Military Resistance 15E3
Trumps Latest Approval Rating Plummets:
“61% Of Voters Expressed The Sentiment That Trump Is Dishonest”
“59% Said They Thought He Didn’t Care About The Average American”
5/11/17BY TIM MARCIN, Newsweek
It’s no secret President Donald Trump isn’t popular with the majority of Americans, but a new poll this week shows he is beginning to lose some of the demographics that thrust him into the White House.
The Quinnipiac University survey found that just 36 percent of voters approve of the job Trump is doing, while 58 percent disapprove. That’s a "near-record" negative rating and a drop from last month, the poll noted.
In its April 19 poll, Quinnipiac University found Trump’s approval rating stood at 40 percent with 56 percent disapproving.
Perhaps even more troubling for the president: The folks who made up his base in November’s election appear to be growing weary. White voters are fleeing.
In the latest survey, 61 percent of voters expressed the sentiment that Trump is dishonest, while 59 percent said they thought he didn’t care about the average American and 66 percent thought he wasn’t level-headed.
"There is no way to spin or sugarcoat these sagging numbers," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, in a statement.
"The erosion of white men, white voters without college degrees and independent voters, the declaration by voters that President Donald Trump’s first 100 days were mainly a failure and deepening concerns about Trump’s honesty, intelligence and level headedness are red flags that the administration simply can’t brush away."
The Quinnipiac survey polled 1,078 voters over the phone from May 4 through May 9. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Trump’s approval rating has mostly hovered around 40 percent recently—the weighted average from data-focused website FiveThirtyEight had him at 41.3 percent Thursday—but his support has seemingly taken a dip in the wake of Republicans in the House of Representatives passing the American Health Care Act, otherwise known as Trumpcare. A Morning Consult/Politico survey released Wednesday found the president’s approval rating dipped four percentage points, to 44 percent, after the passage of the bill, which just 38 percent of respondents supported
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AFGHANISTAN WAR REPORTS
Mourning A Soldier
Army Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar
May 10, 2017Michael E. Miller, Washington Post
They had followed him across the country and back, from one military base to another.
On Wednesday, Army Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar’s wife and five children followed him one last time: six figures, dressed in black, walking behind the caisson that carried his casket through Arlington National Cemetery.
As men in uniform lifted the flag-draped casket off the back of the horse-drawn carriage and marched across the grass, the fallen soldier’s 4-year-old son raised a small hand in salute.
De Alencar, 37, was killed April 8 when his Special Forces unit clashed with Islamic State fighters in eastern Afghanistan.
He was the first American killed in combat in Afghanistan in more than four months. Now his death could mark the beginning of a new stage in America’s longest war.
Five days after he died, U.S. forces dropped a 22,000-pound explosive - nicknamed "the mother of all bombs" - near where De Alencar was shot. Since then, two more American soldiers have been killed fighting the Islamic State in the same area.
De Alencar’s burial comes as the Trump administration weighs a re-escalation of the war in Afghanistan, which has lasted more than 15 years and claimed the lives of 2,216 U.S. service members. The president has declined to say whether he personally ordered the use of one of the largest non-nuclear bombs in the U.S. arsenal, or whether its use was a response to De Alencar’s death.
But De Alencar’s relatives said they viewed the bombing as a show of support from Trump, and a sign that a forgotten war may be a priority again. "It gave me reassurance that our president is going to put it out there that when it’s one of our own killed, we are going to retaliate," said De Alencar’s wife, Natasha. "It’s about time," added his father, Joao. "We’ve been too soft for too many years."
Mark De Alencar always dreamed of joining the Special Forces. The only surprise was how long it took him.
De Alencar grew up on a military base in Germany, where his Brazilian-born father was stationed with the U.S. Army. Once, when he was about 10 and on vacation on the French Riviera, De Alencar and another boy took a boat and began paddling into the Mediterranean. His parents called the police, but the boys were rescued by a boat full of Italian tourists.
"It was an adventure for him," Joao De Alencar recalled. "He always did things like that," said his mother, Maria. "But he was never scared."
When his family moved to Edgewood, Maryland, he was 12 and walked around the neighborhood in a bright yellow-and-green Brazil jersey, kicking a soccer ball. "He’d always try to get us to play soccer with him," recalled Michael Page, 38, who lived a few blocks away. "We were like, ‘C’mon, Mark. Play basketball.’ "
As a teen, De Alencar grew to be over six feet tall. His size came in handy playing football for Joppatowne High School, and for navigating a sometimes-dangerous neighborhood.
"Mark never instigated confrontation, but he would never back down from it," Page said.
One night in 1997, Page was stabbed three times after a basketball game in the local park.
"I could hear the air slurping through my chest," he said. As he stumbled home, Page spotted De Alencar, who raced to Page’s house and called an ambulance, then returned to take care of Page until it arrived.
"I always wonder how life would have turned out if I hadn’t run into him that night," Page recalled. "He saved my life."
De Alencar wanted to join the Army after graduating from Joppatowne in 1998, but an arrest for marijuana possession got in the way, according to his father, then a Baltimore police officer.
De Alencar found work as a carpenter, and he became a single father when his girlfriend committed suicide, leaving him with a young son.
Natasha was also a single parent, with two young children. She and Mark had been friends in high school. They reconnected in 2003 when De Alencar helped fix her mother’s car, began dating and married several years later.
De Alencar earned a good income during the housing boom but always talked about trying again to enlist. When the housing market collapsed in 2009, he met with an Army recruiter. This time, De Alencar was accepted. He began boot camp in July 2009, deployed to Iraq a year later, then began training to try out for the Army Rangers.
In 2015, after Natasha had given birth to their fifth child, the family moved from a base in Hawaiito Fort Bragg, N.C., so that De Alencar could complete the grueling, 18-month Special Forces’ qualification course.
Natasha worried about her husband’s safety but didn’t want to stand in his way.
"As a wife, you don’t want to be the roadblock keeping someone from doing what they want to do," she said. "He always reassured me and the kids that it would be OK."
Before De Alencar flew to Afghanistan on Feb. 11, he promised his 17-year-old daughter, Octavia, that he would be back in time to see her graduate on May 25. By then, they were living at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
At the airport, Natasha needled him, as she always did before he went away.
"Don’t die," she said. "Come back, OK?"
The last time she spoke to him was March 31, the day before his 37th birthday. They talked about house shopping together when he returned. Then he said he was about to go on a mission and wouldn’t be able to call for a while.
A week later, Natasha, her mother and the children had just returned from soccer practice when her 13-year-old daughter, Tatiyana, burst through the front door. She had been retrieving her headphones from the car when she spotted two men in uniforms walking toward the house.
Octavia peered outside and then raced upstairs, crying.
"Mom, you need to come here," she said. "Two men are at the door like when something bad happens in the movies."
"I literally froze," Natasha recalled. When she finally was able to force herself to walk downstairs, the two Army men told her that her husband had been killed.
"I’ll never forget those super white, clean gloves, or the expressionless look on their faces," she said.
When her 15-year-old son, Rodrigo, realized what had happened, he hurled a television remote against the wall. Natasha asked her mother to break the news to her youngest son, Marcos.
"Your daddy went to heaven," Yolanda Thornton told the 4-year-old.
Two days later, the family was present when De Alencar’s remains were removed from the plane at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
"That’s when it sank in for me," Octavia said. Her father wouldn’t be able to watch her graduate, as he had promised. They wouldn’t go to Disneyland together as they had planned.
For Natasha, the pain comes in waves. It ebbs when she is with her children, only to rise when she is alone.
"Nighttime is the worst," she said.
On Monday, exactly a month after De Alencar’s death, his body lay in a white-lined casket in an Abingdon, Md., funeral home. On his medal-decorated chest lay a photo of him and Natasha inscribed with the words: "Our love." Beside his head lay a blue Brazil soccer jersey.
"He wore this one all the time," Rodrigo said, staring down at his father, who still wore a patchy Special Forces beard.
Marcos, not yet in kindergarten, played with his cousins on a nearby couch.
"I’m gonna look at my dad," he announced at one point, climbing up onto a bench beside the coffin, then quickly running away.
"That’s creepy," he said.
On Wednesday, Marcos sat between his two older sisters, swinging his feet as a military chaplain spoke about sacrifice. He covered his ears as a firing party unleashed three volleys into the cloud-dappled sky.
A military band played "America the Beautiful" as soldiers folded the flag that had draped the silver casket. Army Brig. Gen. Antonio Fletcher presented the flag to Natasha De Alencar, who clutched it to her chest as she wept behind black sunglasses.
Fletcher then gave flags to De Alencar’s children, kneeling low to give Marcos his before patting the boy solemnly on the head.
POLITICIANS REFUSE TO HALT THE BLOODSHED
THE TROOPS HAVE THE POWER TO STOP THE WAR
Security In Afghanistan Likely To Get Worse Says U.S. Intel Chief:
“The Government Can Claim To Control Or Influence Only 57% Of The Country”
May 11, 2017By Idrees Ali, Reuters [Excerpts]
The security situation in Afghanistan will further deteriorate even if there is a modest increase in U.S. military support for the war-torn country, the top U.S. intelligence official said on Thursday, as President Donald Trump’s administration weighs sending more forces to Afghanistan.
Afghan army units are pulling back, and in some cases have been forced to abandon more scattered and rural bases, and the government can claim to control or influence only 57 percent of the country, according to U.S. military estimates from earlier this year.
Some U.S. officials said they questioned the benefit of sending more troops to Afghanistan because any politically palatable number would not be enough to turn the tide, much less create stability and security. To date, more than 2,300 Americans have been killed and over 17,000 wounded.
President Ashraf Ghani’s U.S.-backed government remains plagued by corruption and divided by factions loyal to political strongmen whose armed supporters often are motivated by ethnic, family, and regional loyalties.
“It Feels Like Groundhog Day”
US Marines Return To Helmand Province:
“Of The Province’s 14 Districts, Only Two Are Firmly Under Government Control”
“Deep Seated Corruption That Has Gutted Finances And Morale”
30 April 2017Sune Engel Rasmussen in Camp Shorab, The Guardian [Excerpts]
When thousands of US Marines flooded into Helmand eight years ago, they demonstrated Barack Obama’s resolve to quash the Taliban once and for all and leave a peaceful province for Afghans to take over.
Two years after the US flag was lowered, however, the Marines are back, in a sign that things turned out rather differently.
“It feels like Groundhog Day,” said Staff Sergeant Robin Spotts, on his third Helmand deployment. About half of the 300 Marines who have arrived over the past two weeks have served in Helmand before. Even the flag raised in a ceremony on Saturday was the same, having been kept at the Pentagon since October 2014.
US Marines at a flag-raising ceremony at the renamed Camp Shorab in Helmand. Photograph: Sune Engel Rasmussen for the Guardian
The situation now is worse than when they left. Areas where the US military had outposts and walked the bazaars are now inaccessible even for Afghan forces. Of the province’s 14 districts, only two are firmly under government control.
In Marjah, seized in one of the largest operations of the war in 2010, the district centre receives provisions from the air.
Sangin, the deadliest district in the country for both US Marines and British troops, fell to the Taliban again in March, though US forces downplayed the moment.
The Taliban are now encroaching on the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, and have periodically managed to block the main highway to Kandahar.
The Afghan army’s 215th Corps in Helmand, with whom the US marines will be working, struggles not only with record-high casualties but deep seated corruption that has gutted finances and morale.
Not All Teachers Need Coercing:
“Some Are Themselves Active Members Of The Taliban, Swapping Chalk For Kalashnikovs After Completing The Day’s Lessons”
“They Take Their Salary From The Afghan Government, Whose Armed Forces They Then Fight On The Battlefield”
9 May 2017 Sune Engel Rasmussen in Kabul, The Guardian [Excerpts]
When Afghan teachers are lobbied to give good marks to mediocre students, the pressure does not necessarily come from disgruntled parents. Often it comes from the Taliban.
In areas of eastern Afghanistan, militants intimidate teachers to let older boys who fight with the Taliban pass exams despite lackluster performances, according to education experts working in the region.
They say insurgents also pressure teachers not to record the absence of students who spend much of their time on the frontline.
Not all teachers need coercing. Some are themselves active members of the Taliban, swapping chalk for Kalashnikovs after completing the day’s lessons. They take their salary from the Afghan government, whose armed forces they then fight on the battlefield.
“The Taliban are actively interfering in the education system,” said one educator who has trained teachers in Kunar province. In areas under heavy Taliban influence, he says, insurgents introduce their own members as teachers, threatening to close government schools if they do not comply.
Some of the teachers he trained were Taliban fighters, in effect on the government payroll, who turned up at school carrying weapons. “In the afternoon, they went back to fight the government,” the educator said.
The Taliban do not appear to issue their own curricula, but they inspect course material. In Logar province they have reportedly torn pages from books that portrayed historical figures in a light they disagreed with, casting progressive leaders as heroes and conservatives as foes.
Taliban teachers may also add bits to courses, particularly about holy war, said an education expert who works in the east. “They suspect the schools are teaching anti-Taliban propaganda,” he said.
The infiltration of the educational system puts the Afghan government in a dilemma: see schools close or ensure that children receive some form of education. The Afghan ministry of education denied that any teachers on its payroll were affiliated with the Taliban.