Saturday, November 25, 2017

Steve Bannon is in town!




 

 

On the evening of November 18, Steve Bannon spoke at the Marriott resort on the west side of Tucson. He was invited to that venue by the Brian Terry foundation, which used the occasion to present him with their “courage in journalism” award. According to the local paper, roughly 400 people paid anywhere from $50 to 1000 to hear Mr. Bannon speak. Not surprisingly, his presence also attracted about 200 demonstrators, who lined both sides of Starr Pass Avenue in the vicinity of the resort. The protest was peaceful, and no one was injured or arrested.

 



 



The award given to Mr. Bannon was given to him due to his coverage of the “Fast and Furious” program in Breitbart, the publication that he has been in charge of for several years. His article specifically mentions that death of Brian Terry. 

 



 


As you may recall, Brian Terry was a Border Patrol agent who was killed at the end of 2010. The guns that killed him were purchased from the “Fast and Furious” gun program that our government instituted during the Presidency of George W. Bush. The program was called “Operation Wide Receiver” when it was started in 2006, but the name was changed to “Fast and Furious” in 2010.

 

Due to their suspect credibility, I don’t watch FOX “news” (where right wing radio host Michael Levin will soon have a weekly show), or read Breitbart or the National Enquirer, all of which are the chief sources of information for Donald Trump. Out of curiosity, I looked up the article that Bannon had written in Breitbart about Brian Terry. You can read the entire article by clicking on the link below.

  


  

Frankly, I didn’t expect to read an unbiased article in Bannon’s publication, and I was right. He mentions the Obama “scandals “ of Benghazi, the IRS, Department of Justice phone tapping, Pigford, GSA, Solyndra, Lightsquared, and the EPA administrator email aliases. If you take a few minutes to research them, you’ll quickly discover that NONE of them were actually a scandal. Naturally, the article says absolutely NOTHING about the involvement of the Bush administration in the “gun running program”, which was originated by ATF offices in Phoenix and Tucson.

 

Although he no longer works for the Trump administration (he has since returned to Breitbart), Bannon is still very much a Trump supporter. In his speech, he said, “President Trump needs your backing now more than ever. this nullification process that is underway, this nullification that is trying to take away the 2016 victory from the American people and Trump supporters – it has to be stopped “.  

 

According to Bannon, Trump would not be President if the Brian Terry incident has not occurred. He blamed the “elite global apparatus” and multinational corporations for resistance to a massive wall along the Mexican border.

 

The immigration issue happens to be one of my “hot buttons”, so I’d like to add a few comments at this point. The first of those comments is that spending $20 billion for a massive wall along the Mexican border is a REALLY STUPID idea. Mexico is not going to pay for it, and neither are the U.S.  taxpayers.

 

 During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump said that he was going to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants. Since it would cost an estimated $285 billion to deport all those people, it simply is not going to happen. The link below provides more details.

  


  

Even if we came to our senses and did not build the wall, we STILL spend $12 billion a year on border security, and the NET migration from Mexico has been ZERO since 2004. Click on the links below for an expanded discussion.

 


 


 

 

In 2006, the Bush administration passed the “Secure Fence Act”. As a result, we erected close to 700 miles of fence along the border, at a cost of roughly $1 billion. To quote the late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, “a billion here and a billion there – pretty soon you are talking about some real  money”.

 

To their credit, the founding fathers built “freedom of speech” into the 1st amendment to the Constitution. Although it allows people like Steve Bannon the right to publish nonsense in publications like Breitbart, it also allows peaceful protestors the freedom to assemble and protest right wing extremists like Steve Bannon,

 

For that, we can all be grateful.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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