Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Pride of the Boomers, Pride of the Senate"
Okay, that's one of three that Isaiah's done for THE COMMMON ILLS for this week. I've seen the ink sketches on the other two. I love all three. But my favorite -- which will probably go up Wednesday -- features Lily Tomlin. That's my favorite. But I love all three.
As he challenges President Joe Biden, the stories he tells on the campaign trail about himself, his life’s work and what he stands for are often the opposite of what his record actually shows.
Though Kennedy’s primary challenge to a sitting president is widely considered a long-shot, he’s been sucking up media attention due to his famous name and the possibility that his run could weaken Biden ahead of what is expected to be a close general election in 2024. He’s drawn praise from Republican presidential candidates like Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Meanwhile, Trump supporters, including his longtime ally Roger Stone, have ginned up interest by floating a Trump-Kennedy unity ticket.
Debra Duvall, 62, who lives in Fort Myers, Florida, and said she serves on the Lee County GOP executive committee, described herself as a longtime Trump supporter, but said she’s torn for 2024.
“I’ll take Trump or RFK. Either one,” she said, explaining that she was drawn to both because she believes they can’t be bought.
That kind of support has demonstrated some of the contradictions in Kennedy’s candidacy. He has said he wants to “reclaim” the Democratic Party, while aligning himself with far right figures who have worked to subvert American democracy. He touts his credentials as an environmentalist, yet pushes bitcoin — a cryptocurrency that requires massive amounts of electricity from supercomputers to generate new coins, prompting most environmental advocates to loudly oppose it.
And though he peppers his speeches, podcast appearances and campaign materials with invocations of the Democratic Party legacies of his uncle President John F. Kennedy and his father Robert F. Kennedy, his relatives have distanced themselves from him and even denounced him.
“He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame,” Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, said of his cousin in an Instagram video earlier this month. “I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is, his candidacy is an embarrassment.”
Although he subsequently sought to deny it, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. really did say that wacky stuff suggesting that COVID-19 was bioengineered — targeted at specific ethnicities and races, while sparing others (those supposedly being spared were Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.)
He tried to squirm out of it, claiming he never said it, but those words will not go away. To wit, they have already settled into the fertile soil of a neo-Nazi website.
One such person is Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, an early promoter of the theory that COVID-19 is a bioweapon designed to spare Chinese and Jewish people — almost exactly what Kennedy later claimed publicly, although she may have only confirmed ideas he already had.
Tenpenny is quite the character. She has shared numerous antisemitic claims on social media, including Holocaust denial and praise for the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
In early 2022, she claimed Jews were using the Ukraine conflict to distract the world from a meeting in Europe about pandemic preparedness.
Kennedy will have a hard time disassociating himself from Tenpenny and her beliefs, given that she is right next to him in the image below for Kennedy’s June 27 “Health Policy Roundtable.”
American Values 2024, a super PAC supporting Kennedy, is run by close associates to Kennedy who have propped up anti-vaccine ideas — the former head of the New York chapter of Children’s Health Defense John Gilmore is its CEO and Kennedy’s publisher Tony Lyons is its co-chair.
The Kennedy campaign did not return emails seeking comment about a number of questions, including how he can say he is not anti-vaccine given his record and his support from anti-vaccine activists.
Kennedy’s run is also getting plenty of financial support from the right. A super PAC supporting Kennedy’s presidential run, called Heal the Divide PAC, has deep ties to Republicans, F ederal Election Commission records show.
The committee’s address is listed in the care of RTA Strategy, a campaign consulting firm that has been paid for its work to help elect Republicans including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the former Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker.
The PAC’s treasurer, who works for RTA Strategy, is Jason Boles, a past donor to Trump and many other Republicans who includes “MAGA” and “AmericaFirst” in his bio on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
Kennedy denied knowing Boles or the Heal the Divide PAC when it came up at the congressional hearing, saying, “I’ve never heard of Mr. Boles, and I’ve never heard of that super PAC.”
But video available online shows he was a guest speaker
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the
Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident
US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have
leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters
and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
•
US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse,
torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct
appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
• A US helicopter gunship involved in a
notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after
they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in
previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no
official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081
non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent deat
The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.
But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.
Whether the US justice department continues to pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to protect the press.
Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.
Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, is a liar.
To be specific, his statement at the weekend that Julian Assange’s actions in publishing US cables and defence material “risk[ed] very serious harm to our national security” is a clear, indeed blatant, lie.
Let’s cite the authorities who over the years have confirmed that WikiLeaks’ publication of the Chelsea Manning material, including the Iraq and Afghan war logs, did little or no harm to national security:
- Barack Obama’s defence secretary at the time of the releases, Robert M Gates: “I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think — I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets … Other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest”;
- The US Department of Defense in a secret report obtained by Buzzfeed in 2017: no “significant impact”; “disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former US leadership in Iraq”;
- Officials of Blinken’s department briefing Congress in 2010: “We were told [the impact of WikiLeaks revelations] was embarrassing but not damaging”;
- US military officials at the trial of Chelsea Manning: “I don’t have a specific example,” when asked to confirm the much-vaunted claim that the releases had placed the lives of US sources in danger.
Blinken knows all this. He worked as an adviser to Joe Biden when the latter was vice president under Obama. Yet he continues to peddle the lie that the Manning material damaged national security.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has denied several times this lie, as Assange neither did espionage activities, violated laws, nor any of the 18 charges by the US government.
The Mexican leader insisted that the major problem is that Assange told the truth about what really happened in Iraq and other places, uncovered corruption and violation of rights and laws in the United States, so that´s why they want to silence him and punish him for using his right to freedom of speech.
The move is expected to strengthen a central Australian Defence Force framework – Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) – which underpins fundamental assets of the nation’s military including manufacturing, storage and distribution, disposal, and research and development.
By signing the monumental agreement, Australia will be able to both carve its place as a major player in weapons export and also grow domestic stockpiles through on-shore production.
The deal was finalised in a bilateral meet between Defence Minister Richard Marles and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday.
Turkey renewed its air strikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq on Sunday.
Issuing a statement, the Turkish Ministry of Defense declared that PKK positions were targeted during these airstrikes.
News sources also announced that 2 terrorists were killed in the attacks.
Turkish ministry's statement also said that the armed forces of this country continue to fight effectively and decisively against terrorists to eradicate terrorism.
Under the pretext of fighting PKK terrorists, Turkey has deployed its troops in areas of northern Iraq and Syria and is conducting aerial attacks on parts of the northern areas of these countries.
Turkish airstrikes that allegedly targeted a civilian hospital and killed eight people in Iraq have been made the subject of a formal complaint to the UN human rights council.
It is the first case to be brought on the issue of Turkish airstrikes against the Yazidi people. The attack on 17 August 2021 destroyed the Sikeniye medical clinic in Sinjar and left more than 20 people injured.
The four claimants, either survivors or witnesses to the airstrikes, say they violated their right to life under international law, as guaranteed by article 6 of the international covenant on civil and political rights.
Further, the claimants allege that Turkey failed to investigate the killing of civilians resulting from the airstrikes and provide victims with effective remedies, constituting a violation of their rights to a prompt, independent and effective investigation under the same covenant.
A North Carolina school board censured one of its Christian members for posting an anti-LGBTQ+ image on social media that showed an American figure assaulting an LGBTQ+ figure. The Christian man defended posting the image, saying he had free speech rights to oppose “woke” cultural issues.
The Mount Airy Board of Education held a special meeting on July 10 to censure board member Randy Moore, a U.S. Army veteran who was appointed to the board in January 2021. Moore had posted a Facebook image of a figure in red, white, and blue colors kicking the midsection of another rainbow-colored figure symbolizing the LGBTQ+ community, The Mount Airy News reported.
- Truest statement of the week
- Truest statement of the week II
- A note to our readers
- Oil rich Iraq can't even deliver electricity to th...
- TV: The strike and what it boils down to
- A look at Cornel West's campaign
- Books (Stan, Ava and C.I.)
- 2023 Passings
- Books
- Tweet of the week
- This edition's playlist
- Highlights
