Saturday, April 08, 2017

We need better candidates

  Retweeted
Look at how different our choices were in this election!



There was no choice offered by the duopoly in 2016.

America deserved better.

We deserved much better.

Of the two . . .

What the hell is that?

Lesser of two evils?

We are talking about president of the United States, the supposed leader of the free world.

How is "lesser of two evils" even a qualification?

We need better choices.

I that means we go Green, fine.

If that means we go Libertarian, fine.

If that means we create a new party, fine.

But something has to be done.


"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Friday, April 7, 2017.  Chaos and violence continue, The Mosul Slog continues, the partisan liars continue and let's learn to tell the difference between a partisan piece of crap and a peace activist.







There's a chance peace will come, in your life please buy one
There's a chance peace will come, in your life please buy one

For sometimes when I am feeling as big as the land
With the velvet hill in the small of my back
And my hands are playing the sand
And my feet are swimming in all of the waters
All of the rivers are givers to the ocean
According to plan, according to man

Well sometimes when I am feeling so grand
And I become the world
And the world becomes a man
And my song becomes a part of the river
I cry out to keep me just the way I am
According to plan, according to man
According to plan, according to man
According to plan, according to man
According to plan, according to man
According to plan
-- "Peace Will Come (According to Plan)," written by Melanie Safka, first appears on her album LEFTOVER WINE

There's a chance that peace will come . . . but not as long as people lie.
Take this idiot, "Peace Is Active."

Bush Said Iraq Would Welcome Us As Liberators... Many Lives Lost... Civil War We Sparked Bled Into Syria...

 

 

Where's Barack on that list?

I get that D Cheney smirk when I see orgs quote Dr. King today that said nothing during Obama's 8 years of bombings.


If he hadn't overturned the 2010 Iraqi vote -- talk about foreign interference in an election -- Nouri al-Maliki wouldn't have gotten a second term and Iraq might not have witnessed the rise of the Islamic State.
Where's Bill Clinton?
Do a half million dead Iraqi children not matter?
Or, like Madeline Albright (Bill's Secretary of State and Destruction), do you think killing them was "worth it"?


There's a special in place for hell for Madeline Albright and plenty of spots for those who lie and cover for her as well.
Where's Jimmy Carter?


Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what?
That's  Mika Brzezinski's dirty ass father Zbigniew Brzezinski who served as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor.
Peace will never come when whores and liars pretend the problem is Republicans.
John Kerry voted for the Iraq War.  John Edwards voted for the Iraq War.  Joe Biden voted for the Iraq War.  Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War. 
What do they hold in common?
They're all Democrats for one thing.
And they were all on presidential tickets after their votes for war.
The 2004 Democratic presidential ticket was Kerry - Edwards (or John and John -- two toilets for twice the flushing).
Joe Biden was the running mate on the 2008 and 2012 ticket.
Hillary Clinton was the presidential candidate on the 2016 ticket.
Before you start cheering on Barack Obama and Tim Kaine for not voting for the Iraq War, remember that neither was in the US Congress -- House or Senate -- in 2002.
And add in that Barack told THE NEW YORK TIMES in 2004, during the national convention in Boston, that he didn't know how he would have voted had he been in the Senate.
And yet someone claiming to want peace, is pimping the wars as the responsibility of the sole Republican Party?
That's a lie. 
And peace will never come while we continued to allow ourselves to be hijacked for partisan purposes.
Grasp that in 2006, Democrats promised they would end the war in Iraq if they were given control of a house of Congress.
At the time, they were in the minority in both houses.
In those November elections, the American people gave them control of both houses.
January 2007 saw that Congress sworn in.
Did the Iraq War end?
No.
Did it end in 2008?
No.
Give us one house of Congress and we'll end the war . . . 
A lie.
Nancy Pelosi, elevated to Speaker of the House, tried to pin the blame on then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
What a load of nonsense.
She didn't say, "Give me both houses of Congress," she said one.
They thought they had a chance at winning back the House.  That was the promise she was making.  So she expected the Senate would obstruct -- that it would be controlled by Republicans. 
Instead, it ended up controlled by Democrats.
And she whined -- the the editorial board of THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- that she only had control of the House herself so she couldn't end the war.
What a lying sack of s**t.
Shame on everyone who provides cover for politicians who start and/or continue illegal wars.
Shame on those who use it as a partisan issue.
This is about human life and you're lying to churn out the vote for a political party?
That includes Peace Is Active who doesn't give a damn about peace -- check out the Twitter feed -- just about slamming Republicans and praising Democrats.
You are the problem.
You are the cause of continued war.
Because you whore.
I'm hoping Chris Hayes is just stupid.
Remember: US re-involvement in Iraq started with humanitarian mission to save Yazidis from slaughter on Mt Sinjar.


No, Chris, it didn't.
You refused to report what happened but Tim Arango reported it, we've covered it here hundreds of times and, in your magazine THE NATION, Tom Hayden even wrote about Tim Arango's report.
So are you stupid?  Are you lying? Or are you whoring?
The drawdown (not withdrawal) was at the end of 2011.  The Yazidi 'rescue' began in 2014.
Where's Barack sending special-ops into Iraq in 2012?  Oh, Chris ignores it.
From November 7, 2012's "Let the fun begin (Ava and C.I.):"
 If you doubt that, September 26th, the New York Times' Tim Arango reported:

 
Iraq and the United States are negotiating an agreement that could result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on training missions. At the request of the Iraqi government, according to General Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and help with intelligence.



September 26th it was in print.

Days later, October 3rd, Barack 'debated' Mitt RomneyAgain October 16thAgain October 22nd.
Not once did the moderators ever raise the issue.

If Barack's sitting before them and he's flat out lying to the American people, it's their job to ask.  They didn't do their job.  Nor did social menace Candy Crowley who was apparently dreaming of an all-you-can-eat buffet when Barack was babbling away before her about how he wouldn't allow more "troops in Iraq that would tie us down."  But that's exactly what he's currently negotiating.

Maybe Candy Crowley missed the New York Times article?  Maybe she spends all her time pleasuring herself to her version of porn: Cooking With Paula Deen Magazine?

That is possible.

But she was only one of the three moderators.  Bob Schieffer and Jim Lehrer also moderated.  Of course, they didn't foolishly self-present as a fact checker in the midst of the debate  nor did they hit the publicity circuit before the debate to talk about how they were going to show how it was done.

Poor Crowley, a heavy weight strutting into a non-competition will always look woefully misdressed.

Barack lied and Americans will face that or not.
Chris Hayes appears to indicate that America will not face that.
Let's all hope he's wrong.
Meanwhile . . .
President Erdogan: It is not appropriate to raise the Kurdistan flag alongside the Iraqi flag.


Must be wonderful to be Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey, so few problems that you can stick your nose into other countries' business and do so over issues like whether or not they should raise a flag.
What's that?
Erdogan's Turkey has thousands of problems -- most of them stemming from Erdogan.
And when he's out of office, he will be seen as a butcher for all the civilians he's killed in his so-called efforts to bomb the PKK.  (He's killing Kurds.  He knows it.  The Kurds know it.  He's thinning out the population.  His policies in Turkey are the same only less obviously violent.)
Repeating, when he's out of office, he will be seen as the butcher he is.
And he can shut down every last TV channel, newspaper and blog in Turkey and he still won't be able to silence that truth.
Butcher.
Meanwhile it's day 171 of The Mosul Slog.  
How's that going?
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees offers this:

KEY FIGURES
314,268 Iraqis currently internally displaced from Mosul and surrounding areas since military operations to retake the city began on 17 October 2016
37,455 core relief item (CRIs) kits distributed to families in camps, assisting some 224,000 IDPs from Mosul and surrounding areas
7,814 family plots currently occupied out of 12,497 family plots (for some 75,000 people) in UNHCR built camps ready to receive IDPs displaced from the Mosul corridor
3 million IDPs since January 2014
250,952 Iraqi refugees hosted in countries in the region, and 14,878 Iraqis received in Al Hol camp in Syria since 17 October 2016
FUNDING
USD 578 million requested for IDPs and Iraqi refugees in the region in 2017


And remember that this week, the civilians in Mosul were again instructed to remain in their homes.  There is no safe passage out.  But we can be sure that when the next civilian massacre gets attention we will suffer through members of the US Congress insisting it's all ISIS' fault.


The war continues in Iraq, Trump's attacking Syria and the thing all the 'intelligent' people are doing?  Mocking Jared Kushner for wearing a flack jacket.
No, your priorities aren't screwed up at all.  (That was sarcasm.)
While flying home to Hawaii, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard issues statement: Trump's air strikes on Syria are reckless and short-sighted. –Team Tulsi




US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard is correct.
By the way, the US State Dept will not have a press briefing today: "There will NOT be a Press Briefing today."  And they haven't held once since March 21st.  The State Dept press briefing is a daily event.  How sad that Donald Trump's people are too scared to face the press.  How sad, but how telling.
So much to work on but so little willing to do the work.


We don't need another war but, by all means, let's not focus on that or Iraq or anything that matters because we can be snotty about Jared!  (Snotty, not bitchy.  It's not mature enough to pass for bitchy.  It's the stuff of 3rd graders.)


Who's for peace?

That should be the question of the day.
The following community sites updated:



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    Thursday, April 06, 2017

    Tracey smacks down Yglesias

    Matthew Yglesias was an Iraq War cheerleader.

    That he's tolerated among the left today goes a long way towards explaining why the left always loses its way.



    And then one year later he bombed Syria without Congressional authorization anyway.



    Matthew's such a liar.

    It's good to see him smacked down.




    "Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
    Thursday, April 6, 2017.  Chaos and violence continue as some agitate for even more war.



    We're not doing a "Syria snapshot."  Enough Americans have walked away from Iraq, we will keep that our focus for as long as I continue to write here.   But we will note that there is no proof that warrants a war on Syria.  The drums of war are pounding yet again.  Betty said it all with "We don't need another war" and Trina made a good point in "On Mia Farrow and other War Hags:"


    There is no compelling reason for war.

    Yes, that dried out hag Mia Farrow wants war with Syria.

    She always wants war.

    That's why she lied about Woody Allen.

    She's just a dishonest person.

    And she and the others pimping war need to be called out.

    They pretend to care but they don't care about people, they just want war.

    Mia was calling on war on the Sudan before she picked up the cause of Syria.

    War Hags.

    That's what we should call those people, War Hags.




    Trina's right, it is Mia Farrow.  It's not just the neocons.  Stop pretending that the Iraq War took place because of a bunch of neocons.  It was sold and advanced by many people -- not just the neocons.

    War Hags?  Love that title.  It's also the group that's been dubbed "The Cruise Missile Left."


    From Edward S. Herman's 2004 essay "The Cruise Missile Left: Samantha Power and the Genocide Gambits:"


    prominent set of commentators claiming to speak from the left
    have aligned themselves with the national leadership in support
    of an aggressive military interventionism and projection of
    power abroad. This is by no means a genuine left—that
    is, one that opposes the powerful in the interest of the non-elite
    majority. I call them a “cruise missile left” (CML)
    because of their alignment with power and their eager support
    of external violence, which is a very important component
    of their intellectual labors. One of their cohort, Christopher
    Hitchens, even explicitly lauds cruise missiles themselves—“precision-guided
    weaponry”—which he finds “good in itself,”
    but especially admirable when decimating the forces of evil
    that are the official targets (“Its a Good Time for War…,”
    Boston Globe,
    September 8, 2002).


    CMLs often designate themselves the “pragmatic,”
    “rational,” and “decent” left and they
    spend considerable energy attacking their erstwhile comrades
    for failing to keep in touch with the U.S. public, for “reflexive
    anti-Americanism” (Todd Gitlin), for “genuflecting
    only briefly—if at all—to the [9/11] dead”
    (Marc Cooper), for “refusing to acknowledge that the
    country faced real dangers” and has a right to defend
    itself (Michael Walzer), and for not crediting U.S. policy
    with successes when it attacks and removes bad men from power
    (Michael Berube et al.), among other leftists’ failings.

    CMLs are of course welcomed by the mainstream media, because
    they not only support the elite political agenda, they attack
    its real left critics with great vigor and with the credibility
    of alleged leftists who have escaped “the politics of
    guilt and resentment” (Walzer, “Can There Be a Decent
    Left?,” Dissent, Spring 2002). Marc Cooper recently
    published a second article in the Los Angeles Times
    that focused on the recent failures of the peace movement,
    attributed to the influence of a left faction “steeped
    in four decades’ worth of crude anti-Americanism,”
    although why he and the “decent left” haven’t
    successfully stepped into the breach and revitalized the movement,
    Cooper never makes clear (“Protest: A Smart Peace Movement
    is MIA,” LAT, September 29, 2002). CMLs even speak
    of the “Chomsky-left” as a generic class of leftists
    who are extremist, angry, reflexively anti-American, etc.,
    and attacking Chomsky is a favorite outing for CMLs. This
    helps improve their access to the mainstream media, where
    in addition to garnering publicity they are relatively free
    from critical response.


    One problem with the CMLs is that, not really being on the
    left, they have lost sight of what the left is all about.
    The left’s criterion of success is not the extent to
    which it is listened to or heard, irrespective of message
    content; it is its success in getting a left message across
    (and on some issues, like “free trade,” and the
    merits of overseas military ventures [except in the heat of
    battle and under a furious elite propaganda barrage], the
    “radical left” is far closer to mainstream opinion
    than is the “decent left,” and it is listened to
    on those issues by ordinary citizens when they can be reached).
    On issues where it is in a minority position, a real left
    does not abandon its position in order to be acceptable. Marc
    Cooper objects to the left’s “scold mold” and
    its “alienation from its own national institutions,”
    and Gitlin calls on the left to be “practical—the
    stakes are too great for the luxury of any fundamentalism.”
    One can readily imagine the Cooper, Gitlin, Walzer, Berube,
    and Hitchens equivalents of the 1850s explaining to the abolitionists
    that they must tone down their message and alter or even drop
    their anti-racist and anti-slavery message given the “political
    realities” and public sentiment. But then, as now, a
    genuine left focuses on the struggle against basic exploitative
    and unjust policies and structures—it does not give up
    its radical educational and organizing role in order to win
    transitory victories and gain access and approval from the
    mainstream. Most certainly it does not join militaristic bandwagons
    and support wars against distant small targets on the grounds
    of the evil being attacked in some particular case. 



    You should also refer to the BLACK AGENDA RADIO interview with Sara Flounders -- where she discusses how some of our so-called friends betray us every time on war.


    Groups worked together to sell the Iraq War and they're doing the same with Syria.







    I fought in Iraq for 18 months. To no avail. Country is worse now than before. We need to stay out of Syria. Let them fight for themselves.
     
     




    They LIED about Iraq & Libya & they are LYING about Syria. No more foreign wars, they only serve the interests of internationalist cliques!
     
     


    Same neocons who lied us into the Iraq war are at it again.
     
     



    1. Iraq. Libya's Benghazi. And now . Same lies, different day.



    In Iraq, The Mosul Slog reaches day 171.

    171 days since the operation began and still it drags on.

    In June of 2014, the Islamic State took control of the city.  Finally, in October of last year, the Baghdad-based Iraqi government began a plan of action.

    Liberate the city?

    That's been the claim.

    But the mission's goal has not been to protect civilians.

    The March 17th US airstrike is said to be responsible for the death of hundreds of civilians.  Molly Hennessy-Fiske (LOS ANGELES TIMES) reports:

    Iraqi officials said Wednesday that they had removed nearly 300 bodies from the site of an apparent airstrike in west Mosul, the largest civilian death toll since the battle against Islamic State began more than two years ago and among the deadliest incidents in decades of modern warfare.
    More bodies were being removed Wednesday as the U.S.-led coalition investigated whether it was responsible, Iraqi officials blamed Islamic State, and the injured continued to suffer.
    The attack came after government officials urged residents at the start of the Oct. 17 offensive to stay in their homes. Responsibility for the deaths has been disputed, as has the number killed.


    They told them not to leave their homes.

    And they're still telling the civilians that.

    Still.

    From yesterday's snapshot:

    And what's being done?

    Iraq's military on Wednesday urged residents to shelter in their homes in jihadist-held areas of Mosul, where its bid to oust the Islamic State group has taken a heavy toll on civilians.
    Iraqi forces are battling to recapture west Mosul from IS, killing and wounding hundreds of civilians and pushing more than 200,000 to leave their homes.

    The government has encouraged residents not to flee during the fighting -- a policy aimed at easing ease the burden of widespread displacement but which can heighten the risk of injury or death for civilians.



    Despite the infamous March 20th strike that left 100s of civilians dead, that's still what they tell Mosul residents?  Don't leave?
    They refuse to create a corridor for safe passage to get the civilians out of Mosul.
    The Mosul Slog is not about helping Iraqi civilians.
    That should be clear by now.




    Stop pretending this is about saving the civilians of Mosul.

    It's not.


    Zaid al-Ali (AL JAZEERA) offers:

    There have been some calls to compensate relatives of those who died on March 17, 2017, but while the Coalition has not pronounced itself on that particular issue, there can be no compensation for what has happened. The Coalition has stated that its "goal is and has always been zero civilian casualties" and that "ISIS will continue to cause massive human suffering".
    But that statement in and of itself barely conceals a massive contradiction, which is, and always has been, at the heart of US policy in Iraq. The US and others have long maintained that ISIL deliberately puts civilians at risk. As early as December 2015, former US President Barack Obama said that ISIL fighters "hide behind civilians, using defenceless men, women and children as human shields". 
    That being the case, the US had every reason to expect that its decision to destroy entire buildings to eliminate small numbers of snipers would result in massive civilian casualties. The Coalition's carefully constructed strategy was bound to lead to the current outcome.
    The US' sanctimonious self-image does not fit well with its own sordid history of involvement in Iraq. The US has become so involved in Iraq's modern history that its footprint can be found everywhere. ISIL may be an outgrowth of radical ideology that was born elsewhere, but it was the United States which supported late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and which imposed a deadly embargo throughout the 1990s, turning Iraq into fertile ground for those same ideas to grow.
    Iraqi security forces have systematically tortured and abused detainees, for which they are rightly condemned. But the United States firmly encouraged the practice in the post-2003 era, by allowing its own forces to torture detainees of its own.

    Tellingly, however, in recent years, US officials have simply shrugged when asked to pressure Iraqi officials to engage in prison reform, attributing the problem to cultural values, oblivious to its own role in perpetuating this inhuman practice.




    The violence never ends.


    BREAKING Helicopter of Iraqi forces shot down & it's crew killed by IS fighters above Al Gabat area on the left side of city.
     
     



    And the best our corporate media can do is talk about a "change of tactics" -- thanks, NPR.

    The entire missions is built on a false premise.

    We're doing 'good' by helping the Iraqi government.

    That government is no better than the Islamic State.

    Both attack the civilians, both torture the civilians.

    You can be against ISIS and still note that hideous history of the Iraqi government.


    Meanwhile . . .


    Iraqi PM Abadi agreed with a Kurdish delegation yesterday, 5 April, to “remove the obstacles that prevented the activation of Article 140”
     
     



    Article 140 was supposed to be activated at the end of 2007.

    For all the talk of rule of law from the State Dept -- under Bully Boy Bush, under Barack Obama and now under Donald Trump -- the US is very selective about which rules and which laws they highlight and back.

    Some are excited that Abadi's made a promise.

    Those fools don't remember that Nouri al-Maliki made the same promise publicly and then went back on it.

    Believe Article 140 will be implemented . . . when it gets implemented -- and not before then.





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