The official announcement is coming momentarily. All other candidates have conceded. Looks like Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an avowed soft-Marxist, will EASILY end up with 53 to 59% of the vote and is the next President of Mexico:
Primary platform points: ♦Amnesty to all drug cartels. ♦No longer will work with U.S. immigration enforcement. ♦Nationalize oil industry. ♦Farm subsidies. ♦Elimination of multinational corporate influence on farming. ♦Support and assistance for economic growth plan: using •mass migration of Mexican nationals into Southern U.S., •create AmeriMex border region, and •remittance of earnings back to Mexico as initiative for rapid domestic economic growth.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Leftist outsider Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won Mexico’s presidential election handily on Sunday, exit polls showed, setting the stage for a government that will inherit tense relations with Washington and the scrutiny of nervous investors.
Jose Antonio Meade, the candidate of the ruling centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, conceded defeat to Lopez Obrador, a 64-year-old former Mexico City mayor, within minutes of the polls closing.
“For the good of Mexico, I wish him the very best of success,” Meade said in a speech. Lopez Obrador’s other rivals also conceded that the race was lost.
Lopez Obrador is expected to move Mexico in a more nationalist direction as he becomes the first leftist to rule the country in decades. He has pledged to reduce economic dependence on the United States. (read more)
López Obrador has won Mexico but its political system is flawed as is most parliamentary type systems. It allows for coalitions to be formed from very different parties. The French have a run off with the two highest winning candidates thus forcing the people to choose between the two. The problem with the Mexico election lies in the promises. The people were fed up with the corruption and they just wanted to throw out whoever is in power. However, Obrador is more like Bernie Sanders. There is NO POSSIBLE means available to him to pay for his ambitious slate of social programs. He will raise taxes dramatically and we will see Mexico spiral downward into 2020. He is illprepared to get rid the government of corruption when the bureacracy is the problem. In fact, many who were deeply involved in the corruption saw the shifting trends and were a part of Obrador’s campaign. It is also not likely that he will make a dent in the unyielding violence of the drug war. The people are fed up with the drug wars which has escalated out of control. There were more homicides last year in Mexico than any time in the last two decades.
The US dollar is still poised to rise against the Peso in the years ahead.
Earlier today in response to questioning about the current Democrat platform to abolish ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), President Trump said he hoped his political opposition would run on that issue because they are out of touch with the American voter.
A Harvard Harris poll (full pdf below) shows President Trump’s instincts are spot-on. 1,448 polled voters. [Poll ideology: Democrat 37%, Republican 32%, Independent 29%]
An overwhelming majority of American registered voters, 70 percent, support tougher immigration enforcement to include a border wall (60% support), deportation (64% support), and repatriation of all illegal border crossers including families with Children (61% support). Additionally 69% of voters do not support the position of disbanding I.C.E.
♦ Page #67 – Do you think current border security is adequate or inadequate? 61% Inadequate / 39% Adequate
♦ Page #69 – Do you support or oppose building a combination of physical and electronic barriers across the U.S.-Mexico border? 60% Support / 40% Oppose
♦ Page #72 – Do you think that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, known as ICE, should be disbanded or not? 31% Disbanded / 69% Not Disbanded
♦ Page #68 – Do you think we should have basically open borders or do you think we need secure borders? 76% Secure / 24% Open
♦ Page #73 – Do you think we need stricter or looser enforcement of our immigration laws? 70% Stricter / 30% Looser
♦ Page #74 – Do you think that people who make it across our border illegally should be allowed to stay in the country or sent home? 64% Sent Home / 36% Stay Here
♦ Page #75 – Do you think that parents with children who make it across our border illegally should be allowed to stay in the country or sent home? 61% Sent Home / 39% Stay Here
♦ Page #78 – Do you think that people who illegally cross into the country should be allowed into the country and given a ticket to see a judge in the future or held in custody until a judge reviews their case? 55% Held in Custody / 45% Given Ticket
♦ Page #89 – Should cities that arrest illegal immigrants for crimes be required notify immigration authorities they are in custody or be prohibited from notifying immigration authorities? 84% Require to Notify / 16% Not Required to Notify
White House national security adviser John Bolton appears on Face The Nation with Margaret Brennan to discuss North Korea and Russia. Within the interview Bolton says the U.S. could dismantle North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs within a year if the North Koreans committed to scrapping their arsenal in accordance with the agreement reached in Singapore last month.
COMMENT:Dear Mr. Armstrong, I look to help others as you do.
My wife turned 60 in June and we planned a trip to Milan and Lake Como on June 30. We arrived at the airport in Nashville yesterday, checked in, printed our boarding passes and tagged our luggage, then presented our tagged luggage to the AA attendant. She reviewed our passports to verify the name matched the luggage tags and boarding pass, then said we could NOT board the plane. We were told that my passport expires less than 60 days before our return flight and we would not be allowed to board without an updated passport. I spoke to the gate manager at AA and he indicated we would be deported if we arrived and checked in to Italian customs. My passport does not expire until a month after our return, but we were told it has to be 6 months.
When we purchased the Airline tickets, we entered the passport information to include the exp date. No problem was indicated. We checked in the Airport with our Passports and entered the exp date. No problems. We had to process all the way to the gate to be told we could not travel. How does this happen with the advanced computer systems we have today? How costly could it be to update the program for buying tickets to reject a passport number with an exp date of 6 months or less? AA told us it was not their fault, but they stand to gain significantly with change fees. I have been traveling internationally since 1981 and have never encountered this problem. I have not spoken to a person who travels internationally that knew about this rule.
….
Best,
John
REPLY: Each country has different rules. The 6 month rule is also applied by the USA to foreigners and that also applies to visas. Any employee from Ukraine has to have a visa that will not expire in less than 6 months in order to come here even if their passport is good for 10 years. I have a very good travel agent who books me on international flights in the most amazing ways. Often they will be one-way tickets because meetings pop-up often during a crisis and so it is not always black and white when I have to travel overseas. Some just learned through the grape-vine that I am in their country and requests begin.
Most of the time I have no problem even with one way tickets. The only country that causes a problem in France. I must have a return ticket out of France. One from Greece does not count for some strange reason. My agent will book a first class return fully refundable for me to land booking that the day before. When I arrive, he cancels it and I can then go on my way around Europe. The easier work-around is to travel to France within the EU and fly into Frankfurt or Brussels first.
It is the airline fault for their computers should flag a passport that expires in less than 6 months. There are many countries that do have that rule, yet it varies. Best to renew a passport more than 6 months before it does expires just to be safe.
Hear Ye; Hear Ye;… it is officially announced, proposed, reactified and triggeringly proclaimed by the ICC that Froglegs vaccinations are once again available.
What is political extremism? Professor of psychology Jordan Peterson points out that America knows what right-wing radicalism looks like: The doctrine of racial superiority is where conservatives have drawn the line. “What’s interesting is that on the conservative side of the spectrum we’ve figured out how to box-in the radicals and say, ‘No, you’re outside the domain of acceptable opinion,'” says Peterson. But where’s that line for the Left? There is no universal marker of what extreme liberalism looks like, which is devastating to the ideology itself but also to political discourse as a whole. Fortunately, Peterson is happy to suggest such a marker: “The doctrine of equality of outcome. It seems to me that that’s where people who are thoughtful on the Left should draw the line, and say no. Equality of opportunity? [That’s] not only fair enough, but laudable. But equality of outcome…? It’s like: ‘No, you’ve crossed the line. We’re not going there with you.'” Peterson argues that it’s the ethical responsibility of left-leaning people to identify liberal extremism and distinguish themselves from it the same way conservatives distance themselves from the doctrine of racial superiority. Failing to recognize such extremism may be liberalism’s fatal flaw. Jordan Peterson is the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Evolutionary biologist Heather Heying rose to prominence as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web after she and her husband, Professor Bret Weinstein, spoke out against a planned “Day of Absence” at Evergreen State College, where white students, staff and teachers would vacate campus and only minority students would remain. Their opposition to the event led to accusations of racism and a string of protests, threats, and violence, leading The Seattle Times to call the college a “national caricature of intolerant campus liberalism.” Democracy depends on protest, Heying asserts above, but a new strain of unintelligent protest on the Left may damage the very values liberals are trying to protect. “Increasingly we have groups who are claiming to be emerging from this age-old culture of protest who are actually tamping out dissent, who are saying there are things that cannot be said, there are things that cannot be thought, there are research programs that cannot be done,” she says. “… But they don’t tend to be armed in the way the extreme Right is, and so it’s easy for people to imagine that they’re not as dangerous—but shutting down dissent, shutting down the ability to discuss ideas, is actually the beginning of the death of democracy.” In this video, Heying looks at tribalism and dissent from an evolutionary perspective, and highlights how technology has hijacked our ancient brain to create a more polarized society than ever before. Follow Heather on twitter: @HeatherEHeying and on Medium and through her website, http://www.heatherheying.com.
Within the German economy the auto-sector holds the largest political influence. Because of this dynamic all German politicians kneel at the knee of the big industrial auto manufacturers. It has been said that losing support from within the auto-sector is much worse on a German politician than losing support from party or parliament.
Because of this dynamic; and specifically because the German auto-sector is dependent on the United States as their biggest customer, President Trump holds leverage over German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This makes Fraulein Merkel unhappy.
President Trump wants three EU issues resolved: 1) Germany to contribute the minimum 2% of GDP for their own NATO defense. 2) Germany/EU to support enhanced sanctions against Iran; and 3) President Trump wants all German/EU protectionist trade barriers and tariffs lowered or eliminated – and new trade deals negotiated.
To gain momentum on these initiatives, President Trump is using the economics of trade as leverage. Trump has suggested a 20% tariff on all EU automobiles shipped into the U.S. [The same standard now likely proposed toward Canada] The German auto-sector, and as a consequence the German economy, simply cannot survive without low cost access to the U.S. market, their biggest customer.
Immediately following the election (December 2016), President Trump warned BMW (and others) about opening a manufacturing plant in Mexico; Trump suggested such a decision might backfire. BMW ignored the warning and contracted with Mexico for an auto plant with intentions to use NAFTA to bring the completed cars to market.
The plant is anticipated to be operational in 2019; however, it is now increasingly likely that NAFTA will be dissolved and President Trump is threatening a 20% auto-tariff to any imported cars. Accordingly, despite the prior warning, BMW is now going bananas:
BMW was planning on using the NAFTA loophole to assemble EU auto parts in Mexico for duty-free transport into the U.S. However, now there’s a likelihood the BMW sedans planned to be built in Mexico could be subject to U.S. tariffs and they cannot gain benefit from the NAFTA loophole.
BMW builds SUV’s in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The reason they build them there is due to a 25% pre-Trump existing tariff on imported SUV’s. It looks like BMW made a bad decision to build an car plant in Mexico; although their position as expressed within the Reuters article fails to mention this aspect at all. Obviously they don’t mention the 2016 warning from President-Elect Trump either. {{{snicker}}}
Meanwhile, President Trump just keeps applying more layers of winnamin leverage upon the desk of German Chancellor Angela Merkel:
Poland has offered to host a smaller contingent of U.S. forces; and Poland already fully meets their obligations to NATO defense spending. Funny how that happens.
The Pentagon is analyzing the cost and impact of a large-scale withdrawal or transfer of American troops stationed in Germany, amid growing tensions between President Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to people familiar with the work.
The effort follows Trump’s expression of interest in removing the troops, made during a meeting earlier this year with White House and military aides, U.S. officials said. Trump was said to have been taken aback by the size of the U.S. presence, which includes about 35,000 active-duty troops, and complained that other countries were not contributing fairly to joint security or paying enough to NATO.
Word of the assessment has alarmed European officials, who are scrambling to determine whether Trump actually intends to reposition U.S. forces or whether it is merely a negotiating tactic ahead of a NATO summit in Brussels, where Trump is again likely to criticize U.S. allies for what he deems insufficient defense spending. (read more)
Anyone noticing a pattern?
Interestingly, two Canadians are able to connect the dots very easily.
Ezra Levant of Rebel Media and Manny Montenegrino, President & CEO Think Sharp Inc. discuss the dynamic and obvious comparisons and parallels.
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“Complicated business folks,… Complicated business”
I have created this site to help people have fun in the kitchen. I write about enjoying life both in and out of my kitchen. Life is short! Make the most of it and enjoy!
This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
Primary platform points: ♦Amnesty to all drug cartels. ♦No longer will work with U.S. immigration enforcement. ♦Nationalize oil industry. ♦Farm subsidies. ♦Elimination of multinational corporate influence on farming. ♦Support and assistance for economic growth plan: using •mass migration of Mexican nationals into Southern U.S., •create AmeriMex border region, and •remittance of earnings back to Mexico as initiative for rapid domestic economic growth.
Centinel2012 