Heavily Funded Democrat Falls Short as Georgia House Seat Stays Republican

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Republican Karen Handel soundly defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff in Tuesday’s closely watched, historically expensive race for the congressional seat once held by GOP superstar Newt Gingrich.

Handel, 55, a businesswoman who was Georgia’s secretary of state, had 127,021 votes or 53 percent with 99 percent of precincts reporting.

Ossoff, 30, a documentary filmmaker and former congressional aide who does not live in the House district, had 114,390 votes or 47 percent.

Polls had the race going down to the wire.

“It was going to require all hands on deck, which is exactly what we had,” Handel told a jubilant victory party at 10:39 p.m., thanking President Donald Trump for his support.

Five months into Trump’s presidency, pundits cast the race in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District as a referendum on his administration and a bellwether for the balance of power in Congress nearly a year and a half before the midterm elections.

Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the district by under 2 percentage points in November even though the previous incumbent, Republican Tom Price, won re-election to the seat with about 60 percent of the vote.

The race between Ossoff and Handel is the most expensive House race ever, CBS News reported, with fundraising exceeding $50 million.

By the end of May, Handel and Ossoff had spent $3.2 million and $22.5 million, respectively, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, ABC News reported.

“This is a huge win for conservatives,” Cole Muzio, president of the Family Policy Alliance of Georgia, told The Daily Signal in an email. “A record-setting fundraising haul, busloads of out-of-state volunteers, and national unity around Jon Ossoff could not convince Georgians to vote against their own interests.”

The seat opened in February when the Senate confirmed Price as Trump’s secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Handel beat 10 other Republican candidates in the April 18 “jungle primary” with 20 percent of the vote, setting up the Tuesday runoff with top vote-getter Ossoff, who rolled up 48 percent as one of five Democrats in the race.

Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and House Speaker Paul Ryan all backed Handel in the runoff.

She thanked all of them, as well as House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., hospitalized in serious condition six days after being shot by a man with a rifle and handgun who targeted Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice just outside Washington.

The president tweeted at 10:41 p.m.:

Republicans have held the seat for nearly 40 years, since Gingrich, later speaker of the House, first won it in 1978.

Ossoff’s platform included Democrat touchstones such as defending health care reform, civil rights, environmental protection, and Planned Parenthood.

Handel campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare, supporting the pro-life cause, and achieving “a simpler, fairer, tax code that promotes economic growth” as well as “securing our borders.”

Another special election Tuesday actually turned out to be closer as South Carolina voters filled the House seat previously held by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, who Trump nominated to the post in December.

With 97 percent of precincts reporting, Republican Ralph Norman defeated Democrat Archie Parnell, 51 percent to 48 percent, in the 5th Congressional District. Norman’s margin was about 2,700 votes out of more than 83,000 ballots cast, Fox News reported.

Trump tweeted:

Norman, 64, previously was president of the York County Board of Realtors and served in South Carolina’s House of Representatives for 11 years. Parnell, 66, was a tax attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice and for the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee under Democrats’ leadership.

“It’s time to govern, it’s time to get things done, it’s time to go to work,” Norman said in his victory speech.

In Georgia, Handel was deputy chief of staff to Gov. Sonny Perdue and chairman of the Fulton County Board of Supervisors before running successfully for secretary of state and serving from 2007 to 2010.

She came to the attention of conservatives across the country in 2012, when she quit as senior vice president of public policy at Susan G. Komen for the Cure. She did so after the breast cancer charity reversed its decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood, a reversal she opposed.

“In a district that Donald Trump won by 1 [percentage] point, Karen Handel managed a strong victory and pushed back against the onslaught of Pelosi-Planned Parenthood money that poured into the district,” Muzio of the Family Police Alliance told The Daily Signal, adding:

After a disciplined campaign in the first round, Ossoff showed his true colors in the runoff when he attacked Karen Handel for opposing Planned Parenthood funding. There will be a number of narratives that come from this result, and the significance of this runoff will almost certainly be overstated. But, make no mistake about it, this was a win for conservatives.

Republicans previously won special congressional elections in Kansas and Montana.

Republicans previously won special congressional elections in Kansas and Montana.

“Democrats literally bet the House on a win here, and this defeat will certainly leave their base utterly demoralized ahead of 2018,” Muzio said.

Georgia’s 6th District includes northern suburbs of Atlanta and parts of Cobb, Fulton, and Dekalb counties.

Ossoff was a national security staffer and aide to Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., for five years. He grew up in the area, but does not currently reside in the 6th District, as The Washington Post reported.

During an interview Tuesday on MSNBC, Ossoff told Stephanie Ruhle that his living outside the district did not matter to voters, and that he had not considered moving.

“Well, if voters were raising that as a serious concern, Steph, maybe I would,” Ossoff said, adding:

But voters care about how policy and how representation is going to impact their daily lives. They know I grew up in this community, they know I grew up in the 6th District, they know why I’m a couple of miles south of the line. It’s not a major issue in the race.

Handel was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the Maryland suburb of Upper Marlboro.

Trump raised some eyebrows with this effusive tweet this morning, which some pundits predicted could hurt Handel:

Four hours later, the hospitalized Scalise tweeted:

Dan Holler, spokesman for Heritage Action for America, the lobbying affiliate of The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email that Handel’s win is good news for the Republican Party.

“Despite tens of millions of dollars flowing into the race—a level of funding that cannot be replicated in every midterm race—Republicans managed to hold on,” Holler said, adding:

It would be a mistake to view this as a sign of confidence in the national party, though. The slow legislative pace and the absence of a bold governing agenda is dampening Republican enthusiasm, and absent conservative policy victories, that may continue heading into 2018.

Benita Dodd, vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a nonpartisan research organization, told The Daily Signal in an email that the state’s 6th District race was largely civil despite what many partisans saw as high stakes.

“The most encouraging part of the 6th District runoff, the most expensive congressional election in U.S. history, is that it managed to stay mostly civil in an increasingly hostile political arena,” Dodd said, adding:

That said, Jon Ossoff’s campaign waged a sophisticated, successful ‘Wag the Dog’ operation: It began with a 30-year-old unknown, a Democrat who had never held office and doesn’t even live in the 6th District. With funding largely from campaign donations outside the state, he was portrayed as a palatable and viable challenger to Karen Handel, a well-known, respected, and successful GOP veteran and resident of the reliably Republican district.

The spending points to what’s to come in the midterms and beyond, she said:

This costly effort is portentous of the direction of future campaigns. It’s ominous, given the attention span of many voters in a 140-characters-or-less era, that campaign rhetoric can be so easily manipulated. As for the overwhelming cost, it’s an unpleasant downside that early voting ratchets up the cost of political campaigns.

(For more from the author of “Heavily Funded Democrat Falls Short as Georgia House Seat Stays Republican” please click HERE)

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Hundreds of Pedophiles Arrested in Nationwide Sting Operation Involving Dozens of Law Enforcement Agencies

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By Patch. Nearly 200 suspected child predators across the Southland have been arrested as part of a massive two-month, multi-agency investigation of internet crimes against children, authorities announced Friday.

Police conducted thousands of investigations and raided hundreds of homes across Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County and the Inland Empire, culminating in some high-profile arrests. As of Friday, 186 suspected child predators were arrested as part of “Operation Broken Heart IV,” a nationwide law enforcement effort, according to the Los Angeles Police Department . . .

Members of the task force conducted almost 1,400 investigations and served nearly 400 search warrants. (Read more from “Hundreds of Pedophiles Arrested in Nationwide Sting Operation Involving Dozens of Law Enforcement Agencies” HERE)

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51 Louisianans Arrested on Child Exploitation Charges

By Associated Press. Louisiana law enforcement officials say they arrested 51 people on child exploitation charges this spring as part of an annual nationwide crackdown . . .

Officials say there were more than 1,000 arrests made across the country as part of the operation, which was conducted in April and May. More than 150 Louisiana law enforcement agencies participated in the initiative. (Read more from “51 Louisianans Arrested on Child Exploitation Charges” HERE)

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Senate Bill: Travelers Must Register Cash and Digital Amounts Over $10K or Face 10 Years in Prison and Full Asset Seizure

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A new bill seeks to track your money and assets incessantly, will enjoin any business with government ties to act as a de facto arm of DHS, and would steal all of your assets — including Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — should you fail to report funds when traveling with over $10,000.

Under the guise of combating money laundering, Senate Bill 1241, “Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017,” ramps up regulation of digital currency and imposes other autocratic financial controls in an attempt to ensure none of your assets can escape one of the State’s most nefarious, despised powers: civil asset forfeiture.

All of this under the farcically broad umbrella of fighting terrorism.

Civil forfeiture grants the government robbery writ large: your cash, property, and assets can be stolen completely sans due process, your guilt — frequently pertaining to drug ‘crimes’ — matters not.

A court verdict of not guilty doesn’t even guarantee the return of State-thefted property.

In fact, the government can seize virtually whatever it wants if it so much as suspects some of your assets might have been acquired through or used in the commission of even lesser crimes.

For some time, a war on cash has been brewing behind the closed doors of government, and — although officials prefer to claim counterfeiting, terrorism, and money laundering as the impetus for asset tracking — in actuality, physical currency facilitates black market and untaxed transactions, and, most imperatively to the U.S., cannot be thefted under civil asset forfeiture laws as easily as money exchanged digitally.

Characterized as an effort to “to improve the prohibitions on money laundering, and for other purposes,” the bill severely curtails the right to travel freely, without undue hindrance, as travelers with more than $10,000 in assets — including those held digitally, like Bitcoin — must file a report with the U.S. government.

Noncompliance with the tyrannical law — including failing to fill out the aforementioned form — would incur penalties befitting a fascist dictatorship: an individual could find the entirety of their assets seized, not just those unreported, and could be locked in a prison cage for up to ten years.

To be clear, the State wants to write a permission slip to seize all of your assets — bank accounts, including, specifically, “safety deposit boxes,” prepaid cards, gift cards, prepaid phones, prepaid coupons, cryptocurrencies, all of it — even for being remiss in reporting what you’re traveling with.

Considering one’s digital assets veritably follow wherever that travel takes them, a cryptocurrency portfolio would theoretically have to be reported each time that person travels outside the confines of the U.S.

Of course, the legislation in actuality just amends laws pertaining to assets and travel already considered dictatorial — right now, failure to fill out the form carries not just the penalty of seizure, but a sentence of up to five years behind bars.

“And if that weren’t enough, this bill also gives them with new authority to engage in surveillance and wiretapping (including phone, email, etc.) if they have even a hint of suspicion that you might be transporting excess ‘monetary instruments,’” Simon Black of SovereignMan.com reports.

“Usually wiretapping authority is reserved for major crimes like kidnapping, human trafficking, felony fraud, etc.

“Now we can add cash to that list.”

But it wouldn’t just be the government hawkishly surveilling your every transaction, as, essentially, all retailers would be roped into becoming State spies — any business selling gift or prepaid cards would be required to report those, too.

Worse — and in defiance of current structures pertaining to digital currency — the government wishes to somehow require issuers of cryptocurrencies into its abhorrent, ostensible money-laundering police spy ring.

According to the legislation, reports Smaulgold.com, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection must, within 18 months of the legislation’s passage, devise a “border protection strategy to interdict and detect prepaid access devices, digital currencies, or other similar instruments, at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States, including an assessment of infrastructure needed [emphasis added] to carry out the strategy […]

“The obligation to declare amounts in any form over $10,000 exists, irrespective of whether custom officials have a way of detecting such holdings. Since digital currencies technically travel with the holder [wherever] the holder goes, one would have to declare one’s entire crypto portfolio each time the holder entered the U.S.”

Travelers possessing assets, precious metals, and accounts in excess of $10,000 held outside the United States, however, would not be required to declare those to the government — perhaps leaving an albeit sketchy option for those wary of unscrupulous authorities.

While the government insists ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear,’ the Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017 proves you might not be able to hide anything from its greedy clutches — and if you try, you could wind up thrown in a cage for a decade, penniless upon release.

Welcome to America, where your assets are literally the government’s business, and freedom is anything but free. (For more from the author of “Senate Bill: Travelers Must Register Cash and Digital Amounts Over $10K or Face 10 Years in Prison and Full Asset Seizure” please click HERE)

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Otto Warmbier Dead: Trump Condemns ‘Brutal’ North Korea Regime

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President Trump slammed North Korea’s “brutal regime” Monday after the death of college student Otto Warmbier, who was released by the communist nation in a coma last week.

“Lot of bad things happened,” Trump said during a White House meeting with technology CEOs, “but at least we got him home to be with his parents.”

“It’s a brutal regime,” Trump went on, “and we’ll be able to handle it.”

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the United States held North Korea accountable for Warmbier’s “unjust imprisonment” and demanded that the country release three other Americans it is holding prisoner for alleged crimes against the state. The U.S. government has previously accused North Korea of using such detainees as political pawns. (Read more from “Otto Warmbier Dead: Trump Condemns ‘Brutal’ North Korea Regime” HERE)

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Bill De Blasio’s Astonishing Hypocrisy in One Cringe-Worthy Photo

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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was responsible for an astonishing display of transparent hypocrisy, during a rally Monday against state Republican plans to increase the number of charter schools in New York City.

On June 30, mayoral control over city schools expires, reverting control of city schools back to 32 community school boards. De Blasio claims that if he loses control of the school system, there will be chaos and widespread corruption.

State senate Republicans want to increase the number of charter schools in New York City and are refusing to extend the mayor’s control without legislation raising the cap on charter schools and approving tax breaks for individuals who make donations to public, private, and parochial schools. The Democratic majority in the state assembly opposes the measure, creating a stalemate.

Mayor de Blasio held a rally Monday accusing state Republicans of using children as “political pawns” and demanding that they back off the charter school initiative. Mayor de Blasio made his political point by bringing children on stage with him.

Yes, this actually happened.

This is shameful. Dishonorable. Cowardly. Dishonest. Ignoble. Repugnant, and a thousand other adjectives that invoke some sense of what a small-souled, pathetic cretin the current mayor of New York City is. (For more from the author of “Bill De Blasio’s Astonishing Hypocrisy in One Cringe-Worthy Photo” please click HERE)

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Trump CANNOT Be Indicted, Say DOJ Memoranda

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Yes, it’s just that simple. The long-held official policy of the Department of Justice is that a sitting president of the United States cannot be indicted, according to official DOJ memoranda. Even The New York Times agrees…

Mark Levin informed his listeners of this fact during his radio program Monday night, saying, “whether I agree with that position or not is quite beside the point.”

“So all this talk about whether Trump personally is under investigation for obstruction of justice, or whether Trump violated the law, it will never go to court … if Robert Mueller should seek to indict Trump, a sitting president, in the end the Supreme Court would throw it out,” Levin continued.

So why does the endless cloud of investigation around the Trump administration exist? It exists generally to distract and derail Trump’s presidency, and specifically for the purposes of impeachment.

Levin said as much: “Mueller’s investigation, to the extent it involves Trump himself, has as its purpose to lay a predicate or a pretext, if you will, for impeachment — and that’s not that man’s job!” (For more from the author of “Trump CANNOT Be Indicted, Say DOJ Memoranda” please click HERE)

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Federal Judge Rules Cross Violates Law and Must Be Removed

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Atheists across the fruited plain are rejoicing after a federal judge declared that a cross erected in a Florida park violated the law and must come down.

“I am aware that there is a lot of support in Pensacola to keep the cross as is, and I understand and I understand and respect that point of view,” U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson wrote in his ruling. “But, the law is the law.”

The lawsuit was filed in 2016 by the notorious Freedom From Religion Foundation and the American Humanist Association on behalf of four Pensacola citizens. Click here to view photos of the cross.

The judge pointed out that park has hosted tens of thousands of people for roughly 75 years without causing anyone offense — until now.

“When a city park serving all citizens — nonreligious, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Christian — contains a towering Latin cross, this sends a message of exclusion to non-Christians, and a corresponding message to Christians that they are favored citizens,” said Annie Gaylor, the organization’s perpetually offended co-founder. (Read more from “Federal Judge Rules Cross Violates Law and Must Be Removed” HERE)

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How to Resolve Tangled Relationship Between Congress and Homeland Security

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With homeland security being such a national priority, one would expect Congress and the Department of Homeland Security to have a well-organized relationship.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

On Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee marked up a bill that would reauthorize the Department of Homeland Security for the first time since 2002, when the department was conceived.

Why has Congress put off the task for so long? In large part because over the past 15 years, Homeland Security has reported to between 80 and 120 different committees and subcommittees in Congress.

This complicated oversight arrangement exists because the committees that originally had jurisdiction over the department’s component organizations refuse to give up their power.

When portions of 22 different organizations, spanning from the Department of Defense to the Department of Transportation, were consolidated following 9/11 to form the Department of Homeland Security, they all continued to report to their original congressional committees.

Ultimately, this fractured reporting process complicates the reauthorization process. Why do eight committee chairs have to work together to authorize a single department?

In addition, Congress’ impracticable way of organizing its jurisdiction lends itself to producing an oversight process that is duplicative and contradictory.

For example, the homeland security committees could provide guidance to the Department of Homeland Security on how ports or border crossings should be improved. The agriculture, finance, judiciary, and other committees, however, could have completely different opinions, forcing Homeland Security to reconcile multiple views from Congress.

Not only does this harm Homeland Security operations, it lessens the impact of congressional oversight.

Further, because the department reports to around 100 committees and subcommittees, it spends countless work hours and millions of dollars testifying before Congress on its progress and status.

This repetitive and wasteful habit must be eliminated in order to allow the department to return to its primary mission of protecting the homeland.

In order to resolve the oversight conflict, the Department of Homeland Security’s reporting system must be streamlined.

The department should only report to six congressional committees: the House and Senate Homeland Security, Intelligence, and Appropriations Committees. In doing so, Homeland Security would be following the model of the Department of Defense.

After all, it’s a bit ridiculous that Homeland Security, which has a budget one-tenth the size of the Department of Defense, currently reports to over three times as many committees.

The current Department of Homeland Security oversight structure that Congress has in place prioritizes politics over security. Countless bipartisan organizations and individuals have acknowledged that the prevailing system is outdated and only remains in existence to satisfy narrow parochial interests.

As such, it is pivotal that these power politics are put aside in order to protect the interests of the American people.

Streamlining congressional oversight would allow both Congress and the Department of Homeland Security to function more efficiently, and the U.S. homeland will be safer because of it. (For more from the author of “How to Resolve Tangled Relationship Between Congress and Homeland Security” please click HERE)

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History Channel: CIA Used Prostitutes to Drug US Victims With LSD for Mind Control Project

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Your government will, indeed, perform experiments on you if it so chooses, and while some are undertaken with Nazi-esque malevolence — like the atrocities committed in the Tuskegee Study, a 40-year operation infecting innocent Black men with syphilis — others, like Midnight Climax, out the State’s utterly twisted flirtation with mind control.

Part of the notorious MKULTRA program, Midnight Climax — every bit as lascivious as one would expect from an agency founded in duplicity — might be one of the CIA’s most revealing experiments in thought control through substances, as well as its lesser-known entrée into the business of drugs and prostitution.

And now the corporate, mainstream media has finally decided to address the abhorrent crimes committed under the green light by nefarious CIA Director Allen Dulles — who signed off on MKULTRA and, thus, its iterations, on April 13, 1953.

One part in a series on the History Channel, America’s War on Drugs, reveals in documents and interviews how the CIA paid prostitutes to entice unwitting, working-class johns with illicit sex in order to dose them unknowingly with pure LSD — acid, lysergic acid diethylamide, one of the psychedelics exploding into America’s drug scene in the 1960s — for the project known as Midnight Climax.

Amid fears The Russians might perfect mind control before the United States government could manage to do so, the CIA turned unapologetically to experiments with LSD, leaving victims none the wiser — setting up fake brothels in San Francisco and, later, Marin County, where hired prostitutes would bring the agency’s prey: the unremarkable men of the lower and working classes who would be unlikely to retaliate if anything went awry.

“The CIA was scared stiff the KGB was going to get all this LSD and come over and start dosing people,” Richard Stratton, a former hippie pot kingpin ultimately caught and imprisoned, explains of Midnight Climax for a preview of the History Channel show. “So, we bought every drop of LSD in existence at that point.

“They gave it to George White, and let George White start dosing people.”

George Hunter White, a federal narcotics agent and covert captain with the CIA precursor agency, Office of Strategic Services, sought to develop or discover a substance with potential to control the minds of prisoners-of-war — a reportedly failed attempt to best the KGB — so they would reveal privy and classified information upon interrogation.

“American chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the brains behind White’s brawn,” Troy Hooper wrote for SF Weekly in 2012. “It was the height of McCarthyism in the early ’50s, and government intelligence leaders, claiming fear of communist regimes, were using hallucinogens to induce confessions from prisoners of war held in Korea, and brainwash spies into changing allegiances. What better way to examine the effects of LSD than to dose unsuspecting citizens in New York City and San Francisco?”

Stocked with booze and attempting to mimic a “French whorehouse,” rooms in the agency’s bogus brothels — replete with images of women in bondage and prints by artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec — also came complete with two-way mirrors for operatives to kick back with martinis, watch the drug-fogged sexual activity, and scribble notes on what they observed.

“It was supposed to look rich, but it was furnished like crap,” a narcotics agent and frequent visitor to one of the elaborate brothels told John Marks, who authored, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate:’ The CIA and Mind Control.

“An unsuspecting john would think he had bought a night of pleasure,” Marks penned, but would “go back to a strange apartment, and wind up zonked.”

Employing various code words and the sterile terminology to be expected of the CIA, agents recorded the encounters diligently — and although the bulk of those documents were destroyed in a purge of information on MKULTRA and Midnight Climax, seven boxes escaped the agency’s attention, surviving to provide insight into both those programs and the psychology of the agency.

One example, quoted by LewRockwell.com, states plainly,

Certain individuals [the prostitutes] would covertly administer this material [the drugs] to other people [the johns] in accordance with [White’s] instructions.

Knowing the prostitutes faced inherent risks in the operation and that the program could be derailed easily — particularly as its illegal nature might raise eyebrows around the agency and elsewhere — the CIA’s hired sex workers were not required to keep receipts or otherwise account for spent funds.

As such untenable toeing of the lines tends to do, Midnight Climax quickly devolved into an authoritarian operation, devoid of medical screening and care for its forced test subjects, and ultimately expanding to multiple brothels — and myriad drugs.

In fact, one of the first brothels set up by the CIA in New York City saw the program’s first tragedy — U.S. biological warfare specialist Frank Olson either leapt or was pushed from a tenth-story window in 1953.

Sans sufficient scientific controls and medical pre-screening, a 1976 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities asserted,

Paradoxically, greater care seemed to have been taken for the safety of foreign nations against whom LSD was used abroad. In several cases [overseas] medical examinations were performed prior to the use of LSD. The [domestic] program … demonstrates a failure of the CIA’s leadership to pay adequate attention to the rights of individuals and to provide effective guidance to CIA employees. Though it was known that the testing was dangerous, the lives of subjects were placed in jeopardy and their rights were ignored during the 10 years of testing that followed Dr. Olson’s death.

Indeed, Midnight Climax failed — and miserably, shamefully so.

No employable tactics in LSD were discovered and no efficacious counter-intelligence operations or methods were ever derived — but the program, and its parent MKULTRA certainly succeeded in ruining the lives of many of the program’s unfortunate victims.

SF Weekly reported,

Testing of unwitting individuals was suspended in 1964 [after the discovery and outrage over the program by the CIA’s Inspector General the previous year], at least officially. Still, the CIA safe houses in San Francisco and New York City continued to operate for a year and a half longer. Scrutiny of the program intensified at CIA headquarters in Virginia, and subsequently the Bay Area safe houses shut down in 1965. New York City’s operation stopped in 1966. Intelligence officers conceded that the drug-testing exposed the agency to a serious ‘moral problem.’

Considering the wholly egregious manifestation of Midnight Climax — its mendacious premise, disgustingly manipulative facets, and the eagerness with which depraved operatives carried out their tasks — it’s a wonder the CIA managed to concede it had dismissed scruples to carry out these human experiments.

It must be noted that psychedelics, in themselves, are not necessarily harmful substances — it was the surreptitious slipping of LSD to victims without their knowledge and without medical screening or care which led to deleterious effects for an untold number of people which caused direct harm by the CIA.

Programs like MKULTRA might have officially ended decades ago, but given the current climate of heightened xenophobia, Red Scare-anoia, and ruthless and unforgiving domestic surveillance, it would be imprudent — if not foolhardy — to grant the U.S. government a clean slate of trust.

To wit — and to what should be the consternation of the American public and a remarkably inarguable cause for citizen vigilance — White, who died in 1975, later recalled of the odious attempts at mind control,

I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?

(For more from the author of “History Channel: CIA Used Prostitutes to Drug Victims With LSD for Mind Control Project” please click HERE)

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Good News: Scalise Upgraded From ‘Critical’ to ‘Serious’ Condition

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Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise was upgraded from “critical” to “serious condition” Saturday and continued to show signs of improvement after he was wounded in a shooting at a Republican baseball practice outside Washington. Medstar Washington Hospital Center released the update on behalf of the Scalise family . . .

The man who shot Scalise and others at the baseball practice had with him a piece of paper with doodles and the names of three lawmakers, according to a person familiar with the case.

The person told The Associated Press on Saturday that investigators aren’t sure of the significance of the names and don’t know if it was a list of people he was targeting. This person was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity. The person did not disclose the names, but said those listed had been briefed. (Read more from “Good News: Scalise Upgraded From ‘Critical’ to ‘Serious’ Condition” HERE)

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