Matt Sheffield at Salon reports—Brexit engineer Nigel Farage hired to promote effort to break California in two:
Nigel Farage, the British politician known for his successful campaign to get the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, has teamed up with the backers of a campaign to split California into two separate states: a coastal state that would be dominated by liberal-dominated portion and an inland state that would be far more conservative. [...]
Farage and his finance partner Arron Banks have reportedly been recruited by Republican operatives Scott Baugh and Gerry Gunster to help raise money to fund the drive to get more than 500,000 signatures from around the state in order to put the proposal before voters on California’s 2018 ballot.
According to UK Daily Mail, the British duo raised around $1 million on a recent trip to California, primarily from technology entrepreneurs and agriculture.
Banks told the paper the campaign would use the same impulse that propelled the Brexit campaign to victory: “It would be portrayed as the Hollywood elites versus the people, breaking up the bad government. Seventy-eight per cent of people in California are unhappy with their government. It’s the world’s sixth-largest economy and it’s very badly run.”
There have been several unsuccessful efforts to subdivide California into different states. Another one, which is actually backed by the government of Russia, is trying to appeal to liberal Golden Staters to get them to secede from the United States entirely. [...]
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“The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. ”
~Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (1970)
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Afghanistanization: But Still No Exit Plan:
After 60 days of comprehensive reviews and leaks about differences over those reviews within the administration, no surprises have emerged in the new strategy for the "good war" in Afghanistan that President Obama announced today. Not even the slightest hint about when the U.S. troop commitment might end. And not a word about the 550 or more prisoners in the infamous Bagram prison, many of them previously tortured and still held without recourse to legal or humanitarian intervention.
Thousands of additional troops and hundreds of civilians with expertise in agriculture and civil projects will be deployed with a major focus on counterterrorism. The objective will be to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda," the President said in a speech which reminded the world of the loss of nearly 3000 on September 11, 2001, and thousands killed—many of them Muslims—by al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere since then. [...]
It’s been obvious since before election day that the Obama administration would follow a different Afghan strategy and employ different tactics from those of the Bush administration. And so it will. But eight years into what will soon be longest war the U.S. has ever fought—the American Indian wars aside—there is still no exit plan for Afghanistan. And none in sight.
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin sifts through the fallout from the Gop health care flop. An extensive riff on that “River of Blood” story, and why
exactly Donald Trump ended up such a lying sack of crap. Did Ivanka take a White House job & office just for the perks? Epshteyn out!
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