct contacts were with Saudi intelligence and to some extent Pakistani intelligence, not with the Americans.

Missouri EDU

Peter Bergen expanded on the supposed CIA/ bin Ladin links in his book, Holy War Inc:

But were the CIA and the Afghan Arabs in cahoots, as recent studies have suggested? One author charges: “The CIA had funded and trained the Afghan Arabs during the war”. Another refers to “the central role of the CIA’s Muslim mercenaries, including upwards of 2,000 mercenaries in the Afghanistan war”. Both authors present these claims as axioms, but provide no real corroboration.Other commentators have reported that bin Ladin himself was aided by the CIA. A report in the respected British newspaper The Guardian states: “In 1986 the CIA even helped him [bin Ladin] build an underground camp at Khost [Afghanistan] where he was to train recruits from across the Islamic world in the revolutionary art of jihad”…Bin Ladin, meanwhile, had expoused anti-American positions since 1982, and thanks to the fortune derived from his family’s giant construction business had little need of CIA money. In fact, the underground camp at Khost was built in 1982 by an Afghan commander, with Arab funding.

A source familiar with bin Ladin’s organisation explains that bin Ladin “never had any relations with America or American officials… He was saying very early in the 1980’s that the next battle is going to be with America… No aid or training or other support have ever been given to bin Ladin from Americans.” A senior offical unequivocally says that “bin Ladin never met with the CIA.”

While the charges that the CIA was responsible for the rise of the Afghan Arabs might make good copy, they don’t make good history. The truth is more complicated, tinged with varying shades of grey. The United States wanted to be able to deny that the CIA was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). ISI in turn made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to fund the most Islamist and pro-Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charge arose that they were creatures of the CIA.

Former CIA officer Milt Bearden, who ran the Agency’s Afghan operation in the late 1980’s, says: “The CIA did not recruit Arabs,” as there was no need to do so. There were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight…

Moreover, the Afghan Arabs demonstrated a pathological dislike of Westerners. Jouvenal says: “I always kept away from Arabs [in Afghanistan]. They were very hostile. They would ask, ‘What are you doing in an Islamic country?” The BBC reporter John Simpson had a close call with bin Ladin himself outside Jalalabad in 1989. Travelling with a group of Arab mujahideen, Simpson and his television crew bumped into an Arab man beautifully dressed in spotless white robes; the man began shouting at Simpson’s escorts to kill the infidels, then offered a truck driver the not unreasonable sum of five hundred dollars to do the job. Simpson’s Afghan escort turned down the request, and bin Ladin was to be found later on a camp bed, weeping in frustration. Only when bin Ladin became a public figure, almost a decade later, did Simpson realise who the mysterious Arab was who had wanted him dead.

Page 67/68, Holy War Inc, Peter Bergen

This level of hostility to Westerners doesn’t suggest a warm working relationship with the US, and there’s some confirmation in a story retold by Richard Miniter:

…the handful of Americans who had heard of bin Ladin in the 1980’s knew him mainly for his violently anti-American views. Dana Rohrabacher, now a Republican congressman from Orange County, California, told me about a trip he took with the mujihideen in 1987. At the time, Rohrabacher was a Reagan aide who delighted in taking long overland trips inside Afghanistan with anti-Communist forces. On one such trek, his guide told him not to speak English for the next few hours because they were passing by bin Ladin’s encampment. Rohrabacher was told, “If he hears an American, he will kill you.” 

Page 16, Disinformation, Richard Miniter

Bin Ladin was himself asked about US funding by Robert Fisk:

Fisk: …what of the Arab mujahedin he took to Afghanistan – members of a guerilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the United States – and who were forgotten when that war was over? bin Ladin: “Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help…

Fisk interview, 1996

And Ayman al-Zawahiri, second-in-command of al Qaeda, explains more in his text “Knights under the Prophet’s Banner”. Here he claims the “Afghan Arabs” had plenty of funding from various Arab sources, and points to other indications that they never supported the US:

“While the United States backed Pakistan and the mujahidin factions with money and equipment, the young Arab mujahidin’s relationship with the United States was totally different.”Indeed the presence of those young Arab Afghans in Afghanistan and their increasing numbers represented a failure of US policy and new proof of the famous US political stupidity. The financing of the activities of the Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan came from aid sent to Afghanistan by popular organizations. It was substantial aid. “The Arab mujahidin did not confine themselves to financing their own jihad but also carried Muslim donations to the Afghan mujahidin themselves. Usama Bin Ladin has apprised me of the size of the popular Arab support for the Afghan mujahidin that amounted, according to his sources, to $200 million in the form of military aid alone in 10 years.

Imagine how much aid was sent by popular Arab organizations in the non-military fields such as medicine and health, education and vocational training, food, and social assistance (including sponsorship of orphans, widows, and the war handicapped. Add to all this the donations that were sent on special occasions such as Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha feasts and during the month of Ramadan.”

“Through this unofficial popular support, the Arab mujahidin established training centers and centers for the call to the faith. They formed fronts that trained and equipped thousands of Arab mujahidin and provided them with living expenses, housing, travel, and organization.”

Changing Bin Ladin’s Guard

About the Afghan Arabs’ relationship with the United States, Al-Zawahiri says in his book: “If the Arab mujahidin are mercenaries of the United States who rebelled against it as it alleges, why is it unable to buy them back now? Are they not counted now-with Usama Bin Ladin at their head-as the primary threat to US interests? Is not buying them more economical and less costly that the astronomical budgets that the United States is allotting for security and defense?”

“The Americans, in their usual custom of exaggeration and superficiality, are trying to sell off illusions to the people and are ignoring the most basic facts. Is it possible that Usama Bin Ladin who, in his lectures in the year 1987, called for boycotting US goods as a form of support for the intifadah in Palestine, a US agent in Afghanistan?….

“Furthermore, is it possible that the martyr-as we regard him-Abdallah Azzam was a US collaborator when in fact he never stopped inciting young men against the United States and used to back HAMAS with all the resources at his disposal?

“Is it possible that the jihadist movement in Egypt can be a collaborator movement for the United States when Khalid al-Islambuli and his comrades killed Anwar al-Sadat, even before the phenomenon of the Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan emerged?”

“Is it possible that the jihadist movement in Egypt can be a US collaborator movement when in fact it brought up its children, ever since the movement started, to reject Israel and all the agreements of capitulation to it and to consider making peace with Israel as a contravention of Islamic Shari’ah?”

Book, His Own Words: A Translation of the Writings of Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri

Richard Miniter has a little more on this in “Dispelling the CIA-Bin Ladin Myth“, and while you may not exactly trust the source, there were further comments worth at least a look on the US State Departments “Identifying Misinformation” site.