Thanksgiving.
I love a food holiday.
I ate so much, way too much.
But isn't that the point?
To overdose on family and food?
To catch up and share?
And I had so much fun I'm thinking I need to see extended family as in another trip to Ireland.
It's been around ten years since I visited.
I really should go back. I have a lot of family there.
And it's such a beautiful country.
Anyway, I waited for politics to dominate the day but no one really cared.
I think the media's deeply out of touch with most of America.
We had an election.
Someone won.
Life went on.
Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Wednesday, November 23, 2016. Chaos and violence continue, the Mosul
slog continues, Hannah Allem continues her lifelong streak of being (at
best) useless or (more often) harmful, and much more.
'Are you too hard on Hannah Allem?'
Some drive-by e-mails ask that. They then explain that she's with MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS and, remember, in the lead up to the war, they were the only ones who told the truth about Iraq.
It's the press' job to question.
But, more to the point, MCCLATCHY didn't question a damn thing.
KNIGHT RIDDER did.
Jonathan Landay and Warren Stroble -- who get the credit from their peers (Margaret Talev gets ignored) -- worked for KNIGHT RIDDER.
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS was around at the time. It had been for over a century (it's 41 years shy of celebrating it's 200th year anniversary).
It just didn't feel the need to do the job of questioning government propaganda.
It was KNIGHT RIDDER that did.
In the summer of 2006, KNIGHT RIDDER was purchased and taken over by MCCLATCHY.
Like MCCLATCHY, Hannah didn't do s**t.
Now she wasn't as bad as Roy Gutman.
Who could be?
Let's go to Mike's June 17, 2010 post:
Thursday. Okay, tonight's most pressing question: When using "fat asses," which is the bad word?
Reading Ava and C.I.'s "Media: Let's Kill Helen!" and listening to the program, I e-mailed Roy Gutman to let him know that I didn't find it entertaining that he didn't defend Helen Thomas and that he laughed when Yochi insisted the press was not responsible for the Iraq War.
I didn't expect him to write me back (and I won't quote from his e-mail without his permission) but he did and what a whiney.
My use of "fat" or "asses" was objectionable. I'm still confused as to which.
I'm also amazed that a seasoned reporter has never heard "fat" and/or "asses" before me. You sort of get the impression that Roy Gutman's spent the last decades covering socials and tea rooms.
Second, don't lie to me. Roy tried to say he didn't laugh.
I don't think they realize how audible stuff is.
[. . .]
So the point is, Roy Gutman, you did laugh. It's right there on the broadcast. Pop some ear phones into your Fat ears or your Ass ears and listen. You will hear the laughter. I say it's Roy because it's a man -- eliminating Diane -- it's not Yochi who is blathering away and the third man is Arab with a distinctive voice and that laugh isn't his pitch. It's Roy. (And I'd think that even if Diane Rehm's people hadn't identified the laughter as Roy's.)
So I have no idea why he wants to pretend otherwise.
Though it did occur to me that he might have laughed and forgotten.
I'll grant him that. And that's about all I'll do. But he needs to listen to the broadcast before he whines again. And he needs to watch what he does on a microphone in the future.
And just to finish this out, let's go to Mike's June 18, 2010 post:
Roy Gutman e-mailed to tell me "limp dicked" was the term he found objectionable. :D
I'd honestly forgotten that was in the e-mail. (I mailed it Monday. I didn't see his response until Thursday. In his response, he did not include mine below so I was thinking, "What did I say? Fat ass?") Good for me for using "limp dicked."
I should have done variations including Limp Bizkit. :D
I love "limp dicked." :D But I grew up playing sports. And I'm guessing (slowly) that Roy wasn't on the football team or basketball team or baseball team. I hear tell he played a mean game of jacks. No one could beat at two-sies! :D
So, as a jack player (considered more hobby than sport and requiring no locker room), Roy Gutman was not exposed to frank locker room talk.
As such, he had virgin ears and had never heard "limp dicked" until I used it in my e-mail. He had to run out into the streets and ask people. An 80-year-old woman slapped him across the face and called him "young feller!" :D But he finally found out what it meant and he was shocked.
Roy, my apologies. And congratulations on two-sies.
That's a little more representative of MCCLATCHY.
Helen Thomas is wrongly attacked and they find that sort of thing humorous.
She loses the seat she's held for decades in the White House press briefing.
She's dropped by her employer.
And they think it's funny.
I don't get, to this day, how people could apply a standard like that to Helen and yet a Hannah Allem can Tweet the crap she does and still have a job. Or pass around the e-mails she does.
Hannah's the dirty joke that got old about 20 years ago but still lingers.
'Are you too hard on Hannah Allem?'
Some drive-by e-mails ask that. They then explain that she's with MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS and, remember, in the lead up to the war, they were the only ones who told the truth about Iraq.
It's the press' job to question.
But, more to the point, MCCLATCHY didn't question a damn thing.
KNIGHT RIDDER did.
Jonathan Landay and Warren Stroble -- who get the credit from their peers (Margaret Talev gets ignored) -- worked for KNIGHT RIDDER.
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS was around at the time. It had been for over a century (it's 41 years shy of celebrating it's 200th year anniversary).
It just didn't feel the need to do the job of questioning government propaganda.
It was KNIGHT RIDDER that did.
In the summer of 2006, KNIGHT RIDDER was purchased and taken over by MCCLATCHY.
Like MCCLATCHY, Hannah didn't do s**t.
Now she wasn't as bad as Roy Gutman.
Who could be?
Let's go to Mike's June 17, 2010 post:
Thursday. Okay, tonight's most pressing question: When using "fat asses," which is the bad word?
Reading Ava and C.I.'s "Media: Let's Kill Helen!" and listening to the program, I e-mailed Roy Gutman to let him know that I didn't find it entertaining that he didn't defend Helen Thomas and that he laughed when Yochi insisted the press was not responsible for the Iraq War.
I didn't expect him to write me back (and I won't quote from his e-mail without his permission) but he did and what a whiney.
My use of "fat" or "asses" was objectionable. I'm still confused as to which.
I'm also amazed that a seasoned reporter has never heard "fat" and/or "asses" before me. You sort of get the impression that Roy Gutman's spent the last decades covering socials and tea rooms.
Second, don't lie to me. Roy tried to say he didn't laugh.
I don't think they realize how audible stuff is.
[. . .]
So the point is, Roy Gutman, you did laugh. It's right there on the broadcast. Pop some ear phones into your Fat ears or your Ass ears and listen. You will hear the laughter. I say it's Roy because it's a man -- eliminating Diane -- it's not Yochi who is blathering away and the third man is Arab with a distinctive voice and that laugh isn't his pitch. It's Roy. (And I'd think that even if Diane Rehm's people hadn't identified the laughter as Roy's.)
So I have no idea why he wants to pretend otherwise.
Though it did occur to me that he might have laughed and forgotten.
I'll grant him that. And that's about all I'll do. But he needs to listen to the broadcast before he whines again. And he needs to watch what he does on a microphone in the future.
And just to finish this out, let's go to Mike's June 18, 2010 post:
Roy Gutman e-mailed to tell me "limp dicked" was the term he found objectionable. :D
I'd honestly forgotten that was in the e-mail. (I mailed it Monday. I didn't see his response until Thursday. In his response, he did not include mine below so I was thinking, "What did I say? Fat ass?") Good for me for using "limp dicked."
I should have done variations including Limp Bizkit. :D
I love "limp dicked." :D But I grew up playing sports. And I'm guessing (slowly) that Roy wasn't on the football team or basketball team or baseball team. I hear tell he played a mean game of jacks. No one could beat at two-sies! :D
So, as a jack player (considered more hobby than sport and requiring no locker room), Roy Gutman was not exposed to frank locker room talk.
As such, he had virgin ears and had never heard "limp dicked" until I used it in my e-mail. He had to run out into the streets and ask people. An 80-year-old woman slapped him across the face and called him "young feller!" :D But he finally found out what it meant and he was shocked.
Roy, my apologies. And congratulations on two-sies.
That's a little more representative of MCCLATCHY.
Helen Thomas is wrongly attacked and they find that sort of thing humorous.
She loses the seat she's held for decades in the White House press briefing.
She's dropped by her employer.
And they think it's funny.
I don't get, to this day, how people could apply a standard like that to Helen and yet a Hannah Allem can Tweet the crap she does and still have a job. Or pass around the e-mails she does.
Hannah's the dirty joke that got old about 20 years ago but still lingers.
Hard to imagine in the Western world, media bosses being summoned and abused in such a way: Though Idi Amin once did it to me in 1977
Is Hannah really going to play dumb about all the times Barack exploded at the press in closed door meetings?
Forget what I know privately, reporters have talked about it publicly.
For Ann Compton speaking on C-SPAN go this POLITICO's 2014 article -- which has the video.
Ben Wolfgang (WASHINGTON TIMES) covered Compton's statements:
“I have seen in the last year Barack Obama really angry twice. Both were off-the-record times. One, profanity-laced where he thought the press was making too much of scandals that he did not think were scandals. Another where he took us to task for not understanding the limits he has with foreign policy and the way he’s dealing with the Middle East and Iraq, and Afghanistan,” she said. “And I don’t find him apologetic. But I find him willing to stand up to the press and look them in the eye, even though it was off the record and just give us hell.”
While I don't expect Jon Snow to know about it -- the 69-year-old resides in England -- I do expect Hannah Allem to know about it.
Of course, she's just a liar.
If you ever doubt it, she reTweeted this:
Fake news has real and horrifying consequences for a popular restaurant in DC. Jaw-dropping article by @ceciliakang
I don't know where their bodies reside, but their minds live in a tiny gated community, don't they?
Oh, no, threatening phone calls!
Oh, no, online abuse!!!!!!
The horror.
That's got to be the worst thing ever, right?
From Justice for the Babies of Fallujah:
Menacing calls! Online mean things said!!!!
The horror!!!
How will they lives?
Nothing so bad has ever, ever happened!!!!
"Findings suggest the enriched Uranium exposure is either a primary cause or related to the cause of the congenital anomaly and cancer increases," says a recent scientific report on the incidence of birth defects in Fallujah [Dr Samira Alani] |
That's from Al Jazeera.
We're looking at the effects of the weapons the US used on Iraq.
We're looking at birth defects.
Hannah never gave a damn about Iraq.
She never wrote about the birth defects, never gave a damn about these innocent children.
But some eatery gets phone calls and online negative comments and it's time to scream, "Oh, the humanity!"?
Steven's even worse.
We won't open up that can of worms, I'm pretty much done with that paper, but we will note it takes a hell of a lot of nerve and gall for him to pretend to be horrified by 'fake news.'
His paper offered nothing but fake news.
They sold the Iraq War on lies.
And it's not just the effects of this war that Hannah and THE TIMES ignore. It's all the attacks on civilians. Falluja? Nouri al-Maliki started bombing it daily in January 2014. Where was the press? Or how about we drop back to August 14, 2015 to note the photos from new prime minister Hayder al-Abadi's August 13th bombing of a maternity hospital in Falluja?
Hannah, THE TIMES and all the rest are the last who should lecture about fake news because if it weren't for their ability to fabricate fake news, (a) they'd be out of business and (b) the people of the world would be a lot less oppressed.
As Cass Elliot, Denny Doherty, John and Michelle Phillips (the Mamas and the Papas) sing in "Too Late" (first appears on THE PAPAS & THE MAMAS):
Get on your pony and ride
Get on your pony and ride
No one to catch up to you
If you try.
Get on your pony and ride
Get on your pony and ride
No one to catch up to you
If you try.
No one to catch up to you,
If you try -- 'cause I've tried.
'Cause when the mind that once was open shuts
And you knock on the door, nobody answers anymore
When the love and trust has turned to dust
When the mind that once was open shuts
When you knock on the door, nobody answers anymore
When the love and trust has turned to dust
In Hannah's bubble, her mind log ago shut.
Hey, remember when that fake news site said there were WMDs in Iraq?
14 yrs after media-amplified drumbeat for the Iraq War, same media now decries “fake news” & offers no analysis of its role in such fabulism
‘Fake news’ & ‘post-truth’ politics? What about those Iraqi WMDs? (Op-Ed by @NeilClark66)
Hannah and her ilk work overtime to pretend the Iraq War ended.
It never did.
Even the right wing Center for a New American Century can tell the truth (Michele Flournoy created it and it was Barack's go-to throughout his presidency). At WAR ON THE ROCKS, they offer:
The difficulties of applying the U.S. military’s phasing construct to the realities of conflict are rarely more evident than when examining the American experience in Iraq. Though U.S. involvement in Iraq has traditionally been divided into two distinct periods of conflict, the 1990–1991 Gulf War and the 2003–2011 Iraq War, the reality is that the U.S. military has been nearly continuously engaged in Iraq for the past 26 years. The United States has conducted special operations raids into, launched cruise missiles at, imposed no-fly zones over, and outright invaded Iraq. The United States also provided humanitarian aid, financially supported local actors, and even governed the country. The six-phase planning construct does a poor job of accurately representing the range of activities over a quarter-century of U.S. foreign policy and military strategy in Iraq.
Right now, in Canada, some of the people and some of the press are starting to sound off about the Canadian troops in Iraq and how this is, indeed, war.
THE TORONTO STAR, for example, can cover it, the CBC can cover it . . .
But here in the US, the pretense continues.
My name is Penny Evans and I've just gone twenty-one
A young widow in the war that's being fought in Vietnam
And I have two infant daughters, I thank God I have no sons
Now they say the war is over but I think it's just begun
-- Melanie's version of "The Ballad of Penny Evans" used as an intro to her composition "Peace Will Come (According to Plan)" -- "Peace Will Come (According to Plan)" first appears on her LEFTOVER WINE album.
So many truths can't be told in a world where Hannah Allem represents the press.
Don't ever expect her to Tweet or reTweet about the government backed abuses targeting the Iraqi people.
The Hannahs will always look the other way.
Always.
They ignored the call for reform and ending corruption that Shi'ite cleric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr made earlier this week.
Just as they ignore the assassination of another calling for the end of corruption.
اغتيال د.هوشيار اسماعيل خطيب مسجد فى #أربيل أمام منزله بعد خطبة الجمعة الماضية دعا فيها حكومة الاقليم للكف عن الفساد ولصرف الرواتب للموظفين
Wushyar Ismail gave sermons calling for an end to corruption and was in front of his home in Erbil Tuesday when he was assassinated. RUDAW adds, "He was shot multiple times by armed men in front of his house [. . .] Video footage published on social media shows large crowds of people attending his funeral in a mosque in Erbil." NRT notes:
“This invidious act is another dark spot
in the history records,” Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Deputy
Prime Minister, Qubad Talabani, said on Wednesday (November 23), calling
for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.
Kurdistan Parliament Speaker Yousif
Mohammed expressed concern over the murder of Ismail, saying it is an
extension of a “series of terror and terrorizing thoughts” against
Islamic preachers, journalists, writers, members of Peshmerga and
activists in the region’s capital of Erbil.
The first Secretary-General of the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Kosrat Rasul, said the act to kill
the preacher is a dark spot in the experience of the Kurdistan Region.
“Murdering preachers at this time when
there are attempts to make peace is invidious,” Rasul said. “The related
institutions must find the perpetrators soon and bring them to
justice.”
Meanwhile, the operation to liberate or 'liberate' Mosul continues -- day 37 of the slog.
How's it going?
An outright failure if the purpose was to help the people of Mosul.
That mother lost her home. Now she puts her children in a hold to protect them from the bombs and sleeps next to it to protect them from other things.
Bombs?
This morning, the US Defense Dept announced:
Strikes in Iraq
Attack, bomber, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 11 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq’s government:
-- Near Mosul, four strikes engaged three ISIL tactical units; destroyed six ISIL-held buildings, a mortar system, a vehicle, a weapons cache, a supply cache and an artillery system; and damaged five supply routes and a bridge.
-- Near Rawah, a strike engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed a vehicle, a mortar system and a weapons cache.
-- Near Tal Afar, a strike destroyed inoperable coalition equipment.
Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target.
Back to Hannah Allem -- what, you thought we were done?
Why Tulsi Gabbard can’t represent America at the United Nations. @joshrogin makes the case
Why's Hannah reTweeting that nonsense?
Because she's cheap, tacky and tawdry.
Her entire life in 2016 was about electing Hillary (even her child suffered).
She didn't get her way so now she's going to object to Iraq War veteran Tulsi.
Who is she linking to?
Let's let RIGHT WEB explain:
Diehl’s stint as the Post’s deputy editorial page editor has coincided with what many observers consider to be a decidedly hawkish and conservative turn in the page’s editorial stances.[4] Diehl’s own writings—he publishes a regular column for the Post on foreign affairs—typically lean to the militarist right, leading one observer to characterize him as “the knee-jerk hawk at the Washington Post.”[5] Among his common targets are leftist leaders in Latin America and the Middle East.[6]
The strategic disaster of the Iraq War did not change Diehl’s attitude toward U.S. intervention abroad. In a column marking the tenth anniversary of the war, Diehl lamented that U.S. policymakers had learned the “wrong lessons” from Iraq and had become unnecessarily timid about intervening in Syria. “In the absence of U.S. intervention,” he claimed, “Syria is looking like it could produce a much worse humanitarian disaster and a far more serious strategic reverse for the United States” than Iraq. “The tragedy of the post-Iraq logic embraced by President Obama is that it has ruled out not just George W. Bush-style invasions but also the more modest intervention used by the Clinton administration to prevent humanitarian catastrophes and protect U.S. interests in the 1990s.”[7]
Diehl also takes a hardline view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, placing the blame for the stalled peace process solely on the Palestinians—or President Obama—and never Israel.
Why would Hannah be reTweeting such a person?
Because (a) she doesn't care about Iraq and (b) she loathes Tulsi (who supported Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primaries and not War Hawk Hillary Clinton).
Robert Parry (CONSORTIUM NEWS) notes:
Two weeks after Donald Trump’s shocking upset of Hillary Clinton, the imperious and imperial neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist understudies may finally be losing their tight grip on U.S. foreign policy.
The latest sign was Trump’s invitation for a meeting with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, on Monday. The mainstream media commentary has almost completely missed the potential significance of this start-of-the-work-week meeting by suggesting that Trump is attracted to Gabbard’s tough words on “radical Islamic terrorism.”
Far more important is that Gabbard, a 35-year-old Iraq War veteran, endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries because of his opposition to neocon/liberal-hawk military adventures. She starred in one of the strongest political ads of the campaign, a message to Hawaiians, called “The Cost of War.”
“Bernie Sanders voted against the Iraq War,” Gabbard says. “He understands the cost of war, that that cost is continued when our veterans come home. Bernie Sanders will defend our country and take the trillions of dollars that are spent on these interventionist, regime change, unnecessary wars and invest it here at home.”
In the ad, Gabbard threw down the gauntlet to the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks, by accusing them of wasting trillions of dollars “on these interventionist, regime change, unnecessary wars.” Her comments mesh closely with Trump’s own perspective.
Hannah would rather lay with the neocons than stand with the people. Supposedly, Donald Trump will instead go with Nikki Haley. Hannah must be so proud of herself.
The following community sites -- plus Tavis Smiley, SOCIALIST WORKER and BLACK AGENDA REPORT -- updated:
What Ty said
11 hours ago
Hillary?
11 hours ago
Parker Posey
12 hours ago
Hillary has a new job
12 hours ago
THIS JUST IN! HER POST ELECTION CAREER!
12 hours ago
Actor Aaron Eckhart
12 hours ago
iraq