Over the weekend, US President Donald Trump called Baltimore, Maryland, “a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess.” He blamed it on Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), who is black and is the congressional representative for the city's district, and claimed on Sunday that the lawmaker himself is “racist.” He went on to Tweet, "Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings' district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States? No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this corrupt mess immediately!" I need some help with all of this. I think responding to these tweets is nothing but a distraction, and every minute that we spend discussing these ignorant, racist rants is a minute that we are not discussing what really matters: wealth disparity, Trump’s inability to bring manufacturing jobs back to the Midwest, health care, the war in Yemen and more. Follow Trump down this rat hole at your peril.
The US Federal Reserve this week will most likely cut interest rates for the first time since 2008 when the economy was mired in a deep recession, as the central bank tries to keep a record economic expansion from petering out. Is a rate cut at this moment in the cycle sending a signal? Is the current economy as good as it is going to get?
By the time the CIA delivered Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006, it had already extracted confessions from him through interrogations that included waterboarding, rectal abuse, sleep deprivation and other forms of torture. But none of what Mohammed said during his three and a half years in secret CIA prisons could be used in the military commission trial he would face on charges that he was the architect of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. So within months of his arrival at Guantanamo Bay, the Bush administration had FBI agents question him and other al-Qaeda suspects to obtain fresh, ostensibly lawful confessions. Prosecutors called the new interrogators “clean teams.” Now defense lawyers in the September 11 case — which has been stuck in pretrial hearings since 2012 and will not go to trial before next year — are stepping up their arguments that those teams were not so clean after all.
Trump announced on Twitter Sunday that he will nominate Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) to replace Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence, confirming Axios' earlier reporting that Ratcliffe was favored for the job. Coats will leave office on August 15.
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Eugene Puryear — Co-host of By Any Means Necessary on Radio Sputnik.
Dr. Jack Rasmus — Professor of economics at Saint Mary's College of California and author of "Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression."
Todd Pierce — Retired US Army major.
John Kiriakou — Co-host of Loud and Clear on Radio Sputnik
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