Choosing just five is going to be very difficult but here are my picks for the five best tracks she recorded after establishing herself as a musical force to be reckoned with.
1) "Something's Got A Hold On Me."
One of those Etta James songs that you have to mention if you were an Etta fan. The whole world knew "At Last," but a song like "Something's Got A Hold On Me" was a classic of a different kind, one for the devoted Etta fan.
2) "Love On The Brain."
An excellent track. If you're not an Etta fan but the song sounds familiar, listen to Rihanna's "Love On The Brain" and grasp how much that song borrows from this one.
3) "Stop The Wedding."
There's not a thing wrong with this song -- the production is dead on, the singing is dead on, the arrangement is perfect. This is the definition of "the perfect recording."
4) "Lie No Better."
Etta's career didn't come to a screeching halt or slowly descend into embarrassment. This is from her 2003 album LET'S ROLL and proof of just how much better Etta got as her career continued.
5) "Purple Rain."
Etta more than delivers with Prince's "Purple Rain." This was from her second to last studio album, 2006's ALL THE WAY (Kat reviewed it here). ALL THE WAY never got the appreciation it deserved but it remains one of my favorite Etta James albums.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Friday, October 11, 2019.
Starting in the US where the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination continues.
US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard is one of the many candidates. She qualified for the June debates. She qualified for the July debates. She did not qualify for the last debate. However, the upcoming debate (October 15th) is one she has qualified for. October 10th, at 9:00 AM EST, her campaign sent out the following announcement from Tulsi:
I want to thank you all very much for your support. I need to share something with you. It is very important: I am giving serious consideration to boycotting the next debate and I want to tell you why:
There are so many of you who I've met in Iowa and New Hampshire who have expressed to me how frustrated you are that the DNC and corporate media are essentially trying to usurp your role as voters in choosing who our Democratic nominee will be.
I share your concerns, and I’m sure that all our supporters throughout the country do as well.
The 2016 Democratic Primary election was rigged by the DNC and their partners in the corporate media against Bernie Sanders.
In this 2020 election, the DNC and corporate media are rigging the election again, but this time against the American people in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.
They are attempting to replace the roles of voters in the early states, using polling and other arbitrary methods which are not transparent or democratic, and holding so-called debates which are not debates at all but rather commercialized reality television meant to entertain, not inform or enlighten
In short, the DNC and corporate media are trying to hijack the entire election process.
In order to bring attention to this serious threat to our democracy, and ensure your voice is heard, I am giving serious consideration to boycotting the next debate on October 15th. I will announce my decision within the next few days.
With my deepest, and warmest aloha, thank you all again for your support.
This comes after her pouting -- that is the only word for it -- over having not been invited to the last debate. As many noted (including right here), Tulsi had no problems with the rules the DNC came up with as long as she was benefiting. That's why her whining over the last debate looked so hypocritical. She knows US House Rep and fellow Iraq War veteran Seth Moulton, for example, and wasn't voicing concerns about the rules when he didn't make the June or July debates (or concern for any of the other candidates who didn't make those debates). It only became a concern when it effected her.
Though she's qualified for this upcoming debate, her chances for the following one remain iffy. So announcing she might not attend the upcoming party may be her attempt to take some control . Equally true, nothing is going to change regarding the rules and regulations "within the next few days" so why she needs further time to decide what to do is rather unclear.
If she can't make a decision quickly regarding whether or not to participate in the October 15th debates -- days away -- how would she handle being president? How would she handle every day where you go to sleep with one reality, awake with another and are expected to be thinking on your feet and responding immediately?
Maybe she's just desperate to get her name in the news cycle? Or maybe she's hoping that attention over this would remind people that, in 2016, at least, she took a brave stand. I have no idea what she's hoping for. I am not sure that she does either.
She's run one of the worst campaigns ever. Supposedly, she was the anti-war candidate. But the only one she ever sees as effected by the wars? Her 'brothers and sisters' who served in them as she did. She's not at all concerned with any of the many people killed whose only 'crime' was attempting to live in, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan.
This week she again embarrassed herself. Talk show diva Ellen DeGeneres did something stupid and Ellen can never own a mistake so instead Ellen told everyone that she's friends with Bully Boy Bush because it's okay to be friends with people you disagree with. Bully Boy Bush is a War Criminal, it is not okay to be friends with. It is offensive for a 'popular' entertainer to be friends with him because they depend on popularity and War Criminals don't bring you that.
Ellen's not really a 'celebrity' in the true sense. Her show, her 90s sitcom, didn't do well overseas. She's not known overseas. Her biggest worldwide exposure came when she was dating (and using) Anne Heche. That was the 90s. Outside of the US, no one really knows her. Her daytime show doesn't really mean anything on the world stage, nor does she. To most foreigners, if they were shown the photo, they'd ask who the goofy looking old woman was.
If Ellen was popular around the world, she might care about world opinion. She might not and she's not going to change at this late date. She's been too pampered and spoiled.
Instead of calling Ellen out (or just saying nothing), Tulsi chose to celebrate the 'be kind' b.s. Ellen was serving up.
Tulsi is an embarrassment. On the debate stage in July, she refused to call out Joe Biden for his actions with regards to the Iraq War. She made that moment even worse by then giving interviews after the debate where she further excused Joe Biden (and minimized what he's actually done with regards to Iraq). Now comes this moment where she's again crying 'aloha' and it's just underscoring that she's never said 'aloha' for the many dead and wounded as a result of these wars. She spreads 'aloha' around a lot -- 'aloha' or whatever it really is -- and the victimized, the targeted are never in her scope of vision. In that way, she's a hell of a lot like Ellen DeGeneres.
The always laughable Mehdi Hasan showed up (at THE INTERCEPT) to tell us all what is what in his bully-blustering manner. Tiny dick always swaggers and always thinks he's the manly man. He's a joke and he always has been. His column went to all the reasons I've called him out over the years. He's got examples of this man was harmed and that man was harmed and --
Excuse the f**k out of me, but it's men like Mehdi that made #MeToo necessary. Their limited vision and focus never includes women or girls. There are many War Crimes that took place in Iraq. There is Abu Ghraib, absolutely.
There's also Abeer and we got a conviction of one War Criminal on that. (Other low ranking War Criminals ratted Steven out and that supposedly excused their part in the gang-rape of a young girl and their plotting her murder and standing by as she and her family were murdered.)
May 7, 2009 Steven D. Green (pictured above) was convicted for his crimes in the March 12, 2006 gang-rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, the murder of her parents and the murder of her five-year-old sister while Green was serving in Iraq. Green was found to have killed all four, to have participated in the gang-rape of Abeer and to have been the ringleader of the conspiracy to commit the crimes and the conspiracy to cover them up. May 21, 2009, the federal jury deadlocked on the death penalty. February 2014, he died in prison.
Why are we using that photo and no Abeer's? The only known photo of Abeer was from her government documents. That photo was not taken by any western wire agency but damned if they didn't start insisting that they had copyright to this photo that was not their own and should be public domain. When so few in the press were focusing on Steven Green and his court case, I put that photo up and noted I had gotten it from the jail myself and that it's a public photo that anyone can use. At the time, AP was insisting that their own copy of the photo (which always published darker than the above) was copyrighted. No, it wasn't. But the photo above came from the US legal system and US taxpayers paid for it and it's public domain.
Abeer was a girl whose whole life was destroyed.
Her final moments were appalling.
At the age of 14, US soldiers break into her home and begin gang raping her. Steven waits to go last. That's because he's killing her baby sister and her parents in the next room -- while Abeer's being raped. She's being raped and she's a witness at the same time to the murders of her parents and her sister. After Steven gets his turn gang-raping, he kills her. They then try to set her body on fire and that doesn't work so they work overtime trying to make it look like Iraqi 'terrorists' carried out the crimes.
This speaks to so much that was done in Iraq, so much that was done by the US government. Green, for example, he was only in Iraq because Bully Boy Bush couldn't get enough bodies for his illegal war. Green 'qualified' under -- go to Iraq or go to prison. He chose Iraq.
This was a horrible War Crime and there are soldiers alive who took part in it and who largely walked because they agreed to rat out Green. Green was the main target because he was no longer in the military. (The actions carried out were criminal and I have no problem calling those who participated in these actions War Criminals. I am not, we're getting a lot of drive-bys these days so I need to be clear, calling US troops sent to Iraq War Criminals. It was a US soldier who exposed what Green and company had done -- when the US soldier heard about it, he came forward. I have no problem holding many in the US government responsible. I am not, and have not, calling US troops War Criminals. If they did what Green did, yes, they are War Criminals. Otherwise, my only thought is: I am so sorry that, here in America, we failed you and allowed you to be sent to Iraq. That never should have happened.)
Also over at THE INTERCEPT is Ryan Grim writing about Joe Biden's son Hunter:
The problem for Democrats is that a review of Hunter Biden’s career shows clearly that he, along with Joe Biden’s brother James, has been trading on their family name for decades, cashing in on the implication — and sometimes the explicit argument — that giving money to a member of Joe Biden’s family wins the favor of Joe Biden. Democrats have been loath to give any credibility to the wild rantings of Trump or his bagman Rudy Giuliani, leaving them to sidestep the question of Hunter Biden’s ethics or decision-making, and how much responsibility Joe Biden deserves. Republicans, though, have no such qualms, and have made clear that smearing the Bidens as corrupt will be central to Trump’s reelection campaign. The Trump approach is utterly without shame or irony, with attacks even coming from failson Eric Trump.
[. . .]
But that doesn’t mean the Bidens’ behavior isn’t a legitimate problem for Democrats. Indeed, Biden has been taking political hits over of the intersection of his family’s financial dealings and his own political career for some four decades. Yet he has done nothing publicly to inoculate himself from the charge that his career is corruptly enriching his family, and now that is a serious liability. By contrast, one of his opponents in the presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., went so far as to refuse to endorse his son Levi Sanders when he ran for Congress, saying that he does not believe in political dynasties. In defending the Biden’s nepotistic relationship, Democrats would be forced to argue that, to be fair, such soft corruption is common among the families of senior-level politicians. But that’s a risky general-election argument in a political moment when voters are no longer willing to accept business-as-usual. For now, Biden’s opponents in the presidential campaign appear to all hope that somebody else will make the argument, while congressional Democrats don’t want to do anything to undermine their impeachment probe. And so Biden skates.
Ryan wastes way too much time on the Trumps. I don't believe there's a shortage of reports and columns calling out the Trumps. If his main point is that one doesn't excuse the other, that can be made in a single sentence. Instead, he writes like a coward, unable to fully address the issue at hand because he's so worried that some idiot's going to mistake his comments for an endorsement of Donald Trump.
\
Hunter Biden's conduct is appalling. It does reflect on dad.
In fact, his drug addiction goes to this.
When Hunter's firing came out -- the reason the Reserves kicked him out, the cocaine issue -- I defended Hunter here. I stand by that. We're all going to fall, it's how we handle ourselves when we get back up that determines who we are.
But with Hunter, what I failed to grasp until the last few weeks was, this is his addiction.
His corruption, his never being held accountable, all of this goes to the addiction. I don't believe in 'tough love.' But I also don't believe in looking the other way over and over and babying a grown adult. That is what Joe has done. And it is why Hunter has been in one corrupt scheme after another. Joe has repeatedly shielded him from consequences and this has 'greyed' up ethical issues for Hunter.
He is active in his disease (drug use) currently and that's never going to be dealt with until honesty starts entering the picture.
What Hunter did was wrong. What James Biden did was wrong. And Joe allowed it. Over and over.
Joe betrayed the American people by allowing his brother and his son to reap profits off of the office of Vice President. He betrayed the people and he betrayed the office.
That's no small thing.
His attempt to repeatedly point to Donald Trump or to attack the media when they cover this issue does not change reality.
Reality in Iraq is that the government that does not represent the Iraqi people now freely attacks the Iraqi people.
Starting in the US where the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination continues.
US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard is one of the many candidates. She qualified for the June debates. She qualified for the July debates. She did not qualify for the last debate. However, the upcoming debate (October 15th) is one she has qualified for. October 10th, at 9:00 AM EST, her campaign sent out the following announcement from Tulsi:
I want to thank you all very much for your support. I need to share something with you. It is very important: I am giving serious consideration to boycotting the next debate and I want to tell you why:
There are so many of you who I've met in Iowa and New Hampshire who have expressed to me how frustrated you are that the DNC and corporate media are essentially trying to usurp your role as voters in choosing who our Democratic nominee will be.
I share your concerns, and I’m sure that all our supporters throughout the country do as well.
The 2016 Democratic Primary election was rigged by the DNC and their partners in the corporate media against Bernie Sanders.
In this 2020 election, the DNC and corporate media are rigging the election again, but this time against the American people in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.
They are attempting to replace the roles of voters in the early states, using polling and other arbitrary methods which are not transparent or democratic, and holding so-called debates which are not debates at all but rather commercialized reality television meant to entertain, not inform or enlighten
In short, the DNC and corporate media are trying to hijack the entire election process.
In order to bring attention to this serious threat to our democracy, and ensure your voice is heard, I am giving serious consideration to boycotting the next debate on October 15th. I will announce my decision within the next few days.
With my deepest, and warmest aloha, thank you all again for your support.
This comes after her pouting -- that is the only word for it -- over having not been invited to the last debate. As many noted (including right here), Tulsi had no problems with the rules the DNC came up with as long as she was benefiting. That's why her whining over the last debate looked so hypocritical. She knows US House Rep and fellow Iraq War veteran Seth Moulton, for example, and wasn't voicing concerns about the rules when he didn't make the June or July debates (or concern for any of the other candidates who didn't make those debates). It only became a concern when it effected her.
Though she's qualified for this upcoming debate, her chances for the following one remain iffy. So announcing she might not attend the upcoming party may be her attempt to take some control . Equally true, nothing is going to change regarding the rules and regulations "within the next few days" so why she needs further time to decide what to do is rather unclear.
If she can't make a decision quickly regarding whether or not to participate in the October 15th debates -- days away -- how would she handle being president? How would she handle every day where you go to sleep with one reality, awake with another and are expected to be thinking on your feet and responding immediately?
Maybe she's just desperate to get her name in the news cycle? Or maybe she's hoping that attention over this would remind people that, in 2016, at least, she took a brave stand. I have no idea what she's hoping for. I am not sure that she does either.
She's run one of the worst campaigns ever. Supposedly, she was the anti-war candidate. But the only one she ever sees as effected by the wars? Her 'brothers and sisters' who served in them as she did. She's not at all concerned with any of the many people killed whose only 'crime' was attempting to live in, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan.
This week she again embarrassed herself. Talk show diva Ellen DeGeneres did something stupid and Ellen can never own a mistake so instead Ellen told everyone that she's friends with Bully Boy Bush because it's okay to be friends with people you disagree with. Bully Boy Bush is a War Criminal, it is not okay to be friends with. It is offensive for a 'popular' entertainer to be friends with him because they depend on popularity and War Criminals don't bring you that.
Ellen's not really a 'celebrity' in the true sense. Her show, her 90s sitcom, didn't do well overseas. She's not known overseas. Her biggest worldwide exposure came when she was dating (and using) Anne Heche. That was the 90s. Outside of the US, no one really knows her. Her daytime show doesn't really mean anything on the world stage, nor does she. To most foreigners, if they were shown the photo, they'd ask who the goofy looking old woman was.
If Ellen was popular around the world, she might care about world opinion. She might not and she's not going to change at this late date. She's been too pampered and spoiled.
Instead of calling Ellen out (or just saying nothing), Tulsi chose to celebrate the 'be kind' b.s. Ellen was serving up.
Tulsi is an embarrassment. On the debate stage in July, she refused to call out Joe Biden for his actions with regards to the Iraq War. She made that moment even worse by then giving interviews after the debate where she further excused Joe Biden (and minimized what he's actually done with regards to Iraq). Now comes this moment where she's again crying 'aloha' and it's just underscoring that she's never said 'aloha' for the many dead and wounded as a result of these wars. She spreads 'aloha' around a lot -- 'aloha' or whatever it really is -- and the victimized, the targeted are never in her scope of vision. In that way, she's a hell of a lot like Ellen DeGeneres.
The always laughable Mehdi Hasan showed up (at THE INTERCEPT) to tell us all what is what in his bully-blustering manner. Tiny dick always swaggers and always thinks he's the manly man. He's a joke and he always has been. His column went to all the reasons I've called him out over the years. He's got examples of this man was harmed and that man was harmed and --
Excuse the f**k out of me, but it's men like Mehdi that made #MeToo necessary. Their limited vision and focus never includes women or girls. There are many War Crimes that took place in Iraq. There is Abu Ghraib, absolutely.
There's also Abeer and we got a conviction of one War Criminal on that. (Other low ranking War Criminals ratted Steven out and that supposedly excused their part in the gang-rape of a young girl and their plotting her murder and standing by as she and her family were murdered.)
May 7, 2009 Steven D. Green (pictured above) was convicted for his crimes in the March 12, 2006 gang-rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, the murder of her parents and the murder of her five-year-old sister while Green was serving in Iraq. Green was found to have killed all four, to have participated in the gang-rape of Abeer and to have been the ringleader of the conspiracy to commit the crimes and the conspiracy to cover them up. May 21, 2009, the federal jury deadlocked on the death penalty. February 2014, he died in prison.
Why are we using that photo and no Abeer's? The only known photo of Abeer was from her government documents. That photo was not taken by any western wire agency but damned if they didn't start insisting that they had copyright to this photo that was not their own and should be public domain. When so few in the press were focusing on Steven Green and his court case, I put that photo up and noted I had gotten it from the jail myself and that it's a public photo that anyone can use. At the time, AP was insisting that their own copy of the photo (which always published darker than the above) was copyrighted. No, it wasn't. But the photo above came from the US legal system and US taxpayers paid for it and it's public domain.
Abeer was a girl whose whole life was destroyed.
Her final moments were appalling.
At the age of 14, US soldiers break into her home and begin gang raping her. Steven waits to go last. That's because he's killing her baby sister and her parents in the next room -- while Abeer's being raped. She's being raped and she's a witness at the same time to the murders of her parents and her sister. After Steven gets his turn gang-raping, he kills her. They then try to set her body on fire and that doesn't work so they work overtime trying to make it look like Iraqi 'terrorists' carried out the crimes.
This speaks to so much that was done in Iraq, so much that was done by the US government. Green, for example, he was only in Iraq because Bully Boy Bush couldn't get enough bodies for his illegal war. Green 'qualified' under -- go to Iraq or go to prison. He chose Iraq.
This was a horrible War Crime and there are soldiers alive who took part in it and who largely walked because they agreed to rat out Green. Green was the main target because he was no longer in the military. (The actions carried out were criminal and I have no problem calling those who participated in these actions War Criminals. I am not, we're getting a lot of drive-bys these days so I need to be clear, calling US troops sent to Iraq War Criminals. It was a US soldier who exposed what Green and company had done -- when the US soldier heard about it, he came forward. I have no problem holding many in the US government responsible. I am not, and have not, calling US troops War Criminals. If they did what Green did, yes, they are War Criminals. Otherwise, my only thought is: I am so sorry that, here in America, we failed you and allowed you to be sent to Iraq. That never should have happened.)
Also over at THE INTERCEPT is Ryan Grim writing about Joe Biden's son Hunter:
The problem for Democrats is that a review of Hunter Biden’s career shows clearly that he, along with Joe Biden’s brother James, has been trading on their family name for decades, cashing in on the implication — and sometimes the explicit argument — that giving money to a member of Joe Biden’s family wins the favor of Joe Biden. Democrats have been loath to give any credibility to the wild rantings of Trump or his bagman Rudy Giuliani, leaving them to sidestep the question of Hunter Biden’s ethics or decision-making, and how much responsibility Joe Biden deserves. Republicans, though, have no such qualms, and have made clear that smearing the Bidens as corrupt will be central to Trump’s reelection campaign. The Trump approach is utterly without shame or irony, with attacks even coming from failson Eric Trump.
[. . .]
But that doesn’t mean the Bidens’ behavior isn’t a legitimate problem for Democrats. Indeed, Biden has been taking political hits over of the intersection of his family’s financial dealings and his own political career for some four decades. Yet he has done nothing publicly to inoculate himself from the charge that his career is corruptly enriching his family, and now that is a serious liability. By contrast, one of his opponents in the presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., went so far as to refuse to endorse his son Levi Sanders when he ran for Congress, saying that he does not believe in political dynasties. In defending the Biden’s nepotistic relationship, Democrats would be forced to argue that, to be fair, such soft corruption is common among the families of senior-level politicians. But that’s a risky general-election argument in a political moment when voters are no longer willing to accept business-as-usual. For now, Biden’s opponents in the presidential campaign appear to all hope that somebody else will make the argument, while congressional Democrats don’t want to do anything to undermine their impeachment probe. And so Biden skates.
Ryan wastes way too much time on the Trumps. I don't believe there's a shortage of reports and columns calling out the Trumps. If his main point is that one doesn't excuse the other, that can be made in a single sentence. Instead, he writes like a coward, unable to fully address the issue at hand because he's so worried that some idiot's going to mistake his comments for an endorsement of Donald Trump.
\
Hunter Biden's conduct is appalling. It does reflect on dad.
In fact, his drug addiction goes to this.
When Hunter's firing came out -- the reason the Reserves kicked him out, the cocaine issue -- I defended Hunter here. I stand by that. We're all going to fall, it's how we handle ourselves when we get back up that determines who we are.
But with Hunter, what I failed to grasp until the last few weeks was, this is his addiction.
His corruption, his never being held accountable, all of this goes to the addiction. I don't believe in 'tough love.' But I also don't believe in looking the other way over and over and babying a grown adult. That is what Joe has done. And it is why Hunter has been in one corrupt scheme after another. Joe has repeatedly shielded him from consequences and this has 'greyed' up ethical issues for Hunter.
He is active in his disease (drug use) currently and that's never going to be dealt with until honesty starts entering the picture.
What Hunter did was wrong. What James Biden did was wrong. And Joe allowed it. Over and over.
Joe betrayed the American people by allowing his brother and his son to reap profits off of the office of Vice President. He betrayed the people and he betrayed the office.
That's no small thing.
His attempt to repeatedly point to Donald Trump or to attack the media when they cover this issue does not change reality.
Reality in Iraq is that the government that does not represent the Iraqi people now freely attacks the Iraqi people.
Search results
Steven nabil
Another one. Unarmed protester shot by security forces. His name is Samir. What's happening in #Iraq right now is appalling and shows that the government has absolutely no regard for their own constitution.
Iraq’s top cleric wants answers on protester deaths within two weeks - sunnewsonline.com/iraqs-top-cler…
video of the recent protests, it's said in #Muthanna, documents beating a protester in the street by Iraqi security forces.
#insm_iq #iraq #Samawah #save_the_iraqi_people
cc: @AmnestyAR @AmnestyIraq @hrw_ar @GulfCentre4HR @hrw
GRAPHIC: footage from central 
Lastly, remember this action is today:
October 9, 2019
For immediate release:
One Day Until We Rage!
CONTACTS: Cindy Sheehan
CindySheehan@MarchonPentagon.com
Emma Fiala
Emma@MarchonPentagon.com
Where: The White House; 1600 Pensylvania Ave
Date: Friday, October 11th
Time: 11 AM
Who: Activists from all
over the US who are outraged by the
continuing wars and devastation wrought by the
USA and its allies in war crimes.
What: An unpermitted march through the seat of violent
imperial power to Rage against the institutions,
people, and corporate power that make the wars and
other oppressions possible.
 |
| CLICK BADASS BILLIE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT RAGE |
Please read this statement by Black Alliance for Peace about Rage Against the War Machine.
Watch interview of Cindy on Mintpress News
CLICK PHOTO TO WATCH
*************************************************
Listen to this interview of Cindy on Loud and Clear
CLICK TO LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
****************************************************
CLICK THE IMAGE FOR INFORMATION ABOUT
THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST REVOLUTION SUMMIT
**************************************************
DONATE TO RAGE!
The following sites updated:
