Day: November 28, 2016

Trump Calls The Recount A Scam

Clinton Backs Vote Recount Effort, Trump Calls It ‘Scam’

Posted: Sun 9:32 AM, Nov 27, 2016
Hillary Clinton’s campaign intends to back the statewide election recount effort in the battleground state of Wisconsin spearheaded by third-party candidate Jill Stein.
The Clinton team had been quiet about Stein’s crusade, but campaign lawyer Marc Elias said that because a recount was set into motion Friday — and could begin as soon as next week — they want to see a “fair” process for all involved.
“Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves,” Elias wrote in a Medium post explaining the decision, “but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides.”
He also posted on Twitter, including a series of tweets early Sunday quoting Clinton’s previous comments on respecting the outcome of the election and calling the recount effort “sad.”
Wisconsin election officials said that they received Stein’s paperwork and that they were still waiting to obtain a cost estimate from county clerks to calculate a fee her campaign must pay before the recount can start. However, the Wisconsin Election Commission staff announced Saturday that it has already pulled together a timeline it expects the commission to approve.
The timeline, which would have the recount begin Thursday, follows federal law calling for it to be completed withing 35 days of Election Day. That so-called safe harbor date is Dec. 13 this year.
The commission will review the proposed timeline Monday.
Stein’s campaign is trying to raise as much as $7 million for the effort online — and it had garnered more than $5.9 million as of Saturday evening.
Stein, the Green Party’s presidential nominee, also has plans to file recount efforts in Michigan, where NBC News has yet to officially call a winner, and Pennsylvania.
Saturday afternoon, she indignantly tweeted, “I will do a recount in any state where the deadline has not passed.”
Elias acknowledged that “the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan —  well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount,” but he said the Clinton campaign felt it was “important, on principle,” to take part in and monitor the process.
If Stein follows through with her promise to pay for recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, Elias wrote, the campaign will “take the same approach” with additional states and participate in any verification efforts there.
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski tweeted, “Where is the media outcry?” after news broke that Clinton would back the recount.
It’s an endeavor that will take long hours, hundreds of election workers and millions of dollars — and one that Stein herself admits may not change a thing about Trump’s defeat of Clinton.
“I don’t think that’s likely, and this is not done to benefit one candidate at the expense of the other,” Stein said this week on “PBS NewsHour.”
Until now, the Clinton campaign had declined to comment on the potential re-tallying. After what aides called a crushing and unanimously stunning loss, most went silent as they came to grips with the outcome.
Over the last few weeks, lawyers and data scientists have urged the campaign to consider a recount, according to Elias’ post. He also said a deciding factor was Russia’s reported interference in the U.S. election process.
Besides “quietly” taking steps to “rule in or out any possibility of outside interference,” the campaign also dispatched resources to critical battleground states.
“We have monitored and staffed the post-election canvasses  —  where voting machine tapes are compared to poll-books, provisional ballots are resolved, and all of the math is double checked from election night,” he wrote.
Elias also acknowledged the anguish that many that Clinton’s supporters and staffers felt after the shocking upset.
“We certainly understand the heartbreak felt by so many who worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton, and it is a fundamental principle of our democracy to ensure that every vote is properly counted,” he wrote.

North Korea Already Threatening Trump

The statements were made in a fiery editorial in one of Pyongyang’s state-run propaganda newspapers.
The gloating opinion piece began: “The US used to unleash wars against other countries to dominate them, being proud that even not a single shell has ever dropped on its mainland.
“The US is feeling extremely uneasy and experiencing frustrations as its scenario to do harm to the DPRK through nuclear blackmail went up in smoke.
“The US is not in a position to deny the tremendous power of the DPRK, a full-fledged nuclear power in the East, no matter how hard it tries to do so.”
The sabre-rattling editorial was issued a fortnight after Mr Trump stunned the world by winning the US election.
Kim Jong-un said the “curtain had fallen” on America’s era of dominance
While his unexpected victory looks set to improve relations with Russia, whose leader Vladimir Putin welcomed his election, North Korea has responded by doubling-down on its bloody rhetoric.
The editorial continued: “The curtain is falling on the era of US domination. The US, styling itself the world’s only superpower, has fished in troubled waters, turning several regions into mayhem.
Donald Trump spoke often about the need to bring North Korea under control while campaigning
“Now the US strategy for mounting a preemptive nuclear strike at the DPRK has gone bust, becoming a factor of threatening its security.
“Americans are now unable to sleep in peace because of the nightmare that their mainland may suffer a nuclear disaster.
“The position of the DPRK will grow strong and its military muscle become unimaginably tremendous in the future, too.”
The article was written just days after a Pyongyang dictator pleaded with Mr Trump to take down a North Korean defector.
Jung Gwang-Il, who spent three years in one of the North Korea’s hellish prison camps, said Mr Trump could end the division of Korea and become known as the ‘Reunification President’.
North Korea has doubled down on its bloody rhetoric since Donald Trump’s victory
He wrote an open letter to the Republican leader, praising America as a “beacon of hope and freedom” and asking for assistance in taking down the bloodthirsty despot.

Japan Prepares For Nuclear War With Korea

 
By Jessica Duncan and Dave Burke For Mailonline 13:20 EST 26 Nov 2016, updated 19:53 EST 26 Nov 2016
Today it has been revealed that Japan also feels under pressure as Kim Jong-Un is continues to carry out a series of test.
As a result under Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, pamphlets have been issued advising people what to do in the event of an attack have been made available – with people urged to head to underground shopping centres.
The leaflet can be downloaded from the island nation’s civil defence website.
According to The Sun called “Protecting Ourselves against Armed Attacks and Terrorism,” it outlines emergency measures in the event missiles are fired at the country.
As well as taking shelter in shopping malls it urges people to take shelter, particularly behind thick walls to avoid radiation or blast injuries.
Japan’s Defence Ministry’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency have already installed some anti-missile batteries in Tokyo and considering lasers to defend themselves from missile attacks.
But North Korea has been strutting its nuclear strength for months, and despite some failed tests, it claims it would “saturate” its enemies with missiles.
Japan is the only country to have suffered nuclear war after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final days of the Second World War.
As well as 70,000 immediate deaths, the same amount suffered radiation affects, and many have suffered health problems since.
Following the end of the Second World War, Soviet troops seized the southernmost islands in the Kuril chain, known as the Northern Territories in Japan, that lies off the northeast coast of Hokkaido.
The countries have not signed a peace treaty formally ending wartime hostilities, and the dispute has hindered trade and investment.
‘The Northern Territories are an inherent part of Japan’s territory,’ Abe told parliament today.
Abe said Japan had told Russia the deployment ‘is deplorable’ and ‘is contradictory to Japan’s position’ on the issue.
However, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday the missile deployment was aimed at the ‘consistent strengthening of national security’.
‘Missile systems were deployed to the southern Kurils in line with that position,’ she said, calling them ‘an integral part of Russian territory’.
The remarks came ahead of a December 15 meeting between Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Yamaguchi city in western Japan, which is aimed at making progress on the territorial dispute.
The two leaders have met several times since Abe took office in December 2012, most recently last Sunday in Peru on the sidelines of a Pacific-rim summit.
Tensions with Japan have heightened at a time when concerns are increased over Russia’s relationship with NATO.
This week Putin ally Franz Klintsevich, 59, a senator and leading member of the Kremlin strongman’s United Russia Party, warned a modern Cuban missile crisis could be on the way to Europe.
The Kremlin claimed his views were ‘understandable’ but stressed it was Putin personally who decided Russia’s policy on targeting enemies.
‘Russia will deliver a hard and clear response to NATO’s aggressive actions, the alliance’s attempts to draw into its orbit yet more countries,’ said hardline legislator Klintsevich.
‘We shall train our weapons, including nuclear ones, on any alliance facilities threatening us, wherever they may be deployed.’
Klintsevich was speaking as deputy chairman of the Russian senate’s Defence and Security Committee at a time of rising tension between Moscow and the West.

Donald Trump Is A Nuclear Ignoramus

Tim Johnson
Washington: Sometime in the next few weeks, Donald Trump will sit down for one of the most consequential briefings of his transition. Military commanders will meet with him to take him through the procedures for launching a nuclear attack. They will also outline potential targets.
If history is any indication, the briefings will mark the moment when Mr Trump feels the momentous weight of the presidency on his shoulders.
Whether these nuclear briefings will sharpen the President-elect’s focus on nuclear issues is unclear. During the campaign, his off-the-cuff statements indicated limited concern about nuclear proliferation and only a dim awareness of the cascading dangers that experts say the spread of nuclear weapons might bring.
Mr Trump has mused aloud about South Korea and Japan obtaining nuclear weapons, and he indicated the US might limit its commitments to defend other regions from nuclear attack.
“For the issue of nuclear proliferation, this election could be an enormous game changer,” said Jeffrey Knopf, an expert on nuclear weapons at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California.
By all accounts, the nuclear briefings a president-elect receives before inauguration are both complex in detailing procedures for a nuclear launch and awe-inspiring in explaining the physical consequences of selecting a target, launching an attack and girding for the fallout.
“These are the aspects that reportedly left President Kennedy ashen-faced,” said Peter D. Feaver, a security and conflict expert at Duke University, who worked on the National Security Council under the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
Those familiar with the nuclear briefings say they demand a sharp focus.
“It’s not something that someone even with vast experience can easily digest,” said Leon Panetta, a former secretary of defence intimately familiar with the briefings.
“He’s got to be ready from the get-go to respond if necessary,” Mr Panetta said. “There really is a long process, a classified process, that involves a lot of checks in the system to make sure no mistakes are made. It involves a number of key people.”
From the day Mr Trump takes the oath of office, a military aide will shadow him everywhere, carrying a black satchel containing the system to convey a nuclear launch order. The satchel is popularly known as “the football.”
“His first briefing will be just about how the process works: ‘There will be a military aide with you at all times and he has the football,'” said P.J. Crowley, a retired Air Force officer and special assistant on national security affairs to Mr Clinton.
Mr Trump will learn how a launch order would “send key people to underground bunkers,” Mr Crowley said. “That’s a critical dimension of this. Even for the Strategic Command out in Nebraska, this would send an airborne command up in the air.”
“The card itself is critical to begin the process that activates the system,” Mr Panetta said.
While the system is designed with overlapping triggers that ensure that nuclear weapons are not launched by mistake, it is also designed for a president to make a snap decision.
“It’s a very short period of time, measured in minutes,” Mr Feaver said.
After Barack Obama received his nuclear briefings, he laid out a vision of “a world without nuclear weapons.”
“If we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable,” Mr Obama said in Prague in April 2009, promising to make nuclear nonproliferation a top priority.
“We have a system that is very top-down, and we rely on the prudent judgment of an American president to make the right call with respect to crises and potential conflicts,” said Scott D. Sagan, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
Trump’s nuclear policy
Mr Trump’s position on nuclear issues zigzagged during the campaign, and experts are divided on whether that is because his views are not well-formed or simply because he wants to appear unpredictable.
Some voice concern about what they see as Mr Trump’s imprudence.
“He seems to be quite impulsive. He sends off tweets in the middle of the night,” said Ira Helfand, co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, an anti-nuclear advocacy group. “You can’t backtrack a nuclear weapon once it’s been fired.”
During the campaign, Mr Trump offered many points of view, saying limited proliferation was inevitable, nuclear war would be horrific and that the United States should always leave nuclear use as a possibility.
“I don’t think you could predict with confidence where he is going to come down on a question like this,” said Mr Feaver, the Duke University expert.
Pushed by TV host Chris Matthews in March, Mr Trump said he would “maybe” use nuclear weapons. When Matthews questioned that judgment,Mr Trump pushed back. “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?” he asked.
In April, he reiterated the point. “I will not be a happy trigger like some people might be,” Mr Trump told NBC’s Today show. “But I will never, ever rule it out.”
The world now has nine known nuclear weapons states: the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Combined, they are thought to have 15,300 nuclear weapons.
“Everybody that has them is planning strike scenarios against adversaries,” said Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. “This isn’t just a scary thing in your basement. This is a real operational force.”
Mr Knopf, the nuclear expert in Monterey, said scrapping the Iran nuclear deal, which Mr Trump has promised, might weaken a decades-old global effort to contain nuclear weaponry, enshrined in the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which has some 190 signatories, not including India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
“Once you get below the surface, the support for the treaty is eroding in a number of ways,” Mr Knopf said.
If a Trump presidency were to relax the nuclear taboo further, he said, it would have immediate consequences.
“You open the door, and a lot of countries may walk through it,” he said.
Whether those proliferation issues are addressed in further briefings for Mr Trump will depend largely on his level of interest, experts said.
“My prayer is that as the president-elect becomes aware of all the responsibility that comes with the presidency, he will understand that the last thing he’ll want to do is start a nuclear arms confrontation that would end life as we know it,” Mr Panetta said.