Friday, December 24, 2021

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, here's Jimmy Dore.



 

And here's another Christmas gift, Joe Biden met with reality today.  BLOOMBERG NEWS reports:

 

 A traditional White House holiday call with military families ended awkwardly Friday when one father told President Joe Biden, “Let’s Go Brandon,” a slur used by some conservatives, and hung up after Biden asked his kids about their Christmas wishes.

 The phrase has become code for “F--- Joe Biden” in conservative circles. When he heard it, Biden responded, “Let’s Go Brandon, I agree,” but did not otherwise react to the remark. The White House declined to comment.

 

Let's go Brandon!  


One of the year's best phrases. 


Good for whichever father said it.  Loved Cindy Sheehan for taking the truth to Bully Boy Bush, love the guy who said "Let's go Brandon" to Biden. 

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

 

Friday, December 24. 2021.  Joe Biden needs to end the persecution of journalist Julian Assange and THE LOS ANGELES TIMES needs to end their sexist coverage of Iraq.


The most persecuted journalist in the world remains Julian Assange as the US government continues to demand that he be handed over for the crime of 'reporting' and as the UK government continues to hold him in prison while they decide whether or not they're going to hand him over.  Two goverrnment persecuting him while his own government, Australia, sports its own impotency on the world stage.


Whistle-blower Edward Snowden observes:

This Christmas may well be the last that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will spend outside US custody. On December 10, the British High Court ruled in favor of extraditing Assange to the United States, where he will be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information. It is clear to me that the charges against Assange are both baseless and dangerous, in unequal measure — baseless in Assange’s personal case, and dangerous to all. In seeking to prosecute Assange, the US government is purporting to extend its sovereignty to the global stage and hold foreign publishers accountable to US secrecy laws. By doing so, the US government will be establishing a precedent for prosecuting all news organization everywhere — all journalists in every country — who rely on classified documents to report on, for example, US war crimes, or the US drone program, or any other governmental or military or intelligence activity that the State Department, or the CIA, or the NSA, would rather keep locked away in the classified dark, far from public view, and even from Congressional oversight.

I agree with my friends (and lawyers) at the ACLU: the US government’s indictment of Assange amounts to the criminalization of investigative journalism. And I agree with myriad friends (and lawyers) throughout the world that at the core of this criminalization is a cruel and unsual paradox: namely, the fact that many of the activities that the US government would rather hush up are perpetrated in foreign countries, whose journalism will now be answerable to the US court system. And the precedent established here will be exploited by all manner of authoritarian leaders across the globe. What will be the State Department’s response when the Republic of Iran demands the extradition of New York Times reporters for violating Iran’s secrecy laws? How will the United Kingdom respond when Viktor Orban or Recep Erdogan seeks the extradition of Guardian reporters? The point is not that the U.S. or U.K would ever comply with those demands — of course they wouldn’t — but that they would lack any principled basis for their refusals.

The U.S. attempts to distinguish Assange’s conduct from that of more mainstream journalism by characterizing it as a “conspiracy.” But what does that even mean in this context? Does it mean encouraging someone to uncover information (which is something done every day by the editors who work for Wikileaks’ old partners, The New York Times and The Guardian)? Or does it mean giving someone the tools and techniques to uncover that information (which, depending on the tools and techniques involved, can also be construed as a typical part of an editor’s job)? The truth is that all national security investigative journalism can be branded a conspiracy: the whole point of the enterprise is for journalists to persuade sources to violate the law in the public interest. And insisting that Assange is somehow “not a journalist” does nothing to take the teeth out of this precedent when the activities for which he’s been charged are indistinguishable from the activities that our most decorated investigative journalists routinely engage in.

 If you’ve been tuning into the bad news this past week, you’ve certainly encountered a version of precisely this question, is Assange an X or a journalist? In this inane formula X can be anything: hacktivist, terrorist, lizard person. It doesn’t matter what noun you put into this MadLibs, because the entire exercise is pointless.

This kind of sincere, credulous, smug, and gloating inquiry is just the most recent, just-in-time-for-Christmas, example of in-the-flesh-and-in-the-word bad faith, presented by media professionals who are never in worse faith than when they report on — or pass judgment on — other media.



Meanwhile, WSWS notes:

More than 300 doctors and medical professionals from around the world have issued an appeal for the immediate release of Julian Assange from prison in the UK because of the serious deterioration in his health indicated by the stroke he suffered in October during his UK High Court extradition hearing.

On December 22, Doctors for Assange released an open letter, published below, to Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, imploring him to seek the WikiLeaks founder’s urgent release on medical grounds. The letter makes that request based on Joyce’s recent statements suggesting that the US extradition request against Assange should now be dropped.

That hundreds of doctors have again written, warning of Assange’s dire medical situation, underscores the grave dangers he faces as he spends yet another year behind bars with extradition hanging over his head and the prospect of being incarcerated for life on trumped-up US espionage charges.



His health has deteriorated throughout his inhumane treatment -- and the two are related: The inhumanity is destroying him.  That is the point: To destroy him.  This is revenge against Julian by the US government.  They want to destroy him to scare off anyone who might be able to provide the people with real information in the future.

In the future.

So it's 2048 and the world wonders how Julian was persecuted, how this happened, how a tidal wave of outrage didn't compell US President Joe Biden to end the persecution?

Most of us will be 27 years older then, some of us will be dead.  And the young will wonder how did we look the other way?  How did we fail to use our voices, to amplify them, to demand justice?

Right now?  Right now, Joe Biden and the US government have a lot to answer for.  If this persecution continues, we all have a lot to answer for.  

Australia's ABC reports:

Julian Assange's legal team has filed an application to appeal to Britain's Supreme Court against a lower court's ruling this month that he could be extradited to the United States.

US authorities accuse Assange, 50, of 18 counts relating to WikiLeaks' release of vast troves of confidential US military records and diplomatic cables, which they said had put lives in danger.

On December 10 the WikiLeaks founder moved a step closer to facing criminal charges in the United States after Washington won an appeal over his extradition in London's High Court.

The court said it was satisfied with a package of assurances given by the US about the conditions of Assange's detention, including a pledge not to hold him in a so-called "ADX" maximum security prison in Colorado and that he could be transferred to Australia to serve his sentence if convicted.

The Supreme Court is the United Kingdom's final court of appeal.



ALJAZEERA notes, "He has been in custody since 2019, despite having served a previous sentence for breaching bail conditions in a separate case, and spent seven years at Ecuador’s embassy in London to avoid being removed to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations that were later dropped."  RT adds, "The WikiLeaks publisher sought asylum from Ecuador in 2012, suspecting -- correctly, as it turned out -- that the US sought his arrest and extradition via unsubstantiated charges pressed in Sweden. He ended up stranded at Ecuador’s embassy in London for years, until his asylum was revoked under pressure from Washington, and British police arrested him in April 2019. He has been held in the maximum-security Belmarsh prison in south London ever since."





Yesterday, the SEP held an online conference on the dire need to end the persecution of Julian.




I get what the US government is doing.  I do.  I get it, they want to silence anyone else, they want to put fear into the public.

Here's what I don't get.

They're public servants.  Joe Biden is a public servant.  Why are we so scared to put the fear into him?  This is his legacy -- an old fool bumbling around trying to live down valid and credible accusations of assault.  If it weren't for Donald Trump, not only would Joe not be president, he wouldn't be the object of endless ridicule.  We've not had a more questionable president.  His iq and his coherence is constantly questioned by the public -- the press carries him along but the public is not so kind.

Joe Biden should be verys cared because there is no second act post-presidency.  He is an old man in poor health.  He will have no accomplishments after he leaves the White House.  This is the final determination and he needs to understand that and we need to make clear to him what a drag persecuting Julian will have on how he is remembered.

Put the scare to us? No, put the scare into him.

Turning to Iraq . . .

I don't know.  

I sat through that hideous Aaron Sorkin garbage.  Nicole Kidman's great, others overcome casting obstacles to deliver but Aaron's problems remain and I'm just damn sick of it.  Yes, Ava and I broke the ground on this back when Aaron was flying high and 'feminist' media from Gloria Steinem and others were praising Aaron and treating him like a god when he was nothing but a jabber jaw with a sexist attitude towards women which only made his writing more limited.  And, yes, all these years later, we can hear jokes an adult cartoons about how sexist Aaron is and how his female characters are underwritten and poorly framed.  I'm glad about that. 

I am.

But this garbage needs to stop.

And nobody's calling it out.  

Nabih Bulos is part of this problem.  And I have called him out here and the response has been whining from friends at THE LOS ANGELES TIMES.  And others calling him out?  Oh, I guess I can do another ten years of documenting the sexism and maybe then others will emerge to make easy jokes?

I don't know that I have ten years.  

So how about we all wake up to what's going on and agree, right now, right here, that it's wrong.

Nabih is writing this week about an issue that's been documented over and over -- drought in Iraq -- and he has nothing to new to offer on the topic and that should be a big problem to his editors but even more so they should be talking to him about his contacts.  Yet again, he's filed another Iraq report that fails to quote or note even one Iraqi women.

Drought doesn't effect them?

Women don't water?

It's 2021.  

Where are the Iraqi women?

And this is THE LOS ANGELS TIMES --t he paper loves to strut around proclaiming just how advanced and current it is.  Yet this is the same paper that has struggled throughout 2021 to even acknowledge that there are women and girls in Iraq.

Exactly how backwater is the editorial staff at THE LOS ANGELES TIMES?

Last month, FRANCE 24 delivered this.


 






I know that will shock anyone who depends upon THE LOS ANGELES TIMES for their news coverage, but there are women and girls in Iraq.  

Earlier this year, ALJAZEERA reported . . .




Here are a few more reports that all emerged in the last few weeks.  Other outlets can find women in Iraq.  Why can't THE LOS ANGELES TIMES?












t







It is unacceptable that THE LOS ANGELES TIMES coverage of Iraq is so sexist.  It needs to be called out and called out by everyone.   




Thursday, December 23, 2021

Jimmy Dore, Fauci, Joe Biden

Here's Jimmy Dore.



Fauci's got to go.  And as for his calling for people on TV to be fired?  That's way off the mark and it is not his job.  I don't care if he does or doesn't like what people say about him.  F**k him. He's working on our dime.  We're paying the idiot.  And he needs to stop taking our money to pontificate about who he thinks should be on TV.  Shut the f**k up, you animal abusing piece of garbage.


I believe in God.  And I'm praying that Fauci's afterlife will be one where everything he okayed to be done to animals, every bit of torture, comes back on him in the afterlife.


Speaking of the afterlife, how long does Joe Biden think he'll live.  Joe can't govern as it is, he's too old. Now he's saying one thing that might make him run for re-election in 2024 would be . . . Donald Trump running for president.


Oh, please, Joe.  Step down.  Just step down.  We're barely surviving this term with you as president, we don't need a second term.


 

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

 

Wednesday, December 22, 2021.  Iraq, Julian Assange, and two US whores who exposed themselves but think we should still listen to them.


Someone forgot to take the trash out.  Which is how Norman Solomon's latest garbage is where we start.  I have no idea why COUNTERPUNCH continues to run his garbage.  They shouldn't and they owe their readers an apology -- that's not opinion, that's fact.  For violating journalistic standards, they owe their readers an apology.


In 2008, 'antiwar' Norman was published over and over by COUNTERPUNCH.  I liked Alex and I had more important issues with Norman to call out.  So, for example, ehere and with Ava at THIRD, the focus was on how nOrman was lying to listeners of KPFA -- among others  He went on that radio station and on programs on other platforms to give 'independent' analysis of the election.  As an 'independent' analyst, Norman managed to trash Democrats running for the presidential nomination except for one.  No, not Dennis Kucinich.  Norman ignored Dennis.  


The one Norman kept promoting?  Over and over, Barack Obama.  But from an independent and netrual stance, you understand.


He wasn't.


He was a pledged delegate for Barack Obama.  Living in California, we were aware of that.  We were also aware of the fact that this detail was included when his weekly astroturf masquerading as "columns" were published by real news outlets.  When that happened, Norman made sure that a little note was attached identifying himself as that.


That disclosure was never made when he was on KPFA.  And we called it out and were part of a call that grew louder and louder until a call-in raised it on the air.  Poor Norman.


Whore.


THat's what he was.


COUNTERPUNCH published his articles during that period.  I've checked.  No disclosure.  


He's a whore.


And if you let whores in, you're a bordello.  I'm not running a whore house, thank you very much.  Norman has never gotten accountable for his actions in 2008 which were so much worse than just whoring for Barack.  He walked away from the Iraq War.  Which, considering how he almost destroyed Lt Ehren Watada, may have been a good thing.  Ehren was fighting for his future when Norman started attacking him regarding a female journalist that the court wanted to hear from.  I have been told that woman had nothing to diwht the war Norman waged nd we now highlight her as a result.  I'm not going to bring her name into this but it's out there and anyone confused should be able to Google.  Ehren refused to take part in the crime that was the Iraq War.  And in the middle of being tried by the US government, Norman starts popping up on various give-me-meony platforms to take the focus off Ehren who's future is at stake and to put it on a woman who has to do nthing but say she won't disclose her sources.  

We'll forget -- or at least set aside -- how druing the time he also broke up the marriage of two friends of mine.  Norman, you don't want that story told, do you?  DIn't think so.

But the Barack aspect is important.  During the Barack years, Norman lost interest in the Iraq War.  He was too busy covering for Barack.  


That matters because he's still doing it.  His latest garbage is a 'response' to an NYT article.  It's the article we've now noted three times at this site.  Here's the fourth time.  


Azmat Khan (NYT) Tweeted:
 


After years of reporting — more than 1,300 hidden Pentagon documents, ground investigation at the sites of 100+ U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and scores of interviews — we present part 1 of THE CIVILIAN CASUALTY FILES:

Azmat authored "Hidden Petnagon Records Reveal Patterns Of Failure In Deadly Airstrikes" which went up over the weekend:



Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.
In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed.
In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in the strike.
None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing.
These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014.
The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.
The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”
This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones.     



Please note, DEMOCRACY NOW! speaks with Azmat about her report on today's show.  


The report she wrote focuses on Barack Obama's drone war and the many dead as a result -- the many civilians.  It doesn't really address all the lies Barack told while in the White House about the use of the drones.  But it's about his Drone War.


Norman decides he wants to write about that.  But what's a pledged delegate for Barack to the 2008 DNC convention supposed to do?  


Norman decides the thing to do is to write an 887 word commentary that somehow manages to never use two simple words: Barack Obama.


Whore.


You whored.  You whored and Iraq suffered.  All these years later, you've yet to acknowledge, let alone apologize, for the damage you did.


Take your STD laden ass somewhere else.  You're an unrepentant whore and no one should ever trust you again.  You're trash.


I can admit when I was wrong and I've been wrong many times.  One of the biggest times I was wrong was when I took you seriously and at your word.  You are trash.  Looking back, you were trash then as well but I was tood amn stupid to realize it.  You have nothing to offer.  You are not independent.  You are a whore.  Well the world is full of whores Norman and you've reached the retirement age.  We need toa ll ensure that by noting your past whoring so that young people just getting political are not unaware of what you did and how you whored.  


That really is the amazing thing about the internet.  It exposes and you don't have to, ten years later, run to the dark basement of a libray and get out the microfiche to find out what happened.  


John Nichols is a dirty whore to wand he also exposed that when he went ga-ga over Barack.  And when someone makes the mistake of interviewing him on a program today, we get e-mails about it from people who looked him up and found out what a whore he is.  


It's your rap sheet, Norman, and you can't escape it.  


Either COUNTERPUNCH knew or didn't know when they published Norman's 2008 garbage that he was a pledged delegate for Barack Obama.  Either way, that should have been disclosed and the readers are owed a public apology.  In addition, having failed to disclose something that important, Norman should not be published by COUNTERPUNCH anymore. 


Since John Nichols was brought up in the above let me note something e-mails came in on.  A few were noting that I had missed John Nichols' Julian Assange column.


I didn't miss it.  I was trying to be kind.  


It's the typical crap the whore writes.  


I'm not a Julian Assange groupie. 


Some people, like John Pilger, still hate me for some of what I've written.  (And yet we still link to John when it's important because we're not the catty bitches of WSWS.)  I've not retracted anything I've said and stand by it.  I think we are, in fact, the only outlet that reported the court trial accurately.  Lovers of Julian couldn't deal with reality.  Haters of Julian tried to make things worse than they were.  We reported the testimony and noted the important parts -- which includes how Julian ended up in the mess to begin with.  John's not told you that ever.  Glenn Greenwald hasn't.


Hopefully, Julian will be free soon and we can talk about the truth.


But what I'm talking about is not anything that matters today in terms of Julian's life.  


Meaning, I'm not making it an issue in the commentary, I'm not noting it and don't plan to until Julian's free.  By contrast, John Nichols wants to imply that he himself is better than Julian and that we should all be disgusted by Julian but support his cause.


Julian's not a disgusting person.  Nor am I any better than Julian.  


He dserves to be free and I can write that and mean it.  I don't need to couch that argument with qualifiers.  


Nor will I.


End the persecution of Julian Assange and set him free.


It's that basic.


John wants you to know that he did a little research -- on things having nothing to do with Julian.  And he's got some historical examples!!!!  No, he's got some factoids from long ago that have nothing to do with Julian or his case.  He uses his column for crap like that and to let you know that he holds his nose when he speaks of Julian.


That's not a defense.  That's just disgusting but John Nichols is a disgusting whore who knowingly and willfully lies in print and on the air.  When he was out to defeat Hillary Clinton, for example, there was no lie he wouldn't tell (Hillary, not Barack, was the one who met with CAnada and told them NAFTA had her support! -- lie told on DEMOCRACY NOW!; Samantha Power calling Hillary a monster was a-okay because Samantha and Hillary were longtime friends -- lie told at THE NATION -- they hadn't even spoken to one another at that point.)  Dirty, lying whore.


Again: The US government's persecution of Julian Assange must stop immediately.  Julian needs to be set free from the UK prison at once.


And the world needs to pay attention to Iraq.  MEMO notes:


Iraq, along with Palestine, is a clear example of the environmental crisis resulting from war, occupation and neo-colonial policies in the Arab world, which undermine the social and economic basis of life in the region. The effects of this environmental crisis appear in devastating climate change, the pollution of extractive industries, the depletion of natural resources, the scarcity of water, and the pollution of air and soil due to the use of modern munitions, such as depleted uranium and white phosphorous, as has been seen in Iraq and Gaza. It is estimated that the war against Iraq caused the release of 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2003 and 2007. That's more than 60 per cent of the total for all countries in the world.

Despite the availability of this data and its documentation by international human rights organisations, and the fact that the internal environmental situation is largely linked to the outside world, Iraq remained, until recent months, at the bottom of government and public lists of concerns. It is hardly mentioned except on the margins of international conferences or among the lists of "worst" countries in reports and statistics issued by UN bodies and organisations concerned with the environment and its economic and societal repercussions. Only then does it rank in a high position that no one else matches.

Iraq is stable at the top of the most corrupt countries in the world, and it tops the list of the most corrupt Arab countries. Iraqi President Barham Salih is unable to cover the financial loss from corruption in the country over the years. Iraq has lost hundreds of billions of dollars, including $150 billion smuggled abroad through lucrative deals since 2003, a figure that seems smaller when the dinar and dollar are compared, and the word "trillions" comes into play.

Iraq is also among the most dangerous countries according to the security risk index, competing with Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mali and Afghanistan. This is based on the documentation of the war and information on terrorism, infighting, insurgencies and politically motivated unrest. It was also the second deadliest country for journalists in 2020, according to Reporters Without Borders. Once-beautiful Baghdad, with its ancient civilisation, is not spared from inclusion in the list of the least clean cities in the world due to the neglect of the reconstruction of the buildings and structures that the occupation destroyed, as well as the infrastructure, including the sewage system, roads, water drainage and power plants.

In a recent report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Iraq ranked fifth in the list of countries most affected by climate change and global warming. The repercussions can be summed up in the lack of water safe for drinking and irrigation, the indiscriminate use of groundwater, and the lack of water in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers due to the construction of dams upstream by Iran and Turkey, in violation of international agreements. This has caused agriculture to be abandoned and the displacement of rural populations to cities that were not prepared to receive them. The Norwegian Refugee Council declared last week that nearly half of the Iraqi population is in need of food assistance in the areas affected by drought.



Iraq had had many schools built in recent years.  Laura Zhou (SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST) reports:

China has signed a deal to build 1,000 schools in Iraq as Beijing pushes for a bigger role in the Middle East while the United States retreats.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi oversaw the signing of 15 contracts on Thursday, with representatives of the Power Construction Corporation of China and Sino Tech.


Hopefully, unlike the bulk paid for with US taxpayer dollars, these will be built correctly.  


The political paralysis continues in Iraq.  October 10th, the country held elections.  Parliament has still not been convened (it was dissolved days before the election).  No prime minister-designate has been named.  Layal Shakir (RUDAW) reports:


A high-level Shiite delegation arrived in the Kurdistan Region’s capital on Wednesday to meet with Kurdish leaders, discussing the new government formation in Iraq following the parliamentary elections where the Iran-backed Shiites were defeated.

Headed by Nouri al-Maliki, the Coordination Framework, which was formed by some losing party leaders, arrived in Erbil in the morning hours.

The framework met with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leader Masoud Barzani in Pirmam, according to a statement from Barzani Headquarters.

The meeting highlighted “the need to review Iraq’s governance, take advantage of past experiences and considering the principles of partnership, compromise and balance in the governing process,” read the statement.


Nouiri al-Maliki.  Hmm.  If only the press had realized he wasn't dead -- certainly not politically -- and bothered to pay attention to him.  We did.  We noted ahead of the election, months ahead, that he wanted to be prime minister again.  We noted days after the election that he was meeting with various groups in an attempt to form an alliance.  It's a shame that the western press -- so busy with their paint-by-number pieces on how Moqatada was a "king-maker" couldn't notice reality.


The following sites updated:





Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Jimmy Dore, Richard Wolff

Starting with Jimmy Dore.



Sarah Silverman?  Some are calling her racist?  Wow.  How baseless.  Well it's the Spencer Ackerman Trash -- remember him?  Little Spencer nuzzled at Barack Obama's crotch throughout 2008.  And he wants to huff on Barack's pubes in the White House.  So, on Journo-list (Ezzie Klein's secret plotting device later exposed by THE DAILY CALLER and others), Spencer stopped mouth washing Barack's balls long enough to advise people to call their political enemies "racists" and to do it loudly.  Because they were racists?  No, to shut them up.


Spencer Ackerman -- trash and filth.


This is from Richard Wolff:


Wherever and whenever obscenely rich people existed, they always protected their wealth and the privileges that come with it from the majority of non-wealthy people working for them and around them. Emperors, kings, czars as well as masters of huge slave plantations, lords of big feudal manors, and major shareholders and top executives of capitalist megacorporations did so partly by the use of brute force, or through the exercise of power, and bribery. All of them also used ideological persuasion, but none more so than capitalists today. And while “the weapon of criticism can never replace the criticism of weapons,” according to Karl Marx, a critique of capitalism’s obscene wealth today and its ideological justifications is arguably much needed.

One attempted justification argues that obscene wealth is society’s reward for those people making crucial contributions to social welfare and progress. Billionaire Elon Musk, for example, contributed the electric car, some would argue; billionaire Jeff Bezos offered the speedy ordering and delivery of goods. But Musk’s electric car was a late step in a long evolution of electricity, batteries, and automobiles. Constituting that evolution were many contributions by many people along the way. Musk’s contribution was impossible without—and thus dependent on—all those prior contributions. Rewarding contributions and contributors justly would entail rewarding them all, not exclusively Musk. Doing the latter is manifestly unjust and unjustifiable.

The relevant parallel here is a village battling to escape flooding from a nearby river’s impending overflow. A subset of villagers gather to dig sand, acquire sandbags, fill them with sand, and then pass them forward, from person to person, so that the last person standing closest to the river, named Elon, can pile bags on the river’s bank. A grateful village collects $10,000 to reward those responsible for the happy outcome: no flood. The check for $10,000 is handed to Elon. Rewarding in this way—rather than sharing the reward among all those who collaborated to produce the outcome—is more of an incentive to position a single person in a particular place rather than to work alongside all the fellow villagers who contributed to the outcome.


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


Monday, December 20, 2021.  Lies and more lies get exposed -- if you pay attention and don't let whores like Peter Cole misdirect you.



US President Joe Biden ended combat operations in Iraq, removed all combat troops.  That's the lie, right?


It's certainly not the reality.


THE NEW ARAB reports:


Iraqi security forces thwarted yet another attack against a convoy belonging to the US-led Global Coalition on Sunday, local media reported.

Security services detonated two roadside bombs located near al-Hillah on the highway leading to the Iraqi capital Baghdad, which were targeting a coalition convoy, a source in the security services told the Iraqi Shafaq News Agency.


Attacks on US-led convoys continue.  But that's not combat.  No, according to Joe Biden, that's just a big old, silly tickle fight.


Dler S. Mohammed  (KURDISTAN 24) reports:

The so-called "Fateh Khaybar Brigade" on Sunday issued a statement declaring that it will start targeting US forces in Iraq with "painful" strikes.

“The American enemy, their allies, and agents don’t understand the language of dialogue and peace,” read the brigade’s statement, which was published on the Altahreer News website.

It went on to declare that force is therefore “the only way to deal with them.”


That Joe Biden, he brought peace to Iraq, right?  He brought something.  Lies mainly.  


US government lies.  Over the weekend, THE NEW YORK TIMES exposed some with Azmat Khan's "Hidden Petnagon Records Reveal Patterns Of Failure In Deadly Airstrikes:"



Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.
In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed.
In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in the strike.
None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing.
These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014.
The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.
The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”
This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones.     


SPUTNIK notes:


The newspaper has studied 1,311 documents from a hidden Pentagon archive, concluding that the civilian death toll was a lot higher than the 1,417 civilian deaths reported by the US military in Iraq and Syria and the 188 deaths reported in Afghanistan.
Reports of civilian casualties were often dismissed because surveillance footage was too brief, The New York Times said on Saturday. Interviews with surviving residents and current and former US officials revealed that the US military made little effort to identify patterns of failure and there have been no public assessments that included a finding of wrongdoing.
The newspaper said that civilian deaths were often the result of "confirmation bias" on the part of the US military, which confused civilians with terrorist fighters or failed to make sure that the targeted buildings had no ordinary people inside.


Dog Eat Dog

On prime time crime the victim begs
Money is the road to justice
and power walks it on crooked legs
Prime Time Crime
Holy hope in the hands of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers
and big wig financiers

Where the wealth's displayed
Thieves and sycophants parade
And where it's made
the slaves will be taken
Some are treated well
In these games of buy and sell
And some like poor beasts
Are burdened down to breaking

Dog Eat Dog
It's dog eat dog ain't it Flim Flam man
Dog eat dog you can lie cheat skim scam
Beat' em any way you can
Dog eat Dog
You'll do well in this land of
Snakebite evangelists and racketeers
You could get to be
a big wig financier

Land of snap decisions
Land of short attention spans
Nothing is savored
Long enough to really understand
In every culture in decline
The watchful ones among the slaves
Know all that is genuine will be
Scorned and conned and cast away

-- "Dog Eat Dog," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her album of the same name


I'm reminded of the whores and the liars by whore and liar Peter Cole who just discovered NYT's report and feels the need to Tweet:

The horrors of #GeorgeWBush #DickCheney #Rumsfield #CondoleezaRice etc all of whom LIED about #WMDs in #Iraq, ran wild in #Afghanistan, helped create #ISIS on top of massive #Human Toll of #USA Air Wars, unleashed #drones in #endlesswars


Peter Cole is a lying whore.


When we first covered NYT's report on Saturday, we noted:


Yeah, they covered it up.  It was only new and surprising to you if you ever believed that these were precision strikes to begin with.  And if you want to get honest with yourself, maybe you might ask if you believed that because you wanted to?  Because it made it easier for you?


The government lied, no question.  But a lot of us knew it real time.  If you're just now catching up, maybe you need to take a look at yourself and wonder how that happened?


Civilians were murdered.  That's what it was.  It was 'quick' and it was 'cheap.'  And that's all mattered to some.  


Human life -- and respect for it -- never entered the picture.


Grasp that.  And expand that enough to grasp that the Mosul Operation was never about saving the people of Mosul.  It was about the US putting an end to a very visible and obvious failure that went to how bad the govenment that they installed in Iraq was.


ISIS taking over Mosul was an indictment of the ongoing US government actions in Iraq.  And a lot of lies were told to cover that up or to kick the can backwards so that the problems were all in the past and caused solely by Bully Boy Bush.  Bully Boy Bush is a War Criminal, no question.  But the press sure was found of pretending everything after 2009 in Iraq was Bully Boy Bush's fault.  They loved to whore for Barack.  That's how ISIS gets pinned on Bully Boy by some.  ISIS is the direct result of Barack and Joe Biden overruling the Iraqi voters -- who voted Nouri al-Maliki out in 2010 -- with The Erbil Agreement that gave thug Nouri a second term.  


Peter Cole's a damn lying whore.  Bully Boy Bush?  We've long called him out.  The NYT report has nothing to do with Bully Boy Bush.  It's about what took place under Barack Obama.  But Peter Cole wants to whore and distract because that's what whores do.


He can't run with and amplify information.  No, he's got to raise the ghots of Bully Boy Bush because he can't admit the precious (Barack) was also a War Criminal and responsible for many, many deaths.  He's a whore who whores for politicians. 


Is there anything in the world lower than that?  A whore for politicians?  How sad. 

The little whore, please note, is pimping war on Syria and is silent on Julian Assange.  That's a whore, that's a big time whore.  


Winding down, Rasha al-Aqeedi Tweets:


Ok, Twitter. We need your help. This beautiful young woman from Iraq Maryam Al Rukabi refused a marriage proposal. The suitor invaded her home at night and attacked her with acid. He is still free. With enough pressure and international attention, some justice could be brought.
Image

7:58 AM · Dec 16, 2021 


Rasha has started a GO FUND ME campaign for Maryam:

My name is Rasha Al Ogaidi and I'm starting this fundraising campaign to help Maryam Al Rikabi, a 16 year old Iraqi teenager who lives in Baghdad, Iraq. Maryam was sleeping in her home in Baghdad peacefully  when a man intruded her bedroom and threw nitric acid all over her face and body. Maryam had refused to marry the man and he acted out of revenge. She survived the attack but her face and body are severely deformed. Maryam's family have asked for help for her treatment in Turkey or any country advanced in cosmetic surgery.
This young woman's life just shattered before her eyes in seconds. She did nothing wrong. She was a Fine Arts student in love with life and colors. Let's do what we can to help her. All secured funds will be wired to her family directly. 


GULF TODAY reports:

The Iraqi girl, Maryam Al Rukabi, did not expect that her story would be the talk of the media, after her life turned into a tragedy just because she refused a marriage proposal by man, so her beautiful face was burned with acid, to live with permanent suffering, while the perpetrator remained unpunished, according to Iraqi media.

The student of the College of Fine Arts in Iraq, Maryam, who is famous among her friends as the “Princess”, won the sympathy of millions, after she and her family appeared on a media station recounting her tragedy that occurred 6 months ago.

A young man asked the girl to marry him, but she refused due to his moral character, so he decided to take revenge on her in a horrific way.

At night, he crept into her house in the Mansour district of Baghdad. 

He poured acid on her face, and fled the scene.

The media quoted Maryam’s father, as saying: “My mother and I were at work, and Maryam, her brother and his wife were at home, when the criminal entered the house and stole her phone, and poured the acid substance on her while she was sleeping.”

He pointed out that the perpetrator came at night, masked, despite passing in front of security points, and passers-by on the street leading to their house, but no one stopped him.



Mustafa Goran (RUDAW) notes:


Rukabi’s attacker had proposed marriage multiple times, but she had continued to refuse. Her mother said the teenager wanted to complete her education before getting married, and just saw the man as a friend.

“The guy was calling us all the time, giving us his address, but we continuously turned down his request to marry our daughter. He sent us messages for months,” said Suham, Maryam’s mother. “Maryam's response to him was, 'I do not want to marry'. She would always tell the guy ‘we are just friends, I cannot accept you as a husband.’” 

The perpetrator, said to be 19, reportedly attacked Maryam after learning she was home alone. 

Around 80 percent of her face is burned beyond recognition, and she was hospitalized for months, fighting for her life.



Just walking along, shopping for food
Stepping out of the line of fire when people are rude
Cheap stuff made in China, someone calls it a sale
Somebody's mama, somebody's daughter
Somebody's jail

Beat down in the market, stoned to death in the plaza
Raped on the hillside under the gun from LA to Gaza
A house made of cardboard living close to the rail
Somebody's mama, somebody's daughter
Somebody's jail


And I feel the witch in my veins
I feel the mother in my shoe
I feel the scream in my soul
The blood as I sing the ancient blue
They burned in the millions
I still smell the fire in my grandma's hair
The war against women rages on
Beware of the fairytale
Somebody's mama, somebody's daughter
Somebody's jail

The noise of elections, the promise of change
A grabbing of power at the top, a day at the rifle range
Somebody's in danger, somebody's for sale
Somebody's mama, somebody's daughter
Somebody's jail

-- "Somebody's Jail," written by Holly Near, first appears on her album SHOW UP.


The following sites updated: