Saturday, August 20, 2011

Nouri's spokesperson confirms Panetta was correct

Independent Catholic News notes the latest Middle East Analysiss podcast from the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. James Abbott is the host and attorney Dr. Harry Hagopian was the guest as they discussed the MENA region -- Middle East and North Africa. We'll note the section on Iraq.

James Abbott: Well we have to sadly move on to Iraq. We haven't, in recent times, talked too much about Iraq --

Dr. Harry Hagopian: We haven't indeed.

James Abbott: -- but there have been a few church bombings there, Harry, so clearly targeting the Christian community. So what's going on there?

Dr. Harry Hagopian: Well, two things about Iraq, James, very quickly since we're doing a succinct analysis of the MENA region today. The first one is that if you consider the invasion of Iraq took place a few years ago and in those years $30 trillion have been spent on trying to establish democracy in the country, I would hope that our own leaders in the west -- and I include our own country, the United Kingdom, but also the European Union and America -- to realize and to think a little bit more carefully if we ever are in any economic position to embark on any other adventure. So I look at what is happening there and then I look at the cuts that are happening right, left and center and, somehow in my own simple mind, I do not see a kind of a balance between where we are spending our money and the big business and the big industries we are supporting, [...] and the European Union are suffering. And we, as Christians, should also think of the marginalized, those who are poor, those who are powerless, rather than only think about those who have power and who are in control of things. That is my -- let's say my conceptional theory of where we are in Iraq. But in terms of reality of what's happening on the ground in Iraq, yes, the Christians are suffering. There are bombings, there are explosions in many churches. Recently there were three about two weeks ago. One against a Syrian Catholic Church and then there was one against an Evangelical Protestant church. And only a few days ago, St. Ephraim's Church, an Orthodox Church, was also attacked, blown up and one whole wall crumbled down. Now there are attacks against the Christian communities, in Kirkuk that was and in other parts of the country as well. But let us also take it in two ways. One, in the context of the larger attacks that are taking place in the country which are trying to destabilize the country and that destabilization is not only internal from within Iraq itself but also from its adjacent neighbors, each vying to have its own power play in the country itself in Iraq almost by proxy. So Muslims are suffering as much as Christians are. We, of course, look at the Christians because we, as Christians, have this sense of fellowship across the world with our sisters and brothers elsewhere but also because their numbers are smaller and what happens to them impacts us directly but this is something that everybody Muslims and Christians, all minorities in fact, all smaller communities are feeling the brunt of what's happening. The other thing I would say is that those attacks, if you've noticed when you said we haven't spoken about Iraq they basically go into peaks and troughs. There are times when suddenly it's all quiet. and they're basically trying to get on with a very difficult life. Second largest oil producing country, doesn't have electricity half the time in summer. Can you imagine that? I mean somebody explain to me how this pans out. But the other things is that there are external forces -- be it Iran, be it Syria, be it other countries -- that play a role in the instability in Iraq. And a moot point I make -- and it is a moot point because, as a lawyer, I would remind you that I don't have any evidence except circumstantial ones -- that it is very interesting that at a time when the Syrian regime is trying to use every trick in the book to foment sectarian conflict to try and prove that it alone can exercise order in the country and across the region because Syria is viewed somehow as a regional power rather than just a local one, suddenly we have those explosions, bombs in Iraq. I just wonder what the connection is there? And I leave it to the imagination of the listeners to figure out what might or might not be the case.

James Abbott: Well, we've run out of time, Harry. We've really done our best to cover the bases there.

There were several things different about the above conversation -- different than the other Iraq commentaries -- that you may have caught. First the vanished poor were mentioned. For the White House, there is no poverty. There is only a struggling middle class. The poor are invisible and never mentioned. Equally true, no one ever wants to question the lack of electricity in Iraq. All these years later. One hundred degree plus days and they don't have consistent electricity. You can probably pick out other things as well. It was an interesting conversation (which a friend who's a priest passed on).


Today, NPR writes about Iraq. All by itself. A remarkable achievement since they oh-so-rarely report from there these days. The last audio report filed from Iraq was July 20th. 30 days later, Alan Greenblatt writes about Iraq for NPR. He fails to note Leon Panetta's remarks but does note, "Most analysts predict that the U.S. will leave around 10,000 soldiers in Iraq, alongside a large State Department presence and a sizable contingent of private American security contractors."

How do you do that? How do you fail to note Leon Panetta's remarks?

He was, until mere weeks ago, the head of the CIA. He's now Secretary of the Defense. Do you think he's unstable? Do you think he's a liar?

Panetta said, in an interview, this wasn't 'overheard,' that troops in Iraq beyond 2011 was a done deal. Do you really think Panetta didn't know what he was talking about?


Isn't it far more likely that Nouri hadn't had time to break the news to the political blocs and that Barack didn't want to deal with questions about this on his vacation?

Yes, it is far more likely.

Al Mada reports on Panetta's remarks and on Nouri's spokesperson Ali al-Dabbagh denying an agreement has already been made. But while denying it, Ali al-Dabbagh also stated that when "the polical blocs met, they approved the need to train security forces and the Iraqi military" which would be Panetta's point that it was now a done deal. So despite his denial, Ali al-Dabbagh's actual remarks back up what Panetta said. Dar Addustour also offers Ali al-Dabbagh's quote and, in addition, they report that the only perplexing issue in the negotiations is how many US troops remain.

Press TV speaks (link has text and video) with Michael Maloof (who used to be with the Pentagon's Technology Security Operations).

Press TV: You've touched upon this a bit, but I'd like you to expand on this - Obama has never really stood by the reasons the US went to war against Iraq - Why is he so motivated to stay in Iraq now?

Michael Maloof: I think it's because of the changing circumstances; and you're only talking 10,000 troops; it's supposed to be a token amount, or they might agree to the extension of the 40,000 that are there. But it's not going to really matter in terms of what effectiveness they can accomplish. I think the US is also under increasing pressure from the Saudis. It's my understanding that the Saudis have decided to go on their own - they no longer trust the US - to basically create their own army; a rapid reaction force if you will and they're very much concerned about the plight of the Sunnis in Iraq. And so they're going to put pressure on the US to at least maintain some kind of presence there in order to in effect try to disrupt the forward motion of Iranian influence in what is an Arab world in that region and also because of the concern the Saudis have over the plight of the Sunnis there. Iraq has gone relatively unnoticed in the press in recent months. The war in Afghanistan and the killing of Osama bin Laden had replaced the focus on Iraq. But while the fighting and bloodletting in Iraq may have dissipated in recent months, it never ended.

Dar Addustour notes that things are currently moving forward on the creation of the national council (agreed to in November's Erbil Agreement) and that Ayad Allawi is expected to head the council and Moqtada al-Sadr's bloc is publicly supporting the creation of the council and Allawi as head of it.

Meanwhile the editorial board of the Missiourain observes, "The painful reality is that after eight years of war and nearly a year after President Obama declared the official end of combat missions, American soldiers are still deeply engaged in fighting both Sunni and Shiite insurgents. About 47,000 U.S. troops remain in this very unstable and dangerous country. Forty-four American soldiers have been killed so far this year and scores of others have been wounded -- many by roadside bombs."

Late Friday there was an assassination attempt on the Commander of Iraq's Kirkuk Supporting Battalion. Aswat al-Iraq, quoting the region's police director, reports "Hamad Ali Hussein" survived the sticky bombing, however, two of his bodyguards were injured. Meanwhile, the Holy Quaran Radio station in Kirkuk was set on fire today and an Anbar Province bombing left two people injured. We'll note this from the Kurdistan Regional Government:

krg's barzani and us' jeffery

Salahaddin, Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRP.org) – President Barzani met with US Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffery and General Lloyd Austin, the Commanding General of the United States Forces in Iraq, on Thursday to discuss bilateral relations and recent security and political developments in Iraq.

Today's meeting focused on the relations between Iraq and the United States, in particular in the lead up to the withdrawal of the US forces by the end of this year, as well as the issue of filling the posts of the Iraqi ministers of defense, interior, and the council for strategic policies.

The President and the US delegation also exchanged views on the security arrangements in the disputed areas, particularly in light of recent spike in violence in some of those areas.

Ambassador Jeffery paid tribute to President Barzani’s role in the Iraqi government formation process, adding that his intervention is once again needed to push the process forward and thus, with other Iraqi leaders, to complete the formation of the government.


And on Turkey's continued bombing of northern Iraq, the KRG issued the following statement:

All parties should consider the sensitivity of the situation in Kurdistan, and therefore not use Kurdish territories to attack neighbors because they will oppose the higher interests of the Kurdish people, investment process and public service.



The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.









































Speaking the unspeakables (and living to tell)

According to an e-mail, I "wouldn't dare" quote or link to the right-wing site Hot Air, specifically the piece I'm about to link to and quote from. But why wouldn't I? Hot Air's having a big laugh at the lies of Barack Obama. I've called out those on the left who've enabled those lies. I'm more than willing to grab Matthew Rothschild or Amy Goodman by the neck and rub their little snouts in the mess they've made. Here's what the right-wing site Hot Air is carrying, Jazz Shaw's "President McCain is clearly a warmonger:"

I sure wish we had elected that Obama guy back in 2008. If we had, we wouldn’t be looking at staying in Iraq even longer. Obama would have -- at a minimum -- gotten out of Iraq on the same schedule that the warmonger Bush had set up.

Of course, there's still the matter of Afghanistan. If we had elected Barack Obama, I can assure you that he would have set up a firm plan to begin a major draw-down of our forces by this year and gotten the rest out in short order. But not President McCain! Oh, no! We just found out this weekend that he's close to signing an agreement to keep not only training details, but special forces and air power in country until… are you ready for this? Until 2024.




The Cult of St. Barack humiliated themselves by whoring themselves, by destroying their own belief systems to promote one person -- did they never grasp that and how against their 'communal' positions that action was. I hope the whole world laughs at those whores. I hope everyone -- including the whores -- hears the laughter. A little shame might force some accountability.

And excuse me, but here on the left, what is our cry: "No accountability, no justice!" It's time for accountability.

And we'll return to that topic in the next entry but I felt Jazz Shaw's piece was worth noting at the top and I already have our opening for the other entry figured out so we brought Shaw's piece in here.

But before we do, I've been awfully damn nice to David Swanson.

For those who don't know, David Swanson sought out Rebecca online, began e-mailing her, asking her questions and then forwarding her e-mails around. She only found out because whatever the idiot's name it (a middle aged man who claims to be a represenative of the 'hip-hop generation') was out of the country and had his e-mail account set up for auto reply which is how the following (which David denies/lies about to this day) bounced back to Rebecca. I have no idea why it bounced back to Rebecca. I have no idea to this day how that happened. But I do know David's denied it repeatedly and I do know he's insulted Rebecca to people who've raised the issue with him.

Rebecca didn't lie.


Screen snap.

the truth

Rebecca's got the entire e-mail. David's forwarded her e-mail to the man. And when it bounced to Rebecca's site, she first asked him why he was forwarding her e-mails and he lied. He said he'd never done that. He called her crazy. As you can see above, Rebecca got a 'reply' to an e-mail David Swanson wrote Yearwood. That bounce back includes his comments and all of her e-mail that David was forwarding to Yearwood.

It has been embarrassing to watch David Swanson repeatedly lie for the last four years that he never forwarded Rebecca's e-mail. We all knew he did it, we'd all seen the messages that got bounced back to Rebecca from Yearwood's automatic reply.

Yet David denied it.

Called Rebecca "crazy" when she confronted him on it.


David denies that he'll ever change his mind
But he always changes
David denies
But he's left his love behind
-- "David Denies," written by Aimee Mann, Joey Pesce, Robert Holmes and Michael Hausman, first appears on 'Til Tuesday's Welcome Home.

Lots of luck denying it now, David Swanson.

What ticked me off the most about this, why we're posting the screen snap and demonstrating what a liar David Swanson is, was an e-mail from community member Tori expressing outrage that not only has Swanson refused to cover Leon Panetta's statements from yesterday in any form (extension of US troops in Iraq beyond December is a done deal), but he'slinking to the idiot Jar Jar Blinks whom Whore Amy Goodman brought on Democracy Now! yet again.

Boys and girls, that's how it works. You're not an expert because you know a damn thing, you're an expert because you take part in the circle jerk, you're an expert because you engage in mutual masturbation. (It's what Bob Somerby decries at a higher media level -- yes, MSNBC is higher than the Beggar Media -- around Chris Matthews.)

No one is wronger than Jar Jar Blinks who turned tail and ran from Iraq in 2003 and got a cute little legal settlement from an airline that he tried to ride to greater fame -- yes, boys and girls, he arrived in this country and learned the only thing he ever did which is: Anyone can sue. Jar Jar whored it for Barack to the point that you kind of picture him naming his vibrator or dildo "Barack." Barack was going to save us, Barack was going to end the war. Ava, Dona and I have had with that jerk years ago. He's a damn liar. The SOFA was explained to him, he refused to listen. His groovin' on Barack was more important to him.

So instead he continued to preach THE LIE (as did David Swanson) that the Iraq War ended in 2011 and that was because of the SOFA. Neither David Swanson nor Raed Jarrar knows a damn thing about contract law but they were allowed to present their 'expert opinion' because they engage in the circle jerk. So the idiot Raed -- who obviously WAS 100% WRONG about the SOFA but still can't take accountability -- gets pimped yet again by Amy and then by David.

I'm sick of this damn s**t. I'm sick of the fakes and the frauds. Last time I wrote here similarly, I received an e-mail -- which I immediately noted here because if you forward Rebecca's e-mails, your own e-mails have no privacy here -- from Davy Swanson explaining how hard is to tell the truth about Barack and how he has to do it bit by bit. He meant it was hard to do because of the reactions of others. But in reality, it was hard for him to tell the truth because that's who he is.

I don't give a damn if someone links to me or not. I believe the bald Matthew at AlterNet (he's probably long gone now) thought he could threaten me into silence. I believe bald Matthew found out I don't respond well to threats. (Alternet's Matthew and another editor harassed, threatened and spied on a 14-year-old boy. We didn't stand for it, we called them out here. Rebecca called them out at her site as well.) I didn't give a damn that AlterNet was threatening to pull the link to me.

"Oh no! I won't be linked to by a site I neither read nor respect." Hello, I was friends with Molly Ivins. I'm damn well aware of the way Altnet treated writers around the country. Like I gave a damn if they delinked. I never asked them to link to me, why would I care if they delinked. Many friends offer to link to me and I say don't do it, I say we're too controversial and we always will be because I will not kiss ass.

While it is true that I have more money than I can spend in my lifetime, it's also true that even when I had no money (having given it all away to try to stop an earlier war) I didn't kiss ass. My feelings on that subject are well known and we'll again quote from Robert Towne and Warren Beatty's script for Shampoo from the scene where Jill (Goldie Hawn) confronts George (Warren):

Jill: And stop kissing everybody's ass that comes into that shop. That's not going to put you in business. That's going to make you a kiss-ass.

George: Jill, I'm trying to get things moving.

Jill: Oh, grow up. You never stop moving. You never go anywhere. Grow up! Grow up! Grow up!

So it's never mattered whether someone linked here or not. Life went on. The sun still rose in the morning and sat at night and I didn't live in fear of offending anyone or losing any alleged 'gain.' We are a force online because we are indebted to no one. This community grew this community. We did so without help from outsiders.

But when David Swanson whines that it's hard to tell the truth, what he really means is it's hard to face being shunned by his one time supporters.

And, in fairness to him, his (weak) stands have cost him. When his site was AfterDowningStreet and Bush was in office, the whole left celebrated David Swanson.

Oh, he's brave, he's smart, he's this, he's that.

But along came Barack and David couldn't tell the truth about him in 2008 or since. He's inched close to it in 2009 and 2010 only to see that a lot of sites stopped sharing the 'linky goodness' and stopped talking him up.

Now called out here and elsewhere, he's certainly gotten braver in 2011. But it's really not that brave.

Here alone today, we've had over 16,000 visitors or 'hits.' Not huge but more than we needed. And we have two back up sites. I have no idea what David's traffic is and only looked to find out today's traffic here (I ignore it and tell those who look not to tell me because I don't want to start churning out 'greatest hits' -- where I rewrite what I know was popular so I can remain popular).

But if there had only been one 'hit' to this site today, that still would have been fine. Because I don't lie and I don't kiss ass. So anyone reading is getting what I really think and now what I think they can handle right now.

I do understand that fame can be addictive (which is why I never read my own press) and I do understand David Swanson's desire not to continue to bleed readers. But the easiest way to avoid bleeding readers is to speak in your own voice. I could not begin to write a better ___ [pick favorite writer of choice} but no one can do a better me than me. And when you're writing authentically, you don't owe anybody anything.

By contrast, if you fake it, if you pull your punches because 'people' (meaning you yourself) aren't ready for the truth about Barack, you're already losing because you're writing's weak , your focus is off and you're not being yourself.

So David Swanson's punishment is being a lousy writer today and one that doesn't write what he really thinks. He could have been a great one. He could have been fearless and called out what he knew was wrong -- what he wanted to tell you privately was wrong but didn't want to write about because people are so mean online!

As I pointed out before, David was one of the many who refused to promote Cindy Sheehan's actions when Barack came into office.

How do you do that?

How do you praise Cindy through the roof, as he did, and then do a walk away? And do it because you're afraid of what other bloggers might do or say?

I have no idea. But I'm washing my hands of it now. David Swanson, stop e-mailing me several times a day. If you had anything worth saying, you would have written about Leon Panetta's remarks. You didn't. (If I had anything to say to you, I would have replied to your non-stop e-mails at least once in the last year or so.)

I don't want to read your writing, I don't want anything to do with you. As Michelle Pfeiffer says in The Russia House, "I hope you are not being frivolous, Barley. My life now only has room for the truth."

If you believe War Is A Crime, you'd show a lot more bravery. And you certainly wouldn't link to the pathetic Jar Jar Blinks yet again making excuses for Barack the War Criminal. See, Jar Jar declares in the interview, the problem is that Barack hasn't made it clear that the US isn't staying in Iraq. Jar Jar is two-dollar whore. I don't have time for these idiots.



One o'clock in the afternoon tomorrow at San Antonio's Episcopal Church of Reconciliation, Sister Martha Ann Kirk and Sister Patricia Madigan will be giving an audio visual presentation on Iraqi women entitled "Iraqi Women of Three Generations: Challenges, Education and Hopes for Peace." Abe Levy (San Antonio Express-News) reports Sister Martha Ann Kirk went on research trips to northern Iraq where sey spoke with "more than 140 Iraqi girls and women," "from grandmothers to young girls." Sister Martha Ann Kirk states, "I have wanted for us to know the humanity of Iraqi families and them to know us at least a little through my visits. Ordinary, good people -- especially children -- suffer from wars."

Meanwhile Robert Burns (Associated Press)notes the 2003 death in Iraq of 20-year-old Spc Justin W.Hebert and how almost "one-third of U.S. troops killed in Iraq were age 18 to 21. Well over half were in the lowest enlisted ranks."

DoD currently lists the number of US military personnel killed in the Iraq War at [PDF format warning] 4478. That would mean that over 2,200 of the deaths were from the lowest enlisted ranks and about 1490 were 21-years-old or younger.

Swiping from Cedric and Wally's latest:

to note the community posts because Blogger/Blogspot isn't reading all the posts:

"Zucchini and Tomato Bake in the Kitchen"
"Verizon strike continues"
"The toxic man"
"The Help II"
"3 men, 3 women"
"4 men, no women"
"why barack doesn't have time to work on the economy"
"the state of the economy"
"Cesspool: John Edwards Edition"
"71% disapprove of Barack Obama's economic skills"
"The Iraq War never ends because of them"
"Staycation"
"It's all in a name"
"A passing"
"Gothika"
"Carole Lombard"
"The Mystique Candidate"
"Comic, Libyan War"
"Fat ass Danny Schechter"
"Failure"
"Trying to fit in"
"THIS JUST IN! PRINCESS TAKES A VACATION!"



The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.









































The Cult of St. Barack (A Primer)

Yesterday's snapshot has a few asking questions. That's understandable. What took place in 2008 not only shouldn't have taken place, but it remains unexamined by many. That's no accident. While FAIR and others insist upon 'standards' for Big Media, they enforce no standards for Panhandle Media (and FAIR, itself, is the beggar media) they only created and embraced The Cult of St. Barack.

sunsetcampaign

[May , 2008, Isaiah's "Sunset Campaign."]

One e-mail (I've only read 40 so far, we just got off the plane a little over an hour ago) asked about: "Go down the list of all the people who swore that Barack Obama would end the Iraq War, that US troops would no longer occupy Iraq, that US troops would be gone. They lied and then they lied again. Over and over." How was it a lie?

There are two ways.

First, there's what was always known and that is the Senate voting records. Barack Obama didn't get sworn in until 2005. So he avoided the 2002 authorization vote on Iraq (which some say approved the war and some -- such as the late Elizabeth Edwards defending her husband's vote -- insisted was calling for more time and inspections). It is a fact that in 2004, he was telling the New York Times (during the DNC convention in Boston) that he would have voted for that authorization had he been in Congress. But he wasn't there. But what you did have was how he voted once he got in. For war, war and more war. His votes were identical to Hillary's.

And yet the liars presented Hillary in the most vile and sexist terms while buffing and lapping at St. Barack. And if you need to do research, you should use links in entries. So much of what happened in 2008 was covered in "The Year of Living Hormonally" and that is named and linke to in the snapshot.

It is there that you will find out about how the record on the war was repeatedly distorted by the likes of Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) and Matthew Rothschild (The Progressive, Progressive Radio Show, etc.). You bring on a Barack supporter and let them rave and you join them in the raving and you never ask a critical question about the war or Barack's votes to support it and continue it. You bring on a Hillary  supporter (rare for them to do but they needed to 'instruct' their audiences in what was the 'wrong path' so they did from time to time) and you immediately began asking them how they could be against the Iraq War and support Hillary? Barack and Hillary had identical records when it came to voting on the Iraq War. Any journalist should have known that. Amy Goodman and Matthew Rothschild lied to advance Barack Obama and lied repeatedly. (Matthew's badgering of novelist Sara Paretsky for her support of Hillary made for especially uncomfortable listening.)

In addition, Barack's advisors weren't trashed while Hillary's were. Hillary's were mocked, laughed at, sneered at, etc. They were supposed War Hawks. Barack's own War Hawks -- including the Carr Center -- were never questioned or mentioned. The entire counter-insurgnecy movement figure heads were publicly backing Barack and that concerned no one. Despite the fact that during the days of Vietnam we damn well knew that counter-insurgency -- a war on the native population -- was wrong and illegal. But the so-called 'left' press didn't want to be bothered with it.

And, let's stay on The Progressive for just one more moment. A right-wing group had initials that formed an ugly term that can't appear in newspapers or be said on broadcast TV (at least it's not supposed to be said). Matthew Rothschild loved Hillary being called this word -- c**t -- and he loved it so much that he linked to The Weekly Standard. Grasp that, The Progressive linked to The Weekly Standard. Not only that, grasp that they did so with a heading of recommended stories. The Progressive recommended The Weekly Standard. Socialist Matthew Rothschild linked to the ultra-conservative, pro-war Weekly Standard. Ethics were trashed, belief systems sold out in order for the Cult of St. Barack to preach their gospel.


captaincaveman

[August 3rd, 2008, Isaiah's "Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels." Barack's with Cult of St. Barack members Katrina vanden Heuvel, Matthew Rothschild and Betsy Reed.]


The Cult of St. Barack pretended to still have a standard and they applied it to Hillary while giving Barack one pass after another.

Time and again. And, note, Jim's reading over my shoulder and carving out some things for Third including a paragraph that followed "no standard for Barack," so (a) refer to Third tomorrow for more on this topic and (b) if this entry is more disjointed than usal, that's why.

Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richards had real plans for leaving Iraq. Not pie in the sky, not airy statements. How real were those plans? In September 2007, there was a debate of the Dems vying for the party's presidential nomination.

bloodywarhawks


You can refer to Isaiah's "Bloody War Hawks" (above), Rebecca's "craven dems and disgusting peter pace," Kat's "Obama, Edwards & Clinton okay with US trops in Iraq until 2013" and this"Iraq snapshot" for how Hillary, Barack and John Edwards refused to promise to have troops in 2013.

If Barack were the sainted hope of peace that the Beggar Media promised us, he could have taken that pledge. He refused to do so.

All of that and much more told you Barack was not serious about ending the Iraq War.

But maybe people in Beggar Media are just that stupid? I mean, there's got to be a reason that, at her age, Amy Goodman has to beg for dollars on air, right? There has to be a reason that these people are unemployable in real media, right?

So maybe they are just that stupid.

Even if they were that stupid, on March 7th, an event happens that changes everything. How you responded to that event if you were media or a commentator or gas bag determined whether you were lying or telling the truth.

As noted in that day's snapshot, the BBC was airing an interview with Samantha Power (who had quit the Barack Obama campaign that morning, the interview was taped prior to that) where Samantha Power revealed that Barack would decide what he'd do about Iraq if he got elected. But he was promising to have troops out in 16 months? Well, Samantha responds, you can't make that decision until you're in the White House and have examined all the facts.

That was a mind blowing moment.

A candidate's closest advisor had gone on camera to declare that the promise Barack was making to votes wasn't, in fact, for real.

Samantha wasn't just an advisor to Barack after he announced his run for presidency. The War Hawk (who supported the Iraq War though she tries to obscure that today) became Barack's advisor right after he got to the Senate. In fact, the entire War Hawk population of the Carr Center would claim to have Barack's ear. We covered all of this in real time here and at Third Estate Sunday Review. It was possible to cover it.

And it was possible to ignore it.

wheelofgreed

[June 22, 2008, Isaiah's "Wheel of Greed." Barack's with Cult of St. Barack members Katrina vanden Heuvel, Matthew Rothschild and John Nichols.]

When the BBC aired the interview with Samantha Power and when the US press picked up on it,that's when Beggar Media lost plausible deniability on the charge that they were deliberately lying to put Barack Obama in office and that they would apply no standards to their coverage of Barack and that they would trash their ethics and belief systems in order to whore for Barack.

We covered it in real time, check the March 7, 2008 snapshot. I'd already finished dictating most of the snapshot when Ava was handing me her cell and telling me I had to take the call. A friend in the news division of an American network was explaining what was just breaking and we immediately worked into the snapshot including a rush transcript of Samantha Power's remarks in full.

Samantha Power quit the campaign because of the BBC interview. Not due to the controversy where she had called Hillary a monster. She reviewed all the times in the last week -- in one interview after another -- where she had shot off her mouth and how each could be damaging but she concluded that the not-yet-aired BBC interview was the most damaging and she quit the campaign. She quit, she was not fired.

Her remarks that the promise on Iraq wasn't a promise should have been huge news at The Nation and The Progressive and all the others using the Iraq War to pimp Barack as the 'hero' emerged to save us all.

We didn't get that truth. What we got instead was silence or more lies.

kamikazesammy

[March 9, 2008, Isaiah's "Kamikaze Sammy" featuring Samantha Power's remark to the BBC.]

As usual, John Nichols chose to go the more-lies route. Poor Samatha, he whined in more sentences in a single column than Carrie Bradshaw managed in an entire season of Sex in the City. But he never got around to the BBC interview. He had plenty of time to lie and did so repeatedly; most infamously, he lied that Samantha and Hillary were great friends -- at that point the two had met twice and only twice by Samantha Power's own admission. We called it out here.

That column was nothing but lies and distraction from what may be Beggar Media's biggest liar.

In 2008, Barack's campaign was talking tough on doing away with NAFTA, remember? And then it turned out that Barack's campaign was also telling Canadian officials that this was just talk and not to worry. (That statement? It applies to every supposed stand Barack's ever taken. When you wonder why he 'caved' over and over regardless issue, it's because he never meant his words. The pattern was clear with NAFTA.) The Associated Press got ahold of documents proving the meeting took place February 8, 2008 between Canadian officials and Barack's economic advisors. Faced with Barack outright and clearly lying, what did John Nichols do?

Ava and I tackled it -- we were the only ones who did. See "TV: Goodman and Rose 'honoring' bad TV past" and, as you read of John Nichols going on Democracy Now! and insisting that it was a lie, that Hillary's campaign was the one who had met with Canadian officials, not Barack's, and that he had the explosive story and would be publishing it, ask yourself where that story is?

It. Never. Existed.

It was a lie that was tossed out to give the delusional something to hold onto until they could forget. "Oh, it was Hillary! Not our beloved Barack! Oh, I can't wait to read that story!"

pinocchioobama

[March 4, 2008, Isaiah's "Pinocchio Obama."]


The story never was written because John Nichols was lying. At the end of 2003, for those who've forgotten, John Nichols joined Amy Goodman to explain how his sources knew what was planned for the 2004 DNC convention, how Wesley Clark wasn't really running, just holding things up so that Hillary could take the nomination -- without ever running -- at the 2004 convention.

The two psychos should have been laughed off the air.

But at some point, either the left start's enforcing standards or it doesn't.

I am the war hawk you have been waiting for

[Isaiah's "I Am The War Hawk You Have Been Waiting For" from December 1, 2009 featuring Barack and Cult of St. Barack members Alice Walker, Tom Hayden, Phyllis Bennis, John Nichols and Amy Goodman.]

Norman Solomon's fond of screaming "conspiracy" at the 9-11 Truth Movement. But it wasn't the 9-11 Truth Movement that acted unethically. It was Norman Solomon who, in February of 2008, pursued becoming a pledged delegate to the DNC convention for Barack Obama. And it was Norman Solomon who made a point to note that in his syndicated column because failure to do so would be unethical and, most importantly, lead to his column being pulled from the tiny number of newspapers that carry it. But it was also Norman Solomon who continued to go on the air on KPFK and KPFA radio as an 'independent' analyst from February to the end of June, never telling listeners that he was pledged to Obama while trashing Hillary repeatedly. That's unethical.

In July 2008, under pressure from endless phone calls, e-mails and letters, KPFA was finally forced to start identifying Norman Solomon on air as a pledged delegate for Obama. They should have been doing it all along.

If we had a functioning left, none of this would have happened. But we don't have a functioning left.

It's bad enough that The Nation magazine did not fire John Nichols for his endless lies. They hired Lie Face Melissa Harris-Lacewell who's on yet another marriage and now signs "Melissa Harris-Perry" but will forever be known as Lie Face. Lie Face did so much to help the Barack campaign -- a campaign she began working on in 2007, traveling all over to do campaign work (the state of California in the summer of 2007, for example). Yet somehow she was on Democracy Now! and The Charlie Rose Show in 2008 as an objective and impartial analyst and neither she nor the hosts ever revealed to the audience that not only she was supporting Barack Obama, she was working for the campaign.

If you're working for a campaign -- and Norman Solomon knows this, and FAIR knows this, and The Nation knows this, and, sad for Melissa, Princeton University knows this -- you're required to disclose that fact if you're going on air and commenting on the campaigns. Melissa failed to do that. And she's no longer at Princeton. Lucky for the students because she was so fond of attacking them and deriding them in the press. She's a real hate monger that one and it goes to her own self-identify and her own self-hatred.

And let's put it out there. Ava and I teased in January 2008, thinking the Whore might get honest. We just marveled over her hatred of White women, her foaming at the mouth hatred and her ridiculous statements of "sitting here in all my Blackness." See Melissa had a little personal secret as well.

The woman running from one outlet to another insisting Barack was Black and not bi-racial (he self-billed as bi-racial until he lost his first election, but never mind the facts, when have facts ever been applied to Barack), insisting that she was the authority on this and that she had spoken so the question was no more . . .

That little liar was leading her own little Imitation of Life subplot. See, the woman hating White women in public and sitting there in "all my Blackness"? That woman had a White mother. It wasn't a detail she wanted the press to know. It's difficult to present yourself as THE authentic voice of Black America, to launch the campaign to throw Tavis Smiley off The Tom Joyner Show (Tavis refused to blindly worship Barack, a crime in Melissa's eyes), if you tell the truth.


I was always so afraid that
My uptown friends would see her
Afraid one day when I was grown
That I would be her
In college town away from here
A new identity I found
-- "I'm Living In Shame," written by Berry Gordy Jr., Pam Sawyer, Frank Wilson, Henry Cosby and R. Dean Taylor, recorded by Diana Ross and the Supremes

Poor Melissa. Those consumed with self-hatred and shame never get far. And, again, she's no longer at Princeton. Poor Melissa.

From Lie Face back to the lie being exposed by Samantha Power's remarks to the BBC. There was silence from Beggar Media (though Real Media did report it). We called out the silence in "Editorial: The Whores of Indymedia" in March 2008 and among the people we called out for being silent? Tom Hayden.

Months later, July 4, 2008, Tom suddenly agreed with us writing:

The most shocking aspect of Samantha Powers' forced resignation earlier this year was not that she called Hillary Clinton a "monster" off-camera, but that she flatly stated that Obama would review his whole position on Iraq once becoming president. Again, no one in the media or rival campaigns questioned whether this assertion by Powers was true. Since Obama credited Powers with helping for months in writing his book, The Audacity of Hope, her comments on his inner thinking should have been pounced upon by the pundits.


But, of course, it had been questioned. ABC News reported on it, the Boston Globe reported on it, the Washington Post reported on it (repeatedly). Maybe Tom -- writing at the Huffington Post -- should have held his own Beggar Media accountable? But that would require honesty. And Hillary's campaign called it out in real time -- which led to them being trashed by Greg Sargent and David Corn who insisted the issue didn't matter. We covered this at Third in our reply to Tom's July 4th column (see "Letters to An Old Sell Out: Iraq").

And, honestly, Tom knew about it in real time and was confronted on it in March 2008. He chose to stay silent.

Only because Barack said a little more than "We want to end the war! And we want to end it now!" did Tom finally, months later, write about the March 2008 revelations. And he didn't have the decency to give credit to ABC News, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe or Hillary's campaign. He wanted you to believe that no one had covered it. It was covered and those covering it were attacked for covering it.

So that's why they're liars. The March 2008 comments -- by Tom's own admission -- were news. And they weren't covered as such by Beggar Media and all of the Cult of St. Barack.

They didn't give a damn.

Now it would appear that the Iraqi children will suffer for their lies. I have no tolernace for unrepentant whores. Throughout the 8 years that Bully Boy Bush occupied the White House, these people were so very good about instructing on ethics and what was a conflict of interest and how awful the mainstream media was and how unaccountable it was and blah, blah, bulls**t.

Given the first chance to whore, they hit the streets running. And for what? A corporatist War Hawk who always publicly promised more war on Afghanistan.

They whored.


Little Dicky Breaks It Down

[February 8, 2009, Isaiah's "Little Dicky Breaks It Down" and yes, that is the little dick from The Great Orange Satan.]

They want to prove they've got anything else to offer, they're going to have to get accountable. Until they do, no one should consider trusting them. If they get away with this, they will try it over and over again. Either we have a functioning alternative media or we don't. If we do have a functioning one, then people need to start taking accountability for how they slanted their coverage, betrayed their ethics and more and how the result was that a War Hawk who cares more about serving the corporations than serving the people got put into the White House.

I hope the above explains for those confused. I do realize that (a) this story was largely avoided by many, many outlets; (b) 2008 was three years ago and some people paying attention today may have been too young or focused on other things back then; and (c) how difficult it is to grasp that those who preach to us over and over about ethics were the first to betray their own.



























Friday, August 19, 2011

Iraq snapshot

Friday, August 19, 2011.  Chaos and violence continue, Leon Panetta should be dominating the news, Turkey continues to bomb Iraq, and more.
 
As Tina Turner sings
 
We don't need to know the way home
All we want is life beyond
Thunderdome
 
And we didn't need to invent a 'hero.'  We just needed honesty.  Underscored by events of today.
 
Because so many liars were such pathetic liars, the Iraq War goes on.  And I'm not talking Judy Miller or George W. Bush.  I'm talking the really pathetic: Amy Goodman, Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Matthew Rothschild, Barbara Ehrenreich, Naomi Klein, John Nichols, Naomi Wolf, go down the damn list.  Go down the list of all the people who swore that Barack Obama would end the Iraq War, that US troops would no longer occupy Iraq, that US troops would be gone.  They lied and then they lied again.  Over and over.
 
Spoiled brats unable to grow the hell up and deal with reality.  Teeny boppers playing at politics. They dressed Barack as a god and today their false god appears to have broken the promise that they pimped so hard.
 
Kevin Baron (Stars & Stripes) notes that the Iraqi response is that they have not agreed to trainers but US Secretary of Defense "Leon Panetta  said Friday that Iraq has already said yet to extending noncombat U.S. forces there beyond 2011, and that the Pentagon is negotiating that presence [. . . that] there is unanimous consent among key Iraqi leaders to address U.S. demands. Those demands include that Iraqis begin negotiating internally what type of U.S. training force they would like, begin a process to select a defense minister, craft a new Status of Forces Agreement and increase operations against Iranian-backed militants."  Reid J. Epstein (POLITICO) refers to a transcript and quotes Panetta stating, "My view is that they finally did say yes, which is that as a result of a meeting that Talabani had last week, that all of the, it was unanimous consent among the key leaders of the country to go ahead and request that we negotiate on some kind of training, what a training presence would look like, they did at least put in place a process to try and get a Minister of Defence decided and we think they're making some progress on that front."  Adam Entous (Wall St. Journal) adds:
 
Pentagon spokesman George Little said later that Mr. Panetta was not predicting the outcome of negotiations with the Iraqi government.
"The secretary was asked if there had been progress in our discussions with the Iraqi government since his visit six weeks ago," Mr. Little said. "He made clear that the Iraqis have said yes to discussions about the strategic relationship beyond 2011, and what that relationship might look like."
 
 
For those who have forgotten (and those who pretend to forgot -- I'm sure that's going to include a lot of people this weekend), Iraq was a major issue in 2008. Falling back to September 26, 2008, the first debate between GOP presidential candidate John McCain and Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama -- independent candidate Ralph Nader and Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney were shut out of the debates due to the inability to lie and pander. PBS NewsHour's Jim Lehrer is the moderator.  From the transcript.
 
LEHRER: All right. Let's go another subject. Lead question, two minutes to you, senator McCain. Much has been said about the lessons of Vietnam. What do you see as the lessons of Iraq?
 
MCCAIN: I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict. Our initial military success, we went in to Baghdad and everybody celebrated. And then the war was very badly mishandled. I went to Iraq in 2003 and came back and said, we've got to change this strategy. This strategy requires additional troops, it requires a fundamental change in strategy and I fought for it. And finally, we came up with a great general and a strategy that has succeeded. This strategy has succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq. And we will come home with victory and with honor. And that withdrawal is the result of every counterinsurgency that succeeds. And I want to tell you that now that we will succeed and our troops will come home, and not in defeat, that we will see a stable ally in the region and a fledgling democracy. The consequences of defeat would have been increased Iranian influence. It would have been increase in sectarian violence. It would have been a wider war, which the United States of America might have had to come back.  So there was a lot at stake there. And thanks to this great general, David Petraeus, and the troops who serve under him, they have succeeded. And we are winning in Iraq, and we will come home. And we will come home as we have when we have won other wars and not in defeat.
 
LEHRER: Two minutes, how you see the lessons of Iraq, Senator Obama.
 
OBAMA: Well, this is an area where Senator McCain and I have a fundamental difference because I think the first question is whether we should have gone into the war in the first place. Now six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so because I said that not only did we not know how much it was going to cost, what our exit strategy might be, how it would affect our relationships around the world, and whether our intelligence was sound, but also because we hadn't finished the job in Afghanistan.  We hadn't caught bin Laden. We hadn't put al Qaeda to rest, and as a consequence, I thought that it was going to be a distraction. Now Senator McCain and President Bush had a very different judgment. And I wish I had been wrong for the sake of the country and they had been right, but that's not the case. We've spent over $600 billion so far, soon to be $1 trillion. We have lost over 4,000 lives. We have seen 30,000 wounded, and most importantly, from a strategic national security perspective, al Qaeda is resurgent, stronger now than at any time since 2001. We took our eye off the ball. And not to mention that we are still spending $10 billion a month, when they have a $79 billion surplus, at a time when we are in great distress here at home, and we just talked about the fact that our budget is way overstretched and we are borrowing money from overseas to try to finance just some of the basic functions of our government. So I think the lesson to be drawn is that we should never hesitate to use military force, and I will not, as president, in order to keep the American people safe. But we have to use our military wisely. And we did not use our military wisely in Iraq.
 
LEHRER: Do you agree with that, the lesson of Iraq?
 
MCCAIN: The next president of the United States is not going to have to address the issue as to whether we went into Iraq or not. The next president of the United States is going to have to decide how we leave, when we leave, and what we leave behind. That's the decision of the next president of the United States.  Senator Obama said the surge could not work, said it would increase sectarian violence, said it was doomed to failure. Recently on a television program, he said it exceed our wildest expectations. But yet, after conceding that, he still says that he would oppose the surge if he had to decide that again today. Incredibly, incredibly Senator Obama didn't go to Iraq for 900 days and never asked for a meeting with General Petraeus.
 
LEHRER: Well, let's go at some of these things ...
 
MCCAIN: Senator Obama is the chairperson of a committee that oversights NATO that's in Afghanistan. To this day, he has never had a hearing.
 
LEHRER: What about that point?
 
MCCAIN: I mean, it's remarkable.
 
LEHRER: All right. What about that point?
 
OBAMA: Which point? He raised a whole bunch of them.
 
LEHRER: I know, OK, let's go to the latter point and we'll back up. The point about your not having been...
 
OBAMA: Look, I'm very proud of my vice presidential selection, Joe Biden, who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and as he explains, and as John well knows, the issues of Afghanistan, the issues of Iraq, critical issues like that, don't go through my subcommittee because they're done as a committee as a whole.  But that's Senate inside baseball. But let's get back to the core issue here. Senator McCain is absolutely right that the violence has been reduced as a consequence of the extraordinary sacrifice of our troops and our military families. They have done a brilliant job, and General Petraeus has done a brilliant job. But understand, that was a tactic designed to contain the damage of the previous four years of mismanagement of this war. And so John likes -- John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007. You talk about the surge. The war started in 2003, and at the time when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shia and Sunni. And you were wrong. And so my question is . . .

(CROSSTALK)

 

LEHRER: Senator Obama . . .
 
OBAMA: . . .  of judgment, of whether or not -- of whether or not -- if the question is who is best-equipped as the next president to make good decisions about how we use our military, how we make sure that we are prepared and ready for the next conflict, then I think we can take a look at our judgment.
 
LEHRER: I have got a lot on the plate here...
 
MCCAIN: I'm afraid Senator Obama doesn't understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy. But the important -- I'd like to tell you, two Fourths of July ago I was in Baghdad. General Petraeus invited Senator Lindsey Graham and me to attend a ceremony where 688 brave young Americans, whose enlistment had expired, were reenlisting to stay and fight for Iraqi freedom and American freedom. I was honored to be there. I was honored to speak to those troops. And you know, afterwards, we spent a lot of time with them. And you know what they said to us? They said, let us win. They said, let us win. We don't want our kids coming back here. And this strategy, and this general, they are winning. Senator Obama refuses to acknowledge that we are winning in Iraq.
 
OBAMA: That's not true.
 
MCCAIN: They just passed an electoral . . . .
 
OBAMA: That's not true.
 
MCCAIN: An election law just in the last few days. There is social, economic progress, and a strategy, a strategy of going into an area, clearing and holding, and the people of the country then become allied with you. They inform on the bad guys. And peace comes to the country, and prosperity. That's what's happening in Iraq, and it wasn't a tactic.
 
LEHRER: Let me see...
 
OBAMA: Jim, Jim, this is a big . . .
 
MCCAIN: It was a stratagem. And that same strategy will be employed in Afghanistan by this great general. And Senator Obama, who after promising not to vote to cut off funds for the troops, did the incredible thing of voting to cut off the funds for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
OBAMA: Jim, there are a whole bunch of things we have got to answer. First of all, let's talk about this troop funding issue because John always brings this up. Senator McCain cut -- Senator McCain opposed funding for troops in legislation that had a timetable, because he didn't believe in a timetable. I opposed funding a mission that had no timetable, and was open- ended, giving a blank check to George Bush. We had a difference on the timetable. We didn't have a difference on whether or not we were going to be funding troops.
 
 
And on and on it went.  We could quote in full.  They aren't done yet.  Because Iraq was a huge issue in 2008.  Democrats used it the same way they used in 2006 to take back Congress.  They used it and then they ignored it.
 
And Barack likes to pretend that the Iraq War ended August 31, 2010.  Strange, though, the DoD counts 57 dead since that date.  [PDF format warning, click here.  Operation New Dawn is the name Barack gave to the post-August 31, 2010 Iraq 'adventure.'] 57 dead and he wants to pretend the Iraq War is over and that he kept his campaign promise.
 
57 dead and today so many whores in this country play footsie with him.
 
Much earlier in 2008, Barack Obama was glomming on a remark McCain made. John McCain made a comment regarding remaining in Iraq for 100 years.  Back in 2008, Brian Montopoli (CBS News -- link has text and video) reported on it, noting that McCain had stated in January "Make it a hundred" to the suggestion that Bush wanted to keep US troops in Iraq for fifty years. And McCain added, "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so.  That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." Montopoli made this call, "McCain appears to be talking about maintaining a presence in Iraq, not continuing the type of war America is now fighting." Alone among the left press, Zachary Roth (CJR) noted Barack's had lept on the "100 years" and "in doing so, Obama is seriously misleading voters -- if not outright lying to them -- about exactly what McCain said. And some in the press are failing to call him on it." Barack, as Roth points out, couldn't stop weighing in on McCain's remark.  "We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another hundred years," Barack insisted and at another time, "(McCain) says that he is willing to send our troops into another hundred years of war in Iraq." And yet again, "We can't afford to stay in Iraq, like John McCain said, for another hundred years."   As Roth noted, when called on it, Barack began to stop using the term war.  But he continued to criticize John McCain for keeping US troops in Iraq . . . the very thing that Barack will now be doing.
 
 
People who voted for Barack thought they were voting to end the Iraq War.  Remember the tent revivals, Barack yelling, "We want to end the war! And we want to end it now!"  He was so fond of that moment, he used it in commercials in over 34 states during the 2008 primaries (that number may be higher, I could only confirm 34 states this evening with a friend who worked on the campaign).
 
And people might have known better, might have known what a liar Barack was, if the whores hadn't been out in full force.  2008 was The Year of Living Hormonally.  And let's recall how that year went down because it's forgotten and unknown history for some:
 
Elements of the left were always going to side with Barack early on because there was a lie -- produced by fringe radicals on the left (hello, Carl!) -- that Barack was secretly a Socialist. Barack was and is a Corporatist War Hawk. I also wrongly thought that any elements of the left (other than Carl) would quickly grasp that reality after the wave of hype susided. I was wrong there too since this summer found an agitated Philip Maldari floating just that ['Barack is a Socialist!'] on KPFA thereby proving that only the dumb die hard.

In January Goody [Amy Goodman] brought the Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford on the program to discuss Barack and that was a good thing because, strangely, there had never been someone publicly critical of Barack brought on as a guest to the five times a week, hourly program. But while Barack supporters were all over the show and on solo segments or segments with other Barack supporters, bringing on Glen Ford required Goody pair him with the Barack Cultist Michael Eric Dyson. That was strange also due to the fact that, throughout 2007, Amy Goodman offered a plethora of Hillary Haters who never required 'balance' and she continued to do so as January began.

In that month alone, prior to Glen Ford, she'd already offered Robert Parry, apparently enroute to the padded room he now inhabits, insisting that 'evil' Hillary would do just what her husband did because wives behave exactly like their husbands. If, indeed, that's the case, better get the Thorazine ready for Mrs. Parry. There was never an effort made by Goody to stop the foaming at the mouth Parry and say, "Hold on a second. You have spent this decade and the bulk of the nineties writing one article after another in defense of or in praise of Bill Clinton. Why are you suddenly so scared that your deranged fantasy of Hillary being just like Bill will come true?"

You don't ask those questions. To you or me, those questions may seem basic. It's not every day, for instance, that journalist Robert Parry morphs into nutty Christopher Hitchens. But what you're forgetting is that adolescence is all about recreation. It's all about finding another identity. New hair styles are tried, new clothes, new friends, it's all about reinvention. And who but a sane person would attempt to deny Bobby Parry his shot at a second adolescence? And there were so many more important questions to ask.



Is she really going out with him?
Well, there she is. Let's ask her.
Betty, is that Jimmy's ring you're wearing?
Mm-hmm
Gee, it must be great riding with him
Is he picking you up after school today?
Uh-uh
By the way, where'd you meet him?
I met him at the candy store
He turned around and smiled at me
You get the picture? (yes, we see)
That's when I fell for (the leader of the pack)
-- "The Leader of the Pack," written by Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Shadow Morton

Goody had another Drooling Over Barack Teeny Booper in January: Allan Nairn. Nairn wanted the whole world to know that, if asked, he would gladly be pinned by Barack but he would even settle for Barack's letterman's jacket. Here's the moment that resulted in Allan becoming a 2008 homecoming nominee:

[Allan Nairn]: He actually doesn't need to finance his campaign, to go to the hedge funds, to go to Wall Street. But he does anyway. And he does, I think, because if he doesn't, they wouldn't trust him. They might think that he's on the wrong team, and they might start attacking him. He is someone who, in terms of the money he needs for his campaign, he could afford to come out for single-payer healthcare, for example, but he doesn't. He doesn't need money from the health insurance industry, that's wasting several percentage points of the American GDP in a way that no other industrial rich country in the world does, yet he chooses not to do that, because he doesn't want to be attacked by those corporations.

This was back when everyone (except The New York Times) was lying about Barack and pretending he was being made by small donors. He was a corporatist even then and, hopefully for Allan, the blood of East Timor (Barack
buddy Dennis Blair) will wash off the white formal he wore as a duchess to the Barack Ball.

 Some of you are going to be upset because this is big news and I'm basically recycling.  About six hours ago, I learned what Panetta said in the interview.  My rage has not subsided.  Were we speaking face to face, I'd say, "Let me let it rip, but let me warn you about the language."  At Trina and Mike's Iraq War Study Group this evening, my presentation on this would have made Redd Foxx blush.  Even now what I really want to say is to all these lying whores of the left who had no ethics at all, what I want to say is: "May you rot in eternal ___ing hell for what you have done to the children of Iraq." 
 
And to be very clear for those late to the party, that is not a blanket attack on Barack supporters.  I am talking about leaders who knew better and lied, who gamed the system and cheated and whored.  I have friends who didn't rank Iraq high on their list or even at all and they voted for Barack for other reasons.  That's fine.  Your vote is you vote.  The people I am talking about, for example, went on KPFA to provide 'debate analysis' of the debate between Barack and Hillary and all 'forgot' to reveal on air that they were for Barack.  They enjoyed telling you that Hillary "cackled" because sexism is so needed on the left, apparantly. They just didn't want to tell you that they had rigged the 'analysis' and 'debate' by only inviting Barack supporters to the program.  Laura Flanders and Tom Hayden and that ugly man with the little prissy girl voice and all the rest.  They lied, they whored.  And it is the children of Iraq who suffer for it.  You will note not one of them has yet to apologize for their actions.
 
Scott Horton (Harper's, not Antiwar Radio's Scott Horton) was on Law & Disorder Radio this week pretending he had always known reality about Barack.  You don't have to take my word for it, go back and read his 2008 ravings, check out his media appearances from that year.  These are the people with blood on their hands, with the blood of Iraqi children on their hands.  If they had played fair and stuck to the ethics they espoused, that would be one thing.  (And some supporters of Barack did in fact do that. I'm not referring to those supporters or calling them out.)  But that's not what these whores did.
 
And you don't want to read me dictating "whore, whore, whore" over and over.  (We are a work safe site and that is one of the rare curse words we can use here.)  (I have a very foul mouth and have never pretended otherwise.  We are work safe so that people can read it at work without getting written up.)
 
 
So I will pick this topic up again but I can't do it right now.  All I've wanted to do for the last six hours is act out Rebecca De Mornay's amazing scene as Peyton in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, where she goes into the bathroom, grabs the plunger and tears the bathroom up.  That has been my level of rage for the last six hours.
 
The Diane Rehm Show (second hour -- link has audio and transcript options -- both options are free to all visitors at Diane's site) addressed Iraq today -- and this was before the news of Panetta's remarks.   Joining Diane for the second hour was the New York Times' Thom Shanker, McClatchy Nancy A. Youssef (who noted Iraq prior to the excerpt) and the Washington Post's David Ignatius.
 
Diane Rehm: Now, I'd like to move on to Iraq where there has been a particularly violent week, Thom.

Thom Shanker: Well, that's certainly true. I mean, there have been a series of complex attacks. These are not just sort of individual bombs, individual men with rifles, but series of explosions to enter compounds followed by, you know, a raiding party, which shows planning, which shows power, which shows tenacity. I think we do need to recall, though, that there was a similar spike in attacks exactly a year ago at the Ramadan period. So this is troubling. It shows the great gaps that remain in the Iraqi security forces even as America moves to draw down by the end of the year. But it was just this one individual spike. And except for the month of June, which was the highest number of American combat deaths in three years, the rate and pace of attacks has gone down this year.

Diane Rehm: Nancy, what is the controversy over Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's choice of enacting defense minister?

Nancy A. Youssef: Well, it's a sustained attack on Nouri al-Maliki, which is that he is treating the military as an extension of his own armed militia group and that he isn't taking a nationalist approach to the security of his country. You know, Monday was the deadliest day in Iraq so far this year. And I think it's worth pointing out that on August 31 of last year, the president declared the end of combat operations in Iraq. We've lost 57 U.S. troops since then. And we're -- as Thom mentioned, we're seeing these complex attacks. On Monday, they started at 7:00 a.m. and continued until 8:00 p.m. And I have to say I kept wondering, what was the motive? Is it an effort by Al-Qaida to keep the United States -- engaging the United States to force the Iraqi government to ask us to stay to keep the sort of enemy in sight, if you will? Possibly. Is it Iran's effort to keep us engaged and, some would say, entangled in Iraq? Possibly. And the reason those two extremes are there is because this wasn't just an attack on Sunnis or just on Shiite -- albeit the Shiite took a lot more of the attacks -- but it's suggested that both sides had launched these coordinated attacks. And I think, for Iraqis, it was reminiscent of those horrific days at the height of the sectarian war when scores of people would be killed on any given day.

David Ignatius: You do have an Iraq that's beset. You have Al-Qaida showing that it's still capable of extreme violence, still capable of coordinated attacks. You had the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq saying this week that whatever the threat posed by Al-Qaida, the biggest threat in Iraq are Shiite militias backed by Iran, which he identified as the critical problem. Everybody, knowing that U.S. troops are on their way out, wants to take credit for driving the troops out, which is -- you know, it's sorta like raiding a retreating army I think adding to the bleak picture in Iraq is the fact that Maliki, on whom the U.S. has surprisingly relied given his weakness, more than a year after the coalition agreement that got him the prime ministership in which he promised that the opposition, the Iraqiya Party could name the defense minister, has not followed through on that. And indeed appointed an acting defense minister this week, Dulaimi, who was rejected in effect by Iraqiya. In other words, he's basically welched on the deal and I think people are really upset about it.

Nancy A. Youssef: Well, he wants to retain control of the military. He wants it to stay in his hands and not risk giving it to another rival, another party to lose that control because his power, particularly with every brigade that comes -- every U.S. brigade that comes out, rests with the Iraqi military. That's his base, in a way, more than any other group in Iraq.

Diane Rehm: And at the same time, you had Turkey attacking Kurdish targets in Northern Iraq.

Thom Shanker: Right. The Kurdish separatists, you know, have been raiding from their bases in northern Iraq into Turkey. And so Turkey responded very viciously this week with counterattacks. We do have to remember, though, that, you know, if you look at the bigger picture, Turkey remains Iraq's largest trading partner. So while this is worrisome and it's a problem, it is not really affecting the bilateral relationships...

Diane Rehm: So what...

Thom Shanker: ...between the two countries.

Diane Rehm: ...what was the response by Iraq?

Thom Shanker: Well, Iraq right now is really unable -- its forces are, you know, incompetent, stretched thin. And even where they're strong, they are looking at the internal crisis, the Al-Qaida, Mesopotamia, the Shiite militias that David referred to. And one of the real problems, Diane, with a stalemate is come the end of December, all the American forces have to be out of there unless there's some sort of extension or new agreement on the status of forces. I was talking to a two-star general just yesterday who's in from Iraq and he said that nobody expects the current SOFA agreement to be extended. It's too broad --

Diane Rehm: Status of Forces Agreement.

Thom Shanker: -- exactly, to stay in place. And what the U.S. side is drawing up options for is a very limited, very narrow sort of deal, 3,000 troops, 10,000 troops to do training. And what the Iraqis really need is intelligence to find out where the bad guys are and where to go after them. That's what the Iraqis -- they have no intelligence or sustainment.
 
Let's grab the topic of the bombing of northern Iraq and move to that.  The Iraqi Parliament is now in recess. Before going into recess yesterday, Alsumaria TV reportsa, there was "a Kurdish request to add the issue of Turkish bombarding on Irbil and Duhok provinces borders on the session's agenda. Following this request the speaker called the committee of security and defense to study the issue and to present a report about the situation after the vacation." The Turkish military is targeting the PKK. The PKK is one of many Kurdish groups which supports and fights for a Kurdish homeland. Aaron Hess (International Socialist Review) described them in 2008, "The PKK emerged in 1984 as a major force in response to Turkey's oppression of its Kurdish population. Since the late 1970s, Turkey has waged a relentless war of attrition that has killed tens of thousands of Kurds and driven millions from their homes. The Kurds are the world's largest stateless population -- whose main population concentration straddles Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria -- and have been the victims of imperialist wars and manipulation since the colonial period. While Turkey has granted limited rights to the Kurds in recent years in order to accommodate the European Union, which it seeks to join, even these are now at risk." The Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq has been a concern to Turkey because they fear that if it ever moves from semi-autonomous to fully independent -- such as if Iraq was to break up into three regions -- then that would encourage the Kurdish population in Turkey. For that reason, Turkey is overly interested in all things Iraq. So much so that they signed an agreement with the US government in 2007 to share intelligence which the Turkish military has been using when launching bomb raids. However, this has not prevented the loss of civilian life in northern Iraq. Back to Aaron Hess, he noted, "The Turkish establishment sees growing Kurdish power in Iraq as one step down the road to a mass separatist movement of Kurds within Turkey itself, fighting to unify a greater Kurdistan. In late October 2007, Turkey's daily newspaper Hurriyet accused the prime minister of the KRG, Massoud Barzani, of turning the 'Kurdish dream' into a 'Turkish nightmare'." Bloomberg News notes tensions have risen "since a general election [in Turkey] June 12, when the courts barred several pro-Kurdish candidates from entering parliament, culminating in a declaration of Kurdish autonomy last month."  Todays Zaman notes threats that additional "legal action could also be taken against Kurdish politicians [in Turkey] currently boycotting parliament and accused of close links to the PKK."

Seyhmus Cakan (Reuters) notes
the Turkish military continued air raids last night over northern Iraq and states this wave "marks a stark escalation of the 27-year-old conflict" between the government of Turkey and the PKK. AFP notes Turkish war planes continue bombing today "for a third straight day." Suzan Fraser (AP) quotes PKK spokesperson Ahmed Danis stating, "Our fighters left these bases a while ago and now they are in constant mobility. Therefore there were no casualties."  Ergun Babahan (Hurriyet Daily News) offers the opinion that, "There is no point in calls for peace in an environment where news of the death of young people arrives every day. The administration of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, or those who are managing it eitehr believe that they can overcome Turkey by military intrusions or they hope that they will have more popular support in an atmoshphere that becomes more anti-democratic in such a struggle." Rizgar Hemid Sindi (Rudaw) argues:
 
On the Turkish front, Prime Minister Receb Tayyib Erdogan has started policy reforms backed by the US and the EU. Under Erdogan's government, Turkish military generals are living their worst nightmare. Several of those who had participated in the massacre and torture of Kurds are now in prison.
Last month, the country's top army general resigned from his post, saying he could no longer protect his officers from being thrown in jail.
The largest pro-Kurdish party in Turkey, the Peace and Democratic Party (BDP), won 36 parliamentary seats in the June elections. Several TV channels have been given permission to broadcast news and other porgrasm in Kurdish. Erdogan, whose party holds the majority of seats in the Turkish parliament, has promised to amend the constitution to make it more democratic.
The situation shows that participating in municipal and parliamentary elections is a much better strategy for the Kurds.

Ivan Watson, Mohammed Tawfeeq and Yesim Comert (CNN) quote KRG spokesperson Kawa Mahmoud stating, "We always emphasize that shelling (the) Iraqi border is inconsisten with international conventions and good neighborly relations, and we consider it as intervention and disregard for the sovereignty of the Kurdish and Iraqi territory."  Mahmoud also noted that Turkey's repeated bombings were harming the KRG's infrastructure.

Meanwhile Aswat al-Iraq reports US Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey met in the KRG with KRG President Masoud Barzani to discuss a number of issues. The ongoing air raid assault has prompted only the mildest of critiques from Nouri al-Maliki. al-Maliki and his State of Law have had much harsher criticism for Iraq's president Jalal Talabani. Alsumaria TV reports that State of Law has taken offense to Talabani's statements that Monday's bombings throughout Iraq partly resulted from Iraq's inability to name people to the security posts.
 
Reuters notes that Iraq's violence included a Kirkuk attack that left a police officer "seriously wounded," 1 person shot dead in Mosul, a Baghdad roadside bombing last night which left three people injured, 1 corpse discovered in Kirkuk last night, a Kirkuk sticky bombing last night which injured a police officer and his wife and 1 person shot dead in Kirkuk.
 

 
In yesterday's snapshot, we noted Scott Horton -- the good Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio, not his evil twin from Harper's magazine -- speaking with Antiwar.com's Jason Ditz and Scott was noting his belief or hope that Nouri would refuse to go along with the deal. Nouri's a thug and a puppet so that's not very likely but I hoped there was at least a tiny chance of it as well.  I also hoped that with the negotiations having been made public some of the lying whores who now avoid the topic of Iraq would rush forward to put pressure on their personal lord and savior Barack Obama.  Alas the Cult of St. Barack never managed to take on their Christ-child.  How fitting that this would be the day on which Stephen Lendman offered "RIP: America's Anti-War Movement" (Indybay):

According to United for Peace and Justice's (UFPJ) Michael McPhearson, it's partly partisan politics. Many anti-war protesters were Democrats. "Once Obama got into office, they kind of demobilized themselves," and America's major media provided no momentum to reinvigorate them.
"Because he's a Democrat," said McPhearson, "they don't want to oppose him in the same way as they opposed Bush. The politics of it allows him more breathing room when it comes to the wars."
Of course, UFPJ also has been less anti-war active under Obama than Bush, not quiescent, but much less resonant than through 2008.
UFPJ "calls for an immediate withdrawal of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan with a negotiated just settlement involving international parties, including regional neighbors" when condemnation is essential.
Moreover, it says nothing about war and occupation of Iraq, not enough about Afghanistan, the lawlessness of all US wars, why they're waged, other illegal wars against Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, support for Israeli belligerence against Palestinians, as well as denouncing them all as Washington-sponsored imperial aggression.
Failure to do so betrays the trust of its member groups and followers. All US wars are illegal. America is responsible for daily crimes of war and against humanity in every theater. Exposing and denouncing them is the first crucial step to arousing public anger enough to stop them.

I'm so sick of the liars of United for Peace & Justice. The day after the 2008 election, they posted their litte 'everything is beautiful, go home' post and then they want to whine about the state of the movement today as if they had no part in it. For almost three years now, they have remained silent and done nothing. Not only have that not staged a convincing protest, they've failed to support the genuine efforts of people like Cindy Sheehan. They couldn't be bothered offering even just 'online support' to any of Cindy's actions. In a column on the financial costs of war, Linda Greene (Bloomington Alternative) writes about an October event of Cindy's:
Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was killed in action in the Iraq war on April 4, 2004. Since then, she has become an activist for peace and human rights.

Sheehan travels and speaks widely and has returned recently from France and Japan. The author of five books, she is currently writing her sixth, on Hugo Chavez, Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution. She is also the host of her own radio show, Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox.

For Sheehan, war is also an environmental issue. "The U.S. military is both the largest polluter in the world and the largest consumer of fossil fuel," she says. "The current U.S. military missions not only pollute the world using conventional weaponry, but the war machine's increasing use of weapons and equipment enhanced with depleted uranium is also contaminating the planet and further compromising the delicate balance of life."

This will be Sheehan's first visit to Bloomington.

The talk, sponsored by the Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, the Bloomington branch of the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, the 9/11 Working Group of Bloomington, and the Just Peace Task Force and Green Sanctuary Task Force on Global Climate Change of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington, commemorates the 10th anniversary of the start of the Afghanistan war, Oct. 7.

 

  

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