In WW2, Texas treated NAZI POWs better than its own Black residents.

https://time.com/5872361/wwii-german-pows-civil-rights/

McConnell and the Russians: Setting the record straight

Forward KY
October 21, 2020 by Marshall Ward

Excerpt...

Russian money and McConnell actions

Russian oligarchs have been putting money into Republicans, and specifically McConnell, for years.

In the 2016 election cycle and beyond, Oleg Deripaska had his companies contribute over $6.3 million to U.S. campaigns, with $2.5 million of that going to McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund.

In 2017, Len Blavatnik, a Ukrainian businessman and a partner of Deripaska, donated another $1 million to the McConnell fund.

Interestingly, in April 2018, the Trump administration announced sanctions on multiple Russian oligarchs and their companies, including Deripaska and his aluminum company Rusal, the second largest aluminum company in the world. The sanctions were in response to Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Deripaska is known to be closely allied with the Kremlin, and his name has come up in emails turned over to the Mueller investigation.

Then, in December 2018, the administration agreed to lift the sanctions on Deripaska’s companies in exchange for him giving up majority ownership.

Democrats in Congress mounted an effort to keep the sanctions in place, saying the sanctions were justified due to the 2016 election meddling.

But about a month later, in January 2019, McConnell led Senate Republicans to block the Democratic effort. The sanctions on Deripaska’s companies were removed, and those companies could then do business in the United States.

And once the sanctions were lifted, Deripaska’s company, Rusal, promised an investment of $200 million in a start-up aluminum plant. Where? In McConnell’s home state of Kentucky.

The Mueller Report and the Senate Intelligence report showed the normal chain of command was Putin to Deripaska to Kilimnik (a Russian operative under indictment) to the Trump campaign minions, many of whom are now in jail.

Continues...

https://forwardky.com/mcconnell-and-the-russians-setting-the-record-straight/

THIS is why Drumpf spied on “leakers.” Crooks hate it when the truth comes out.

Bill Barr: "Racist. Bully. Fascist."

From someone who’s known the AG since high school...



He has no clue Barr works for a higher power.



So, who’s zooming who, Putin?



First tied to Jeffrey Epstein through father.



There’s more. Of course.

Traitor.

Trump asks Biden to give Putin his 'warmest regards'

BY LEXI LONAS - The Hill, 06/10/21

Former President Trump told President Joe Biden to give his “warmest regards” to Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of the two world leaders meeting.

“Good luck to Biden in dealing with President Putin—don’t fall asleep during the meeting, and please give him my warmest regards!” Trump wrote in a statement Thursday.

Biden and Putin will have their first meeting Wednesday in Geneva, Switzerland.

Snip...

The former president still claims Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election.

“Despite the belated Fake News portrayal of the meeting, the United States won much, including the respect of President Putin and Russia,” Trump said. “Because of the phony Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, made-up and paid for by the Democrats and Crooked Hillary Clinton, the United States was put at a disadvantage—a disadvantage that was nevertheless overcome by me.”

Continues...

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/557903-trump-asks-biden-to-give-putin-his-warmest-regards

Trump didn’t just write about the stupidest thing ever written by a former president.

He wrote just about the stupidest thing ever written.

Manchin Family Values
Fred Gardner
Counterpunch.org, June 10, 2021

Excerpt...

After some superficial improvements (a stronger spring, clearer instructions) that supposedly justified raising prices, Mylan began its big marketing push in 2009. With almost 90% of the market, their key goal was to get every school in the US to keep EpiPens on hand. Children face the highest risk of a fatal response because many never been exposed to the substance they’re allergic to. Adults generally know what they’re allergic to and try to avoid exposure or carry the antidote.

As Governor of West Virginia, Joe Manchin had appointed his wife to the state Board of Education in 2007. By 2012 Gayle Conelly Manchin would be president of the National Association of State Boards of Education, an official-sounding-but-private outfit that lobbies state boards to adopt policies favored by Association members. In 2016 USA Today (a paper that doesn’t get enough credit for serious muckraking) reported that Mrs. Manchin had “spearheaded an unprecedented effort that encouraged states to require schools to purchase medical devices that fight life-threatening allergic reactions.

“The association’s move helped pave the way for Mylan Specialty, maker of EpiPens, to develop a near monopoly in school nurses’ offices. Eleven states drafted laws requiring epinephrine auto-injectors. Nearly every other state recommended schools stock them after what the White House called the ‘EpiPen Law’ in 2013 gave funding preference to those that did.”

Snip...

Heather’s brilliant career was launched after Joe Manchin introduced her to the CEO of Mylan. Although her claim to have a Master’s Degree in Business Administration was exposed as a lie, her fast rise to the top was unimpeded. Heather had something better than a degree, she had real audacity. And so she quadrupled the price of a drug that several million US Americans must have on hand and buy every year. (Somebody ought to confirm that epinephrine degrades significantly in a year. It might be a pseudo-scientific marketing device like Dial Soap’s famous “Rinse and repeat.”)

Heather’s salary rose from $2.5 million in 2007 to $18.9 million in 2015. She was then 45 years old and would have become the poster child of Pharmaceutical Industry Greed had it not been for Martin Shkreli, who raised the price of the anti-parasitic drug Diapram from $13.50 to $750. Then the publicity-welcoming “pharma bro” won the auction for the world’s only copy of a hip-hop album by Wu-Tang Clan. Shkreli was sentenced to seven years and may still be doing time for securities fraud, but presumably, he got to enjoy “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” before the 2-CD rarity was seized by the feds.

Heather is married to a corporate lawyer named Jeffrey Bresch whose firm represents, in addition to numerous Fortune 500 companies, the Pennsylvania Republican Party in its challenge to the validity of votes mailed in on Election Day in 2020. (But that’s another story). Heather retired at age 50 in 2020 after arranging Mylan’s merger with Upjohn. The first woman to head a Fortune 500 Pharmaceutical company, her accomplishments included Mylan’s acquisition of Abbott Laboratories and a transfer of corporate headquarters to the Netherlands, bringing the merged companies’ tax rate down from 24% to 21%. The moral of the story is: you don’t really need an MBA to be a successful corporate executive.

Continues...

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/10/manchin-family-values/

Through Rudy and the Deranged Orange Puppet.



How Russia Used An Overt Agent To Attack Joe Biden In The 2020 Election

Time correspondent Simon Shuster says that Andriy Derkach, a seven-term member of the Ukrainian parliament, gave misleading information to Rudy Giuliani to discredit Biden during the 2020 campaign.

June 3, 20211:56 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air with Terry Gross

Excerpt...

GROSS: Do you think the conspiracy theories that Derkach has been spreading, including, you know, the false information that Biden worked to further his son Hunter's financial interests in Ukraine, do you think all this still has legs? I mean, so much of this information was brought out during the impeachment hearings in the House, and Trump was impeached in the House.

SHUSTER: Yeah, I think it does very much still have legs. I think it's still a very influential narrative. And the reason I say that is, you know, there's a large - former President Trump still has a very large base of supporters. And, you know, among the news media and the online forums that his really devoted supporters use, this narrative that Derkach promoted and fueled is basically part of reality. It has been thoroughly incorporated into the perceptions of Joe Biden within Trump's base.

And I think one of the most interesting things I learned while reporting the story is how much QAnon, the online conspiracy theory kind of cult-like movement of Trump devotees, how much they promoted the Derkach material. It was a remarkable thing. You can go back and read all of the statements from Q, the kind of anonymous (prophet) of this movement. And, you know, at a very crucial moment in this movement - this movement is quite obsessed with numerology and, you know, the meaning of numbers and all that - dates, numbers. And there's - a lot of the people in that movement were expecting, what is Q going to post - post No. 4,500 because in kind of numerological thinking, 4,500, the 45th president, right? This should be an important post from Q.

And what did Q post in No. 4,500? A link to a YouTube video, 1 1/2 hours long, of Andrii Derkach. And he says, worth reading, listening. So the promotion on the QAnon forums. To me, is very clear indication that, yes, the things that Derkach is pushing and promoting has made it very deep into the bloodstream of a large portion of former President Trump's base. And it's going to continue to be part of the lore of that group of American voters, which is very large.

Continues (link to radio interview, too)...

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/03/1002858655/how-russia-used-an-overt-agent-to-attack-joe-biden-in-the-2020-election

While he was brave and volunteered for combat — the story of PT-109 demonstrates his courage — President Kennedy hated war for the reasons you know. He lost his big brother, a US Navy aviator, fighting the NAZIs.



Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.

The President’s big brother was the one being groomed for a life in politics by The Old Man, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. The younger Joe had served as a delegate from Massachusetts at the 1940 Democratic convention. A brave, athletic and conscientious young man, he volunteered for service in the US Navy before World War II.

After completing his tour as pilot of a US Navy B-24 Liberator on anti-submarine warfare patrol from 1943-44 over the North Atlantic, flying out of an airbase in England, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. volunteered for a top-secret mission, Project APHRODITE. The objective was to knock out the NAZI V-1 buzz bombs that were killing civilians in London and other English towns.

The Navy, in cooperation (and in competition) with the Army Air Corps, worked to develop a secret weapon — a remotely piloted flying bomb. They would convert four-engine bombers into flying bombs that would be flown by remote control into the V-1 sites along the coast of France.

Joe and other pilots were needed to get the experimental versions of the 4-engine B-24 and B-17 bombers airborne. The planes had been converted from being a 10-man bomber, capable of carrying sixteen 500 pound bombs, into one giant flying bomb with a crew of two — the pilot and the bombardier-engineer.

For the time, it was state-of-the-art science, engineering, and warfare. Joe Kennedy’s plane was among a few Liberators and Flying Fortresses modified for a very early version of remote control. The ship, basically, was history’s first guided missile. The entire fuselage was filled with Torpex and gelignite, IIRC, and was to be armed by a rather elaborate, and untested, electronic arming panel.

Like something out of Buck Rogers, the Navy equipped the airplane with a primitive 2-channel remote-control pilot. One radio signal could make the plane dive and climb and another signal could make it turn left and right. A prototype video camera would also send information to the Mother Ship, where the remote pilot sat before a tiny TV monitor.

The scientists and engineers in the Mother Ship would take over and signal on two radio frequencies: One to turn the stick RIGHT or LEFT; or push the stick FORWARD or pull the stick BACK. Primitive today, they were the first remote-controlled weapon of mass destruction. The Mother Ship would follow two miles or so back and then fly it over the English Channel and guide it down into the rocket launch sites.

The technology was so primitive, human pilots were needed to get the flying bombs aloft. Once aloft, they were to turn on the radio-guidance controls and arm the flying bomb. Then, somewhere over the English countryside, they were to bail out. Sounds simple, but it was anything but.

The pilot and bombardier were to bail out at an altitude of about one thousand feet. Bailing out from the modified aircraft was extremely dangerous work. One B-17 pilot was killed and another lost an arm in the process. By the time it was Joe’s turn in the first APHRODITE B-24, there was reason for concern about a plan that looked like a suicide mission.

For the Kennedys and the future of American politics, the tragedy was that the Navy ship used a rather primitive arming panel. The regular engineer/co-pilot refused to fly and instead the Navy sent aloft the engineer who designed and installed the system.

Over the English countryside, the ship exploded, killing the two flyers and changing American political history. Joe's younger brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy then became the heir to the family's political ambitions.

John F. Kennedy made an outstanding President, living up to his brother’s promise of greatness. JFK, it should be remembered, saved the world from nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

While he never lived to see the dream realized, JFK also stretched mankind’s imagination and reach to the moon. Ironically, he even used the NAZI rocket scientist who developed the V-1 to do so. The same von Braun who the allied air command sent his lost brother, Joseph, to destroy.

One of Hitler's superweapons, the V-2 was developed by Werner von Braun and his team at Peenemünde. History's first ballistic missiles were used to rain death, destruction and terror upon London. The allies were worried that if the Nazis continued developing their super-weapons, the V-2’s descendants would be delivering bombs — possibly atomic — to New York City.

# # #

Two outstanding books on the subject of Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. and his service in World War II:

“Aphrodite: Desperate Mission” by Jack Olsen

and

“The Lost Prince: Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy” by Hank Searls.

QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded

Gregory Stanton
Just Security, Sept. 9, 2020

Excerpt...

I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence.

The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. It collected myths about a Jewish plot to take over the world that had existed for hundreds of years. Central to its mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.

The Nazis published a children’s book of the Protocols that they required in the curriculum of every primary school in Germany. The Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer (derived from the German word for “Storm”) spread the Blood Libel. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his narcissistic autobiography and manifesto for his battle against the Jewish plot to rule the world, copied his conspiracy theories from the Protocols.

The Nazis worshiped Adolf Hitler as the Leader who would rescue the white race from this secret Jewish plot. Nazi “storm troopers” (“storm detachment” – Sturmabteilung) helped bring Hitler to power. Nazi Germany went on to conquer Europe and murder six million Jews and millions of Roma, Slavs, LGBTQ and other people.

America had its own dark side. Henry Ford echoed Nazi hatred of Jews and had 500,000 copies of the Protocols printed and distributed in the U.S. Father Coughlin preached the Protocols on national radio. The Ku Klux Klan combined its white supremacist racism with hatred of Jews.

QAnon’s conspiracy theory is a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Continues...

https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/

A soldier who photographed World War II in Europe describes 6 of his photos that reveal the 'insanity of war'

Katie Sanders
Business Insider, Sun, May 30, 2021

Michelantonio "Tony" Vaccaro wanted to serve his country with a camera during World War II, so he tried to join the US Army Signal Corps. But under Uncle Sam's rules, the 20-year-old draftee was too young for that branch.

So Vaccaro, the orphaned son of Italian immigrants, became a private first class in the 83rd Infantry Division. By June 1944, days after the first wave of 156,000 Allied troops descended on the beaches of Normandy, Vaccaro landed on Omaha Beach, where he saw row after row of dead soldiers in the sand.

Continues...

WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES — Whose subjects represent WHY MEMORIAL DAY MATTERS.

https://news.yahoo.com/soldier-photographed-world-war-ii-221900188.html