Five Minutes Five Issues: USS Liberty, Obama Deportations, Vermont Police, Dennis Rodman, CSA Monuments

A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Friday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to the new episode here:

Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.

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What Michael Moore Gets Right and Wrong about the Police State

Documentarian Michael Moore, in a Friday post at Twitter, linked to video of Alex Wubbels, a nurse at a Salt Lake City, Utah hospital, being arrested for refusing to comply with a police demand that she draw blood from an unconscious patient at the hospital without first the patient consenting, the patient being arrested, or a warrant being issued. While Moore admirably alerted people to what he termed the “authoritarian police state” in America and provided them with a vivid example of that police state in action, he clouded the issue by wrongly suggesting that the police state is a new creation caused by Donald Trump being president of the United States.

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Five Minutes Five Issues: Secretary of Raytheon, Police Militarization, Google, NYC Cigarettes, Animals’ Marijuana

A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Saturday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to the new episode here:

Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.

Starting in five four three two one.

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Lew Rockwell: US Fascism behind Websites Purge

In a new interview with host Tom Woods at the Tom Woods Show, libertarian communicator Lew Rockwell provided a fascinating critique of private technology companies such as PayPal and the Google subsidiary YouTube recently ending their provision of services to organizations they deem unworthy. Rockwell, chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and publisher of the popular website lewrockwell.com, identifies the companies’ decisions as part of the shift toward fascism in America.

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Lawrence Wilkerson: Expect New Afghanistan War Policy to ‘Deepen the Failure’

“The professional predilection of military,” says retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson in a Thursday Real News Network interview with host Paul Jay regarding the Afghanistan War policy President Donald Trump announced last week, “is to keep the war going, not to end it, because that’s where you get your rank, that’s where you get your progression, your notoriety, your fame, your fortune, and so forth.” This has been the case, Wilkerson argues, for the last 5,000 years and has “just gotten a little more sophisticated” over time.

In Afghanistan, with Trump having put the generals in charge, Wilkerson says we should expect the military to be ”reinforcing strategic failure and thus deepening that failure” that has developed over the last sixteen years of US military action in the country.

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Five Minutes Five Issues: Bundy Ranch, Trump Recants, Deadly Tasers, Ukraine Weapons, Anthem Protest

A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Friday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to the new episode here:

Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.

Starting in five four three two one.

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Ron Paul Says President Trump’s Afghanistan War Plan Calls for Perpetual War and is a Recipe for Disaster

What does prominent nonintervention advocate and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul think of President Donald Trump’s Monday night announcement of the Trump administration’s policy regarding the Afghanistan War? Paul said in a Tuesday interview at RT that the Trump plan calls for perpetual war and is a “recipe for disaster.”

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New Senate Intelligence Authorization Bill Includes Language Threatening WikiLeaks

The Senate Intelligence Authorization Act (SB 1761), introduced Friday by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and already approved by the committee, concludes with a one sentence section — Section 623 — that appears to threaten WikiLeaks with potential harsh actions. The section categorizes the news organization, which helps expose information obtained from whistleblowers, as resembling “a non-state hostile intelligence service.”

“Senior leaders” of WikiLeaks, such as Julian Assange who will not leave the Ecuador Embassy in London for fear of being arrested and sent to the United States for detention or prosecution, are also included in the categorization.

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The Afghanistan Speech President Trump Should Deliver Tonight

President Donald Trump is expected to deliver a speech tonight in which he announces the deployment of more United States troops to Afghanistan to take part in America’s longest war. Over at The Intercept today Jon Schwarz and Robert Mackey document many of Trump’s pronouncements over the last few years, largely on Twitter, opposing continuation of the war and proposing that the US troops leave Afghanistan. Included in Schwarz and Mackey’s article is a video Trump made in March of 2012 in which Trump emphatically declared “Afghanistan is a total and complete disaster.”

Trump further stated in the video:

Let’s get with it. Get out of Afghanistan. We’ve wasted billions and billions of dollars and, more importantly, thousands and thousands of lives, not to mention all of these young men and young women that come home and they really have problems.

It would be refreshing to see Trump stand up to the generals surrounding him, put down his prepared speech, and make a statement like this one he made five years back. But, don’t count on it happening.

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Lawrence Wilkerson Explains the Danger of Trump Handing War Decisions over to Pentagon

Retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, interviewed last week by host Aaron Maté at The Real News, explained the danger that is materializing from President Donald Trump significantly decreasing presidential control over the military’s war activities.

Responding to Maté’s comment that from Trump’s January inauguration through this month, “Trump has dropped more than 20,000 bombs, about 80% of what President Obama dropped in all of 2016,” Wilkerson, who was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell and now teaches at the College of William & Mary, advises that Trump removing presidential restraint and oversight over military actions overseas means more destruction will occur to advance purposes far removed from protecting Americans — to benefit armaments manufacturers and advance training, for example.

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