Saturday, May 23, 2020

The butt ugly winner of Idiot of the Week

John Stauber Tweets:

The phony rich celeb who forced #Biden down your throat is coming to tell you how much you will like him.
Quote Tweet

guardian
·
Barack Obama poised to add his star appeal to Joe Biden's campaign theguardian.com/us-news/2020/m


Amen.

Now for Idiot of the Week.







That's the deranged Katha Pollitt.  Since 1980, she's been imposing her smut on THE NATION.  She really needs to go.  When not lecturing African-Americans and the NAACP on how she doesn't feel they should worry about how many African-Americans are on TV shows, Katha likes to print lies.  For example, she was blown away by Sarah Palin and wrote in an e-mail to the Journlist about how well she came across.  But then, when writing about the same presentation for THE NATION, she ridiculed Palin.  It's that sort of dishonesty that's at the heart of Katha's bad writing.

This week, she wanted America to know that even if Joe Biden assaulted Tara Reade, it didn't matter and they should vote for Joe Biden.

Let's remember that.  In May of 2020, Katha Pollitt declared it didn't matter if a man raped a woman.  What a great moment for Katha.

She calls herself a feminist?

People let her get away with pretending?

Time's Up, Katha. 

If THE NATION had any credibility, they'd fire Katha.

Her argument will be used against survivors: There are issues larger than your single rape.

Katha's arguing, grasp it, that rape is not really a crime.  You can vote for rapists.  You can support rapists.  You can defend rapists.

That's what she's saying.

She needs to pack it in and go away. 
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"


Friday, May 22, 2020.  No attack is too far when the press wants to discredit a woman's voice and corruption continues in Iraq.



Let's start with Ely Kreimendahl's hilarious parody of Women for Biden:





Let's note Pig Boy Michael Tracey who loves to attack women (especially women of color -- Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, etc -- there's a reason Margaret Kimberley's rebuked him online).

Antioch University emphatically denies that Tara Reade ever received a degree. Unless they're lying for some bizarre reason, Tara Reade falsified her credentials in court. Again, congratulations to everyone who promoted this complete fiasco of a story

If true, what does that have to do with her allegation of assault?

More to the point -- who the hell cares?

They are throwing everything they can at her.  Have you had a problem with a landlord?  Guess what -- not a crime.

Have women ever lied about the academic history?  Yes.  It is not uncommon (or for men too).  It is so not uncommon that it was a story for Mary Richards.  Yes, on THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, Mary reveals to Lou that she didn't actually graduate college as she had stated in her long ago job interview.

I didn't believe Christine Blasey Ford and I still don't.  Find anything here where I ripped her apart.  You won't.  First off, I could be wrong.  Second off, I'm not going to rip her apart for this or that event in her life that has nothing to do with her assault charge.  I'm not interested in shaming or silencing women who say they were assaulted.  Blasey Ford may be telling the truth, she may not.  But I'm not going to rip her life apart to try to pretend that proves a point about whether she was assaulted or not.

It proves nothing.

Nothing is what Asama Khalid offered on NPR yesterday.  That includes her justification for Joe Biden supporting the Hyde Amendment.  She insists that Joe has evolved and "the Democratic Party has evolved on it."  As Li Zhou (VOX) noted last June "until a few weeks ago , former Vice President Joe Biden was a staunch supporter of the Hyde Amendment."

Asama felt it was important to note that PBS spoke to 74 people who worked for Joe Biden but with Tara's corroborating witnesses, "these are people, I should point out, that we were connected with through Tara herself."  As Ava and I noted Sunday in "Media: Lies and liars all around," PBS spoke to 74 employees the Biden campaign steered them to -- that's written in the actual report.  That would be the report everyone keeps mentioning but fails to have actually read it.

Failing is all Asama has done on NPR with this story from day one.

The NPR segment offered a Patty in a soundbye insisting "we would have heard about it during the vetting" and demanding "Give me a break!"

Rebecca Traister, who was one of the panelists, rightly noted that the country has evolved on this issue since 2008.  More to the point, Barack's vetting?  He let one of his daughters intern for Harvey Weinstein.  Are we really trusting Barack's vetting?


Democrat Hannah James is running for Congress out of California's 19th district and she Tweets:

Hey
@JoeBiden
, Why did you sexually assault Tara Reade? #AskBidenAnything


Here's another question: When is Joe going to be vetted?  These attacks have been organized by his campaign and yet he's repeatedly allowed to go on camera stating Tara has every right to tell her story and act as though he's not doing anything.  He is running a campaign to trash and destroy her.  When will the media get real about this?

Probably never.  Ever.

When do Joe's actions in public impact the way this story is covered?  When is he ever asked why did you say you apologized and days later make jokes about consent when you appeared before a largely male audience?  How is that funny?  How does that make it appear you took the complaints from women seriously?

When is he asked about his many lies about Anita Hill?  That goes to Tara's assault charge.  Joe has lied about Anita repeatedly.  He has lied that he supported her.  He then went to Republican senators and told them Anita was lying.  When is he going to get honest about that?  How many Republican senators have to talk about that before the media asks him?  He has a long history of dismissing assault and harassment.  That goes to this issue.

The Iraq War?  It doesn't.  His past lying about everything else?  It really doesn't have to do with Tara.  But if the media wants to dig through a citizen's life, they damn well should be digging through a public servant's life -- a public servant who somehow ends up with millions and millions of dollars.  No, that's not how public service is supposed to work.

On Iraq . . .




Joe has spent 2019 and 2020 citing his being in charge of Iraq during Barack's presidency.  So if he was responsible, when is he asked the tough questions?

There are a ton of tough questions that need to be asked.  That interview has many lies in it.

Even to the idiots, it should be obvious that the rise of ISIS -- which Joe is responsible for -- raises the issue of how US troops left.

We were and are for all US troops out of Iraq.  We argued for that to take place immediately.  We argued that to Barack's transition team -- Ava and I did -- long before Barack was sworn in.  Our argument was: Pull all troops now and the reason is: This is what the American people voted for.

Why does that matter?

Iraq's government was and is propped up by US troops.  The US installed the government.  It is not popular with the people.  When US troops leave, the government most likely will topple.

Good.  Let the Iraqi people determine the government that they want and need -- that is democracy.

So pull out immediately and when asked you reply: This was the will of the American people.

Fail to keep your promise of ten months and dicker around with Iraq and you own it.  It's no longer Bully Boy Bush's problem, it is your problem.

And that's how it became Barack's problem.  He did not keep his campaign promise.  Samantha Power and Joe Biden and Susan Rice, among others, just knew they were smart to fix things.  They were idiots.

And they made Bully Boy Bush's war into Barack's war.  If he had kept his promise, it wouldn't have happened.  But he didn't.

Hassan Ali Ahmed (ARAB NEWS) reports this morning:

After about two months of quiet due to pandemic concerns, Iraqi protesters returned to the streets soon after the formation of the new government.
The protests that erupted last year in October resulted in Adil Abdul Mahdi’s resignation and withdrawal of the last two prime ministers. After the approval of Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s government, the new prime minister announced plans to tackle corruption and address the protesters' demands.
Baghdad, Wasit, Dhi Qar, Al-Muthanna, Babel, Al-Qadisiyyah and Karbala provinces have been rocked by protests since last week. There have been several clashes between the protesters and the security forces. On May. 18, four activists were arrested in Diwaniya, the capital of Al-Qadisiyyah. Security forces also attacked protesters at the Ahdab oil field in Wasit province, burning their tents and damaging their vehicles. On May. 19, security forces fired live ammunition at protesters in Diwaniya, killing at leat one and injuring many others.
Protesters still complain about activists and paramedics being abducted. Prominent activist Haidar al-Lami was abducted on May. 18 when he was returning to Tahrir Square in Baghdad. Though those arrested and abducted were released by direct order from the prime minister, the protesters have not only reduced their activities but have stepped up the protests and raised their demands.
As summer approaches, the protests are expanding in the southern provinces over a lack of electricity and clean water. Hundreds of protesters gathered May. 16 in front of the governor's office in Basra, which has suffered salinity problems for last few years.
Iraq's government does not serve the Iraqi people.  The hope of US war mongers originally was the Iraqi people would be stunned -- shocked and awed -- into submission.  Naomi Klein wrote about that in "Baghdad Year Zero" which originally appeared in HARPER'S.





That has long since changed.  They no longer want to shock into submission, they just want to keep the Iraqi government in place until the Iraqi people are too exhausted to argue or fight back.





The US-installed Iraq government is corrupt and it does not serve the Iraqi people.  Karwan Faidhi Dri (RUDAW) reports:                                                                     


When 752 tons of wheat went missing from a state grain silo in Najaf this year, the site manager claimed it had been pilfered by flocks of hungry birds. Anti-graft officials aren’t convinced.

Iraq’s integrity commission, parliament, and provincial officials in Iraq’s holy city of Najaf have launched a probe into the alleged avian antics, which seem a little farfetched.

As the missing grain is said to be worth at least $350,000, investigators believed it was stolen by corrupt officials.

On Thursday, Iraq’s Federal Commission of Integrity (FCOI) said its officials completed an audit of the silo’s stocks between May 4, 2019 and April 1, 2020.

“The Office confirmed that there was a shortage in wheat material that amounted to (752 tons and 498 kg), and that its total value reached (421,120,000 IQD) [$353,744],” the commission said in a statement.

Investigators have submitted their findings to the Najaf Investigation Court and called for legal action against those deemed responsible. 





The following sites updated:













  • Friday, May 22, 2020

    A truest and two songs I love from the '00s

    This is from Tiana Lowe's "We went from 'maybe Tara Reade is lying' to the rehabilitation of Matt Lauer in about a month" (WASHINGTON EXAMINER):

    The final nail in the coffin of our hopes of post-Clintonian redemption came with Tara Reade's allegation against Joe Biden. Reade's claim, while credible, may not quite meet the preponderance of the evidence, but that's not the conversation Democrats decided to have. Most in the party apparatchik have simply pretended that Ford never existed, acting as though the multiple contemporaneously corroborating witnesses backing Reade's claim are laughable shams of evidence, but some have said the quiet part out loud, admitting that they believe Reade but are willing to accept yet another sexual predator in the White House as long as he beats Trump.
    So the press has embarked on a scorched earth campaign against Reade, gleefully reporting how she’s had trouble making rent, misrepresented her college career, and may have embellished details about an undeniably violent and abusive relationship. No matter that no one has actually discredited the evidence backing the actual assault claim. The press can paint Reade as a poor, Putin-loving liar, and that’s good enough for them.
    In the midst of this environment, Ben Smith came out of nowhere with a piece criticizing Farrow. Some of Smith’s critiques that Farrow failed to properly explicate his sourcing or explain context in his stories were valid, and one point attempting to exonerate Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Weinstein simply made no sense. But most glaring was his refusal to mention Farrow’s most faulty story, the bogus Ramirez allegation.
    Whatever prompted the initial report, it can’t hurt Biden to have America’s most well-known reporter on sexual assault allegations against powerful men under fierce scrutiny.

    I think that calls for a truest. I'm taking that to THIRD this weekend because that is a "truest statement of the week,'' if you ask me.

    What is my favorite song from the '00s? Mickey asked that in an e-mail. If you've been reading this for any length of time, you'll probably have a few guesses. One good guess would be Janis Ian's "All Those Promises."



    I love that song. It could easily be my second favorite song of the decade. It's from her album FOLK IS THE NEW BLACK.

    So what's number one?



    The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army."

    I love that song.


    Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"


    Thursday, May 21, 2020.  Attacking Tara Reade isn't feminism though it clearly helps some make a quick buck.





    Cher performing Stephen Stills' "For What It's Worth." Cher's version appears on her 1969 classif album 3614 JACKSON HIGHWAY.


    There's battle lines being drawn 
    And nobody's right if everybody's wrong 
    Young people speaking their minds
    Getting some much resistance from behind

    As a friend with the Biden campaign gloated to me on the phone last night, "We knew what we were doing."  Yes, they did.  The campus papers are pretty much mute right now.  That was always the biggest block for Joe.  It's not just that young adults don't like him.  It's also that they're better educated on assault and harassment.

    The generational divide that's been at the heart of Joe's lukewarm reception continues.  And you see it at THE NATION where the elderly write so many columns that 46-year-old Dave Zirin is the 'youngster' in the mix.

    Joan Walsh? 61.  Katha Pollitt?  70.  Patricia J. Williams?  68.

    I had to ask Jim to look into that 2007 e-mail from THE NATION.  Ava and I had been sick of the imbalance at THE NATION in terms of gender.  They were publishing far more men than women.  We'd started to track it.  Around July 4th, THE NATION had e-mailed frantically.  They wanted the story killed.  They would do anything.  They would publish Ava and myself (we had no interest, thank you), they were going to be hiring women columnists shortly -- and young women at that.  Could we please kill the story?

    Do we look like whores?  Maybe.  But we're not.

    We tracked it for a full year and served up "The Nation featured 491 male bylines in 2007 -- how many female ones?" on December 23, 2007. 149, by the way, that's the answer.  They had 491 male bylines that year and only 149 female bylines.

    And you don't see what women are up against?  Even on the so-called inclusive Democratic left (as opposed to genuine left).

    Well they never did hire a young woman -- 46-year-old Melissa Lacewell Harris Perry was the closest they got.

    They don't get it, like so many, they just don't get it.  They don't want to get it is probably the reason why they don't get it but it really doesn't matter.  What matters is we're in the 21st century and they're stuck in the 90s with their James Carville mindset.

    They smear and attack Tara with rape culture because they must stop Tara and any other woman who might come out -- two have now hinted publicly about coming forward.

    Katha Pollitt, you're the new Midge Decter!  To this generation coming up right now, that's what you are.  Embrace your descent into frivolity -- or further frivolity.

    They don't get it.  They didn't get Anita Hill in real time either but we'll talk about that tomorrow.

    Alexis Grenell (NEW YORK DAILY NEWS) plans to vote for Joe but is dismayed by the attacks on Tara Reade:

      
    Reade may be only the latest in a long line of inconvenient women to pipe up about a favorite son, but she’s the first to appear post-#MeToo in the middle of an election year where the sitting president has botched the response to a pandemic that’s killed more Americans than the Vietnam War. All of this leaves less bandwidth for her in the public imagination, as she asks us to weigh her individual pain against the agony of watching our whole world bleed out. It certainly doesn’t make her any easier to like.

    The thing is, it’s not necessary to like or not like Reade, because either way we cannot know what happened. I’ve read through every shred of “evidence” and I still can’t make sense of the facts or my feelings about them. I have no qualms about supporting Biden — we can’t re-elect the titular head of the death cult formerly known as the Republican Party — but my ambivalence about Reade is what keeps me up at night. I want her, and anyone else who comes forward about alleged abuse, to be allowed to be unlikeable and legitimate. I want people to be able to separate feelings from facts, and when the facts don’t lead somewhere conclusive, not to fill in the blanks with feelings. I want us to learn that sexual abuse rarely comes with a certificate of origin and to sit with that discomfort.

    Alexis bills herself as a feminist.  Is she?  I'd say no.  Xenophobia doesn't really belong in feminism.  Maybe she's a domestic (and domesticated) feminist (tabby)?  The Vietnam War?  If we're going to count deaths, we should include the Vietnamese.  It was their country.  Reducing a war to the deaths on only one side -- regardless of the war -- is not just short-sighted, it's xenophobic.

    But Grenell is a writer and she's right to be concerned about what's taking place which puts her far ahead of Katha Pollitt the faux feminist that we addressed in yesterday's snapshot.  Others are addressing her nonsense as well.  Here's Sady Doyle:



    Here, from Katha Pollit's latest piece on Reade, is a problem troubling me with this coverage: Pollit names four-count-em-four witnesses corroborating sexual harassment, three of them roughly contemporaneous to the event. Then she calls it merely "possible" Reade was harassed.
      


    The evidence for the assault itself is much weaker. But every witness, even hostile ones (like the ex) corroborates the harassment at least. Why "possible?" Why not "likely?" In any other circumstance, feminists would likely say "can be relatively sure harassment occurred."


    One element of Reade's claim - the most inflammatory, the rape - has the weakest evidence for it. But we DO have corroborating accounts for the harassment, more than are often required to take a claim seriously. If we're feminists, we should take that as our grounds for argument.

    If the worst insinuation of Reade's critics is true -- that she inflated a sexual assault claim to a rape claim to get press attention she was missing -- that's a tragedy about a woman who went unheard so long she risked something desperate and destroyed her life in the process.

    Another scenario is that a vulnerable woman, who struggled with money and an abusive marriage after being sexually harassed at work, was later preyed upon by bad political actors and convinced to escalate her claim. Again, that would be horrible, but it would also be tragic.


    In no scenario does Biden emerge spotless. In no scenario does his track record with women become irrelevant. What makes Biden look worst, all this, is the rush to demolish Reade in the hopes of restoring some "feminist" reputation Biden does not appear to have ever deserved.

    Katha Pollitt is an embarrassment.  She opened that hideous column attacking Tara with the reveal that she would vote for Joe even if were seen on the street eating a baby.  Is she trying to restart the spirit cooking nonsense?  Is that stupid?  I thought we agreed that nonsense was harmful, that people were wrongly being threatened because of it.  But here's Katha offering, like a good whore, where her line in the sand is.  The entire column is an embrace of and advancement of rape culture.  That's not feminism.

    Candice Russell Tweets:

    Watching the Tara Reade coverage has become like some sort of trauma induced version of Groundhogs Day so of COURSE “professional feminist” Katha Pollitt just HAD TO give her two cents on sexual assault again (hint: still just as problematic as when she wrote about mine)


    By the way, when Katha attacked Candice, Katha wrote, "Why not say, 'These are serious allegations, and we're going to look into them'?"

    Double standard?  Katha denies there's one with regards to Christine Blasey Ford and Tara Reade.  But there is one.  There's also a double standard to how Katha responded with Candice and with Tara.

    The rank hypocrisy that wafts off Katha is something no FDS will ever send running.

    COMMON DREAMS' Eoin Higgins offers:

    Wow, Katha Pollit doesn't believe Tara Reade, what a shocking surprise, what's next, that she's a TERF?

    It's left to Anthony Zenkus to provide the realities Katha avoids:

    There is rarely "definitive proof" in rape cases. The reason so many victims never even come forward. And yet 1 in 6 women are victims of rape or attempted rape in their lives. Funny how that works.


    Let's note two more from Zenkus:

    After being called out by multiple women for nonconsensual, inappropriate touch which they viewed as harmful, Biden joked about consent multiple times. Mr. Biden: what is so funny about consent? #AskBidenAnything



    And:



    We need nominee who doesnt think it's fair game to touch the thighs of sex assault victims after they talk about their assaults, and who then jokes about consent after being called out on his gross behavior. Biden needs to go. Consent is not a joke. #DropOutJoe #AskBidenAnything


    Andrew Levine (COUNTERPUNCH) notes:

    Let’s begin with the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, whose leadership decided to throw Reade to the curb because of the identity of her alleged assailant. According to Reade, she only realized after reading Ryan Grim’s reporting for The Intercept  that this happened owing, in all likelihood, to the nonprofit’s professional relationship to Anita Dunn, a Biden advisor who works for SKDKnickerbocker, the PR firm for Time’s Up. Leaving aside any other critiques one has of The Intercept and Joe Biden, it is a tremendous faux pas for Ryan Grim to let a journalistic bombshell like that be published without forewarning to his source. The Watergate conspirators were given more courtesy, as demonstrated by the classic exclamation “[Washington Post publisher] Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s ever published!” What was he thinking?
    In 2019, both the Associated Press and the Washington Post worked the story but ultimately canned coverage. The AP had the story in April of that year, when, simultaneously, everyone was publishing about Biden being too touchy for people’s comfort case and point this particular column in Clinton lap dog Ezra Klein’s Vox. Even if there were inconsistencies within Reade’s story (purportedly the reason for squashing it), she deserved a fair hearing and a forum. These venues have given far more airtime to far more dubious actors over the years (cf. 2016 Donald Trump campaign) and have no shred of credibility here. Sexual trauma and memory are very messy things from top to bottom. There are plenty of women who have very public accounts of suppression and triggering that causes them to recall details sometimes years after the events.


    We're living in a different century and what's going down will not have consequences.  In this century, a woman writes her own "For What It's Worth" and performs it.  Stevie Nicks:





    In Iraq, REUTERS reports:

    Royal Dutch Shell evacuated some 60 foreign staff from Iraq’s Basra Gas Company as a security measure following a protest over delayed pay, company officials said on Thursday, adding production was unaffected.
    The staff were flown out of the country on Wednesday after workers protested at the headquarters of Basra Gas Company (BGC), a venture between state-owned South Gas Company, Shell and Mitsubishi, to demand payment of their delayed salaries, officials said.
    “Shell confirms that as result of a security breach at the accommodation camp of Basra Gas Company, we have temporarily relocated Shell secondees,” Shell said in emailed comments.






    The following sites updated: