Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
AP’s Today in History for February 12th
President Abraham Lincoln and naturalist Charles Darwin born; The U.S. Senate acquits President Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial; Founding of the NAACP; Cartoonist Charles Schulz dies.
Breakfast Tune Pete Seeger – If I Had A Hammer (The Hammer Song) (Live at Farm Aid 2013)
Something to Think about, Breakfast News & Blogs Below
Army veterans return to Standing Rock to form a human shield against police
Sam Levin, The Guardian
US veterans are returning to Standing Rock and pledging to shield indigenous activists from attacks by a militarized police force, another sign that the fight against the Dakota Access pipeline is far from over.
Army veterans from across the country have arrived in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, or are currently en route after the news that Donald Trump’s administration has allowed the oil corporation to finish drilling across the Missouri river.
The growing group of military veterans could make it harder for police and government officials to try to remove hundreds of activists who remain camped near the construction site and, some hope, could limit use of excessive force by law enforcement during demonstrations. …
North Korea tests ballistic missile; U.S. to avoid escalation
Ju-min Park and Matt Spetalnick, Reuters
North Korea fired a ballistic missile into the sea early on Sunday, the first such test since U.S. President Donald Trump was elected, and his administration indicated that Washington would have a calibrated response to avoid escalating tensions.
The test was likely to have been of an intermediate-range Musudan-class missile that landed in the Sea of Japan, according to South Korea’s military, not an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), which the North has said it could test at any time.
The launch marks the first test of Trump’s vow to get tough on an isolated North Korean regime that last year tested nuclear devices and ballistic missiles at an unprecedented rate in violation of United Nations resolutions. …
Peru says U.S. is not planning to detain wanted ex-president
Reuters
Peru has been informed by U.S. authorities that they are not planning to keep former Peru President Alejandro Toledo, who is wanted in connection with a corruption probe, from boarding a flight to Israel from California in the coming hours, a source in Peru’s Interior Ministry said on Saturday.
The U.S. Justice and State Departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment, said it was unclear why the United States did not want to detain Toledo. The government of Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was pressuring for the United States to change its mind, the source said. …
Trump’s desperate search for a ‘Reichstag Fire’
Hamid Dabashi, Al Jazeera
Donald Trump and his top Islamophobe nomenklatura gathered at the White House, now led by the militant crusader Stephen Bannon, are on a desperate lookout for their “Reichstag Fire” and their favourite propaganda outlet, Fox News, is franticly searching for it – even in Canada.
“Reichstag Fire” was an arson attack on the Reichstag, the German parliament, in Berlin on February 27, 1933. The incident was soon abused by Adolf Hitler and his gang to demand a suspension of civil liberties in systematic preparation for his putsch for total fascist power.
Ever since, the term “Reichstag Fire” is used metaphorically to mark a dreadful event abused by any proto-fascist movement to blame an amorphous internal enemy, to be coupled with an external enemy, and rapidly from there rapidly move towards a total control of the state apparatus by criminalising and crushing public dissent.
Given the fact of Trump’s serious unpopularity with a significant portion of American society, this “Reichstag Fire” incident is increasingly a dangerous possibility. …
- Trump’s Accidental Truth Will Take Him Down
JOHN ESKOW
- Class War Yet?
FRED NAGEL
- Why the Democrats’ Challenge Is Far Greater Than Donald Trump
Harold Meyerson
Something to think about over coffee prozac
Man Hammers 38 Nails With His Skull In Pursuit Of World Record
A Boston-area man wanted a world record and, by gosh, he nailed it ― by pounding 38 nails into a board with his skull in under two minutes.
“Hammer Head” John Ferraro smashed his way to the record earlier this week on the Guinness World Records Italian Show, a weekly YouTube series.
It’s not the first hit for the “Hammer Head,” who also holds the one-minute record (13 nails) and the world record for “Most concrete blocks broken on the head with a bowling ball in three minutes (male). Ferraro broke 45 blocks in that timeframe back in April 2011.
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Scratching your head at how Ferraro is able to do that? His skull is more than twice as thick as the average human’s ― 16 millimeters in thickness compared to an average of 6.5, according to the Daily Mail.Ferraro discovered he was thickheaded when he was a kid and went head-first through a wooden door while chasing his brother, according to Guinness.
When Ferraro isn’t banging his head against nails for glory, he works as a professional wrestler under the name “Gino Martino.”
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