Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Joe Makes The Cover" went up Sunday.
Now we're going to return to the topic of Aung San Suu Kyi. She is fascinating as a case study. The real question is whether or not power corupted her or whether she was always a fake?
We should also question those who allowed themselves to be props for Aung San Suu Kyi. Barack Obama and Bono are only two who posed for photos with her.
Peter Symonds (WSWS) reports:
Aung San Suu Kyi, de facto head of the government in Myanmar [Burma], appeared in the International Court of Justice in The Hague last week as a crass apologist for the country’s military against charges of gross human rights abuses, including genocide, against the mostly Muslim Rohingya minority.
Since 2017, the military in Myanmar has engaged in brutal operations to terrorise the Rohingya population forcing hundreds of thousands to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh where they live in squalid refugee camps.
A UN fact-finding mission last year found that military forces had destroyed almost 400 villages and driven close to three quarters of a million Rohingya out of their homes. It stated that the estimated death toll of 10,000 was “conservative” and called for the indictment of six senior generals, including Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of the army, on charges of genocide.
Suu Kyi, who was touted by the US and its allies as “an icon of democracy” and given a Nobel Peace Prize, dismissed the charge of genocide and accused Gambia, which brought the charges before the court, of presenting an “incomplete and misleading factual picture of the situation.” The Gambian case is being backed by the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, as well as Canada and the Netherlands.
Suu Kyi claimed that the exodus of Rohingya from north-western state of Rakhine was simply the result of the conflict between the military and armed Rohingya separatist groups, not a conscious policy of ethnic cleansing by the military. While acknowledging that individual members and units of the military might have carried out crimes, she insisted that these would be dealt with by the country’s military courts and, in any case, did not constitute genocide.
The attempt to blame Rohingya militants for the turmoil has been the standard pretext used by the military to defend its crimes. The UN fact-finding mission last year dismissed the excuse, noting that the army incursions into Rakhine had been planned at the highest levels of the military prior to small-scale rebel actions in August 2017. It also noted the coordinated character of the military operations, which has involved the round-up of men and boys, the sexual abuse of women and the torching of entire villages.
Suu Kyi also ignored the systematic denial of basic democratic rights, including citizenship, to the Rohingya, who are treated as “illegal immigrants” despite have lived in Myanmar for decades or longer. Her government has done nothing to address the issue and leading members of her party, the National League for Democracy, are deeply imbued with Buddhist supremacism and hostile to the Muslim minority.
Suu Kyi also claimed that it was “still not easy to establish clear patterns of events.” Her claim of ignorance is simply not believable. She and the military have sought to block journalists and human rights activists from entering Rakhine state to gather firsthand evidence. Nevertheless, satellite imagery, along with eyewitness accounts from refugees who have fled Myanmar, all corroborate allegations of systematic human rights abuses.
My guess? She was pretty much always a fake. It was in the interest of the government of the United States to promote her and they did. I believe the CIA and other groups were utilized to promote her (I'm not the first to make such an accusation -- see this 1996 AP article). She did what she needed to take the power she wanted and, once she had it, she did as she pleased.
I don't believe she was ever a hero.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Monday, December 16, 2019. Bernie Sanders is polling very well -- watch
the corporate media try to undermine that, another protester was
stalked and killed in Iraq but a whore for THE WASHINGTON POST can't be
bothered with telling you even though she's supposed to be their Baghdad
correspondent, and much more.
Starting in the United States where the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination continues. At CNBC, Jake Novak wonders if any of the Democratic contenders actually wants to win the nomination? Novak notes the corruption behind Hunter Biden's profiting from his father being Vice President and how everyone of the nominees wants to pretend it didn't happen:
One candidate who had the best chance to take advantage of this was Sen. Warren, who was asked point blank about the Hunter Biden issue at the very time she was unveiling her anti-corruption policy statement. But instead of making an issue about it, the usually assertive Warren meekly answered that she’d have to check her plan when she was asked whether the sweetheart deals the younger Biden got would be allowed in her administration.
Besides, there are many ways for Democratic candidates to pound Biden on this issue and still plausibly deny they’re somehow joining a narrative started by the Trump White House. For one thing, this issue was in question well before Mr. Trump even ran for office. In May 2014, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked then-White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest a direct question about the apparent conflict of interest created by Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma. Earnest didn’t give much of a real answer.
But so far, no Democrat is taking this opportunity to prove they consider stamping out nepotism and other forms of political corruption more important than circling the wagons for the party and Biden. With President Trump sure to hit Biden hard for this issue if he does win the Democratic nomination, all this reticence will do is delay the inevitable.
Joe Biden is a career politician. Hunter Biden is a 49-year-old man. Declaring them both essentially off-limits for serious attack is basically a primary election death sentence for every Democrat running against Biden. I suspect all those other candidates probably know that, which means everyone supporting them is really wasting their time.
In a debate, Elizabeth Warren demonstrated she could withstand an attack; however, she's yet to demonstrate that she can fight herself in a debate. Maybe that's why she's not higher in the polls?
The latest polls?
Domenico Montanaro (NPR) types:
Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders lead the crowded Democratic field, pulling in together about half of the support of Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll.
Biden leads with 24%, followed closely by Sanders at 22%. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is third with 17%, followed by South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 13%, all together making up a clear top tier of four candidates.
First off, it's NPR-PBS NEWSHOUR-Marist Poll. It's not NPR or PBS NEWSHOUR or Marist Poll so it's defined with dashes. This is basic English grammar. All those years ago, when we came online, people were still typing singer/songwriter to talk about Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, etc. No. It's singer-songwriter. And thankfully that has been fixed. These polls need to be fixed as well in how they are typed.
Second, the lede to the report is that Biden and Sanders are tied. It can even be argued that Elizabeth Warren is not in a distant third. No where in the text does Montanaro tell you that the margin of error for the poll is +/- 5.4%. Possibly because he doesn't grasp that "/" means "or."
Bernie has been slaughtered by the corporate media over and over. Much to their dismay, he doesn't go away. It's also to the dismay of the disgusting Neera and her cabal at the Center (emphasis on "center") for American Progress. Matt Bruenig (JACOBIN) points out:
It’s been fun to see how the Center for American Progress (CAP) navigates this year’s presidential election. For insider political reasons, they can’t support Biden or Sanders. But for a long time, it was unclear who the alternative candidate they could support would be.
When Kamala Harris was rising, CAP’s staff was doing overtime boosting her on Twitter and in the press, including boosting Harris’s absurd health care proposal. But Harris’s collapse put an end to that strategy. Recently Warren has risen as the alternative, and so CAP has been working to promote her campaign, which puts CAP in the comical position of having to promote policies that they just a few months ago claimed were insane and politically suicidal.
No one has embodied the hilarity of this predicament more than CAP’s Topher Spiro, who has had to shoulder a lot of the weight of CAP’s election strategy because of his role as a health care guy. In shouldering this responsibility though, Spiro has frequently resorted to lying about Bernie Sanders in the hopes of boosting Elizabeth Warren.
Consider the following tweet by Spiro, which was made in a thread in which Spiro (absurdly) argues that there is a double standard in the discourse in which Warren’s Medicare for All (M4A) financing plan gets more scrutiny than Bernie’s does.
In this tweet, Spiro claims that Bernie’s list of M4A financing options (found here) was deemed by the Urban Institute to only cover half of the federal cost of M4A.
The first problem with this claim is that the Urban Institute report he links to is from May of 2016, while Sanders’s list of financing options was released in September of 2017. Barring some kind of time machine, the claim that this report is commenting on Sanders’s financing options list seems
And of course, upon inspection, you see that Spiro’s claim is incorrect. The Urban report is an estimate of what national health expenditures would be under Medicare for All, and includes only a brief mention of the Tax Policy Center’s estimates of the revenue generated by all of Sanders’s tax proposals in the 2016 campaign. The report says nothing about Sanders’s M4A financing options for the obvious reasons that those would not be released for another sixteen months.
Lies is all they have to toss at Bernie. And despite this, he keeps pulling in crowds. Julia Conley (COMMON DREAMS) reports:
Sen. Bernie Sanders held his largest rally yet in the key state of New Hampshire on Friday night, joined by Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has faced racist attacks since taking office earlier this year but who received a warm welcome from the crowd of more than 1,300 people.
The rally was reportedly the largest of any Democratic primary candidate in the state so far, according to the campaign; last month, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg reported that he drew "about 1,300" to a rally in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
"The political revolution is strong in New Hampshire," said Sanders campaign New Hampshire state director Shannon Jackson. "We are seeing incredible enthusiasm from voters across the state. Sanders and Omar represent a vision for the future of economic, racial, environmental, and social justice, and the voters of New Hampshire are on board. The multiethnic working class coalition we are building was on display today and will ultimately lead us to victory on February 11th."
On the topic of Bernie. JEZEBEL's calling him out for an endorsement he made of Cenk Uygur. The endorsement's been pulled. That's not the issue. I'd love for Cenk to be on the campaign trail -- it would save us all seeing him on TV. As someone who has never embraced Cenk because he is so disgusting, I don't support JEZEBEL's attack on Sanders -- and it is an attack.
I've called out Cenk. Here and at THIRD. I refused to join the soup line that sobbed when he was fired from MSNBC and -- unlike Branko and others -- I haven't tried to make that a defining moment of the corporate talk that is MSNBC.
But I'm reading JEZEBEL's attack on Bernie and wondering how Bernie was supposed to know all of this about Cenk? It's not like, for example, JEZEBEL ever bothered to report on it. Look at the article, link, link, link, link . . . Not one goes to a JEZEBEL piece on the issue.
Sorry, it's a little bitchy to call out Bernie for not knowing what you yourself never covered in your many years online.
I don't like Cenk. He radiates hatred for women -- as does Farron on RING OF FIRE but no one wants to point that out, right JEZEBEL? -- and that's obvious to me. Has been obvious to me. But he's been embraced by a left culture and ignored by another aspect of it -- the aspect JEZEBEL is supposed to represent.
They can slam Bernie all they want but the reality is that they've been online for how many years and haven't led on this issue even once. That's one finger pointing at Bernie and three and a thumb pointing back at JEZEBEL.
Let's stay with embarrassing women.
Starting in the United States where the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination continues. At CNBC, Jake Novak wonders if any of the Democratic contenders actually wants to win the nomination? Novak notes the corruption behind Hunter Biden's profiting from his father being Vice President and how everyone of the nominees wants to pretend it didn't happen:
One candidate who had the best chance to take advantage of this was Sen. Warren, who was asked point blank about the Hunter Biden issue at the very time she was unveiling her anti-corruption policy statement. But instead of making an issue about it, the usually assertive Warren meekly answered that she’d have to check her plan when she was asked whether the sweetheart deals the younger Biden got would be allowed in her administration.
Besides, there are many ways for Democratic candidates to pound Biden on this issue and still plausibly deny they’re somehow joining a narrative started by the Trump White House. For one thing, this issue was in question well before Mr. Trump even ran for office. In May 2014, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked then-White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest a direct question about the apparent conflict of interest created by Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma. Earnest didn’t give much of a real answer.
But so far, no Democrat is taking this opportunity to prove they consider stamping out nepotism and other forms of political corruption more important than circling the wagons for the party and Biden. With President Trump sure to hit Biden hard for this issue if he does win the Democratic nomination, all this reticence will do is delay the inevitable.
Joe Biden is a career politician. Hunter Biden is a 49-year-old man. Declaring them both essentially off-limits for serious attack is basically a primary election death sentence for every Democrat running against Biden. I suspect all those other candidates probably know that, which means everyone supporting them is really wasting their time.
In a debate, Elizabeth Warren demonstrated she could withstand an attack; however, she's yet to demonstrate that she can fight herself in a debate. Maybe that's why she's not higher in the polls?
The latest polls?
Domenico Montanaro (NPR) types:
Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders lead the crowded Democratic field, pulling in together about half of the support of Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll.
Biden leads with 24%, followed closely by Sanders at 22%. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is third with 17%, followed by South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 13%, all together making up a clear top tier of four candidates.
First off, it's NPR-PBS NEWSHOUR-Marist Poll. It's not NPR or PBS NEWSHOUR or Marist Poll so it's defined with dashes. This is basic English grammar. All those years ago, when we came online, people were still typing singer/songwriter to talk about Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, etc. No. It's singer-songwriter. And thankfully that has been fixed. These polls need to be fixed as well in how they are typed.
Second, the lede to the report is that Biden and Sanders are tied. It can even be argued that Elizabeth Warren is not in a distant third. No where in the text does Montanaro tell you that the margin of error for the poll is +/- 5.4%. Possibly because he doesn't grasp that "/" means "or."
Bernie has been slaughtered by the corporate media over and over. Much to their dismay, he doesn't go away. It's also to the dismay of the disgusting Neera and her cabal at the Center (emphasis on "center") for American Progress. Matt Bruenig (JACOBIN) points out:
It’s been fun to see how the Center for American Progress (CAP) navigates this year’s presidential election. For insider political reasons, they can’t support Biden or Sanders. But for a long time, it was unclear who the alternative candidate they could support would be.
When Kamala Harris was rising, CAP’s staff was doing overtime boosting her on Twitter and in the press, including boosting Harris’s absurd health care proposal. But Harris’s collapse put an end to that strategy. Recently Warren has risen as the alternative, and so CAP has been working to promote her campaign, which puts CAP in the comical position of having to promote policies that they just a few months ago claimed were insane and politically suicidal.
No one has embodied the hilarity of this predicament more than CAP’s Topher Spiro, who has had to shoulder a lot of the weight of CAP’s election strategy because of his role as a health care guy. In shouldering this responsibility though, Spiro has frequently resorted to lying about Bernie Sanders in the hopes of boosting Elizabeth Warren.
Consider the following tweet by Spiro, which was made in a thread in which Spiro (absurdly) argues that there is a double standard in the discourse in which Warren’s Medicare for All (M4A) financing plan gets more scrutiny than Bernie’s does.
In this tweet, Spiro claims that Bernie’s list of M4A financing options (found here) was deemed by the Urban Institute to only cover half of the federal cost of M4A.
The first problem with this claim is that the Urban Institute report he links to is from May of 2016, while Sanders’s list of financing options was released in September of 2017. Barring some kind of time machine, the claim that this report is commenting on Sanders’s financing options list seems
And of course, upon inspection, you see that Spiro’s claim is incorrect. The Urban report is an estimate of what national health expenditures would be under Medicare for All, and includes only a brief mention of the Tax Policy Center’s estimates of the revenue generated by all of Sanders’s tax proposals in the 2016 campaign. The report says nothing about Sanders’s M4A financing options for the obvious reasons that those would not be released for another sixteen months.
Lies is all they have to toss at Bernie. And despite this, he keeps pulling in crowds. Julia Conley (COMMON DREAMS) reports:
Sen. Bernie Sanders held his largest rally yet in the key state of New Hampshire on Friday night, joined by Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has faced racist attacks since taking office earlier this year but who received a warm welcome from the crowd of more than 1,300 people.
The rally was reportedly the largest of any Democratic primary candidate in the state so far, according to the campaign; last month, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg reported that he drew "about 1,300" to a rally in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
"The political revolution is strong in New Hampshire," said Sanders campaign New Hampshire state director Shannon Jackson. "We are seeing incredible enthusiasm from voters across the state. Sanders and Omar represent a vision for the future of economic, racial, environmental, and social justice, and the voters of New Hampshire are on board. The multiethnic working class coalition we are building was on display today and will ultimately lead us to victory on February 11th."
On the topic of Bernie. JEZEBEL's calling him out for an endorsement he made of Cenk Uygur. The endorsement's been pulled. That's not the issue. I'd love for Cenk to be on the campaign trail -- it would save us all seeing him on TV. As someone who has never embraced Cenk because he is so disgusting, I don't support JEZEBEL's attack on Sanders -- and it is an attack.
I've called out Cenk. Here and at THIRD. I refused to join the soup line that sobbed when he was fired from MSNBC and -- unlike Branko and others -- I haven't tried to make that a defining moment of the corporate talk that is MSNBC.
But I'm reading JEZEBEL's attack on Bernie and wondering how Bernie was supposed to know all of this about Cenk? It's not like, for example, JEZEBEL ever bothered to report on it. Look at the article, link, link, link, link . . . Not one goes to a JEZEBEL piece on the issue.
Sorry, it's a little bitchy to call out Bernie for not knowing what you yourself never covered in your many years online.
I don't like Cenk. He radiates hatred for women -- as does Farron on RING OF FIRE but no one wants to point that out, right JEZEBEL? -- and that's obvious to me. Has been obvious to me. But he's been embraced by a left culture and ignored by another aspect of it -- the aspect JEZEBEL is supposed to represent.
They can slam Bernie all they want but the reality is that they've been online for how many years and haven't led on this issue even once. That's one finger pointing at Bernie and three and a thumb pointing back at JEZEBEL.
Let's stay with embarrassing women.
- In my experience, and those of friends, female reporters are far, far more likely to be harassed or sexually assaulted - sometimes violently. And yet this lazy Hollywood trope persists.
Oh, look, Thus Spaketh The Whore. That's Louisa Loveluck. Louisa, reporters -- male and female -- do sleep with their sources. And when Gina Chon was caught, I know where I stood on the issue because I ran with it here. We were the first website to cover it. I was appalled. I had noted Gina's reporting from Iraq. I didn't often agree with it but she's a woman and so she did get noted here.
If I had known that she was sleeping with her primary source -- let alone everything else -- I never would have noted her.
For those who don't know, while Bully Boy Bush was in the White House, Gina was sent by THE WALL STREET JOURNAL to Iraq to cover the war. Gina slept with government official (and neocon baby) Brett McGurk. Had that come out while Bully Boy Bush occupied the White House, FAIR and CJR and all the others would have cried foul. Because it was bad.
It was actually worse than just that, but we'll get there in a minute. Instead, it came out while Barack Obama was president and nominating Brett to be the US Ambassador to Iraq. So situational ethics were at play and so many on the left looked the other way or defended Brett.
There is no defense.
We called him out and we called out Gina. Gina didn't just sleep with Brett, she allowed him to vet the copy. That's why, when this came out after the fact, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL fired her. She was fired. If I had more time, I'd make it a point to listen to the recording a friend in that meeting made for me. I love Gina's attempts to lie and then her blubbering when she realizes the tides aren't going to turn for her.
Now Brett was married and Gina was married so there's that as well. But the offense for this site was that she was sleeping with her source and her source was receiving her 'reporting' before her editor did and her source was re-shaping what she submitted to her editor.
Now, again, I know where I was because I was calling this out. Where was Louisa?
Stick a pin in that one.
RICHARD JEWELL is about the way Kathy and other press whores destroyed someone's life. That's the point of the story. Louisa can't seem to grasp that.
Nor can she grasp, pay attention, what her role is.
Let's be blunt: Bitch, you're not the movie critic for THE WASHINGTON POST. You are supposed to be the one covering Iraq.
Where in your Tweets is Iraq?
The film RICHARD JEWELL has nothing to do with Iraq.
Go back seven Tweets and we get this reTweet:
Louisa Loveluck Retweeted
Baghdad airport announced the cancellation of all the flights today because of the fog.
Go back nine more and you get this:
The young man lynched, stabbed & essentially beheaded by protesters in Baghdad had not, as crowds believed, been trying to shoot them. After 3 days of arguments, he'd finally fired his weapon on the air to try & keep them back from his family home. nytimes.com/2019/12/12/wor…
We didn't cover that here. There was no point in it unless you hate the Iraqi people -- which clearly Louisa does. Hate the Iraqi people?
That was one death at a time when multiple deaths are taking place daily. Louisa can't find those deaths, can she?
Bitch. Whore. There are so many names I have for trash like Louisa.
AFP reported yesterday, "Mohammed Al Doujaili, 24, was shot in the back near the Tahrir Square protest hub on Saturday night, the police source said. Another man who was with him was wounded in the same attack, and Al Doujaili died of his wounds at a Baghdad hospital Sunday morning, relatives said."
Where's Louisa's Tweet on that? No where to be found because she's a whore, not a reporter. She's a whore trying to do her employer's bidding which is to knock the protests.
A young man was killed by the protesters? That's unfortunate. He shouldn't have been firing a gun. The protesters are regularly shot at. Someone was shooting, they attacked. Do I condone that? No. Do I understand it? Yes, it's human preservation. It was a natural instinct.
And there's nothing in Whore Louisa's Tweet that conveys that.
I try to be kind. I really do. I was nice to Jane Arraf while she was defending the use of tear gas canisters aimed at protesters -- defending it on NPR on the same day that one of those canisters was fired into a protesters head and killed him.
I try to be as kind as a I can.
But when you can't Tweet about attacks on protesters and the only thing of substance you offer on Iraq -- foggy weather is not substance, idiot -- is bemoaning the death of a stupid idiot who never should have been firing a gun near the protesters to begin with, you're a whore.
Lousia is covering Iraq for THE WASHINGTON POST? You'd never know it from her Twitter feed.
Isaiah's latest THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Joe Makes The Cover" went up yesterday. The following sites updated:
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