Friday, July 28, 2017

Stevie and Christine



That's a great song, "Julia," by Stevie Nicks.

I was unfamiliar with that until Ronnie e-mailed me a link to it.

It's a great song.

He also asked me what my favorite Christine McVie song is?

(Christine and Stevie are both in the group Fleetwood Mac.)

That's hard.

I love her two ballads on MIRAGE.  And I love "Think About Me," "Sugar Daddy," "Warm Ways," "You Make Loving Fun," "Don't Stop," etc.

But if I had to choose just one song by McVie?

It would have to be "Honey Hi" from Tusk.




Stevie and Christine are two ladies who changed the rock world and left real impressions.

Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"


Friday, July 28, 2017.


Let's start with things that are beyond stupidity.


This vote is this decade's Iraq war vote. Except no Senator will be able to say they weren't warned by the experts.





Andy Slavitt's one of those ugly whores who wormed his way into government (via Barack) from Goldman Sachs.

He's also got a face that looks like someone ran over it with an 18-wheeler.

Which could explain the possible brain damage.

ObamaCare does not help America.

Nor will TrumpCare.

The only answer is Medicare for all -- an answer a Goldman Sachs whore will never support.

Andy's not the first ugly piece of trash to lie.

But he had to lie about Iraq.

Why?

Because he's not just a whore, he's also a War Hawk.

His comments are not just ridiculous, they're xenophobic.

The Iraq War has resulted in the immediate deaths of over a million civilians.

It has left hundreds of thousands living in a war zone with severe injuries.

Do not compare this to the US healthcare system.

The weapons used by the US and others have destroyed areas like Falluja and will result in birth defects for decades to come.

Iraq did not attack the United States.

Add to that, no one can say they weren't warned ahead of voting for the Iraq War.

They chose not to pay attention -- like Blood Thirsty Hillary Clinton -- but they were warned.

They wanted war because they're whores just like Andy.

The US government has destroyed Iraq.

Don't you dare show up at this late date pretending to suddenly care so you can do a Tweet you filthy piece of trash.  But it's what he wants to do, it's what the laughable Obama whore Daniel Benaim wants to do.

Next up, watch Daniel compare his issues with the McDonald's menu to the plight of the Palestinians!
Seriously, people need to realize how stupid they sound when they liken this to an ongoing, 14-year war that has decimated a country, turned it into a country of orphans and so much more.


Let's stay with stupidity:

Openly gay Iraq War veteran on transgender military ban: “I thought we were done with this”


Gay men and lesbians are not transgendered.


CNN can't find a transgendered person to speak with?

That's insulting.

It's like bringing on an Anglo White person to discuss what it's like to be African-American.

Rob Smith is not qualified to speak and needs to sit his tired ass down.

It's like when the Native Americans told Jane Fonda they could speak for themselves and didn't need a savior to speak for them.

Rob Smith needs to sit his tired ass down and CNN needs to grasp that if you are covering transgender issues, you bring on guests who are transgender.

He is not an expert on being transgender.

Shame on CNN for refusing to invite a transgendered guest to the table and shame on Rob Smith who thinks he can speak on any topic.

There are many who could speak including Chelsea Manning.



  1. so, biggest baddest most $$ military on earth cries about a few trans people 😩 but funds the F-35? 😑 sounds like cowardice 😎💕🌈
  2. wrote about trans ban (and war against trans) in 😌 big setback 😬 but we will move forward 😎🌈💕



Shame on anyone taking a seat at the table on this issue from a transgendered person.  It's a bit like the way Gloria Steinem derailed feminism by refusing to step aside (she had no qualms about knocking Betty Friedan out of the way, did she?).

Even in the so-called age of diversity, seats at the table are hard to come by.  If you're taking up someone else's seat, you need to step back.

And shame on CNN for the garbage they offer including "Ten years on: How Iraq's soccer stars brought warring nation together."

Was someone at CNN inhaling fumes from their dirty jock strap?

How else to explain such garbage?

They can't cover the War Crimes but they're propaganda central, aren't they?

Bill Van Auken (WSWS) reports:


Two weeks after the Iraqi government hailed the “liberation” of Mosul, the scale and criminality of the mass slaughter carried out during the US-backed siege continues to emerge.
Iraqi soldiers and officers speaking to a reporter from Middle East Eye (MEE) have revealed that during the assault on the densely populated Old City of western Mosul, the order was given to massacre everyone remaining, men, women and children.
“We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier told MEE. “Daesh [ISIS] men, women and children. We killed everyone.”
An Iraqi major told the web site, “After liberation was announced, the order was given to kill anything or anyone that moved.” He added that most of the remaining fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni Islamist militia that took control of the city in June 2017, had surrendered to the army. “They gave themselves up, and we just killed them,” he said.
The report, one of the few from Mosul, from which US-backed Iraqi security forces have barred the media, paints a horrific portrait of what was once Iraq’s second-largest city:


To be clear, many US reporters were covering -- or miscovering -- Mosul.  Including THE NEW YORK TIMES' new Judith Miller -- who, no surprise, Rachel Maddow's reTweeting.


RUDAW reminds:

Because of alleged killings committed by the 16th division of the Iraqi army in Mosul, the United States should stop assisting Baghdad militarily, argues a human rights monitor.

“The US government should make sure it is no longer providing assistance to the Iraqi unit responsible for this spate of executions but also suspend any plans for future assistance until these atrocities have been properly investigated,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The group released a report on Thursday claiming two international observers witnessed “the summary killings of four people by the Iraqi army’s 16th Division in mid-July 2017.”

HRW argues that US government should suspend all assistance and support to the 16th Division pending Iraq’s full investigation of the allegations and appropriate prosecutions.

Its basis is that the Leahy Law prohibits the US from providing military assistance to foreign military units that violate human rights with impunity.



Let's turn to numbers.  Qassim Abdul-Zahra (AP) reports that the Iraqi government estimates there are 7,000 members of ISIS still in Iraq.  Another number, via Patrick Cockburn's reporting last week, was 40,000 civilians killed in the 'liberation' of Mosul.  One number getting less attention -- in fact, no attention outside Arabic and Russian media -- is 20,000.

That's the number of Iraqi forces killed in the 'liberation' of Mosul per Nouri al-Maliki.

Ahead of his trip to Russia and after reaching Russia, Nouri gave numerous interviews stressing that 20,000 Iraqi forces had been killed.

Considering that the Iraqi government had clamped down on the number and that UNAMI storpped recording the number of dead Iraqi forces at the Iraqi government's request, Nouri's 20,000 should have been big news.


The following community sites -- plus PACIFICA EVENING NEWS and DISSIDENT VOICE -- updated:













  • iraq iraq iraq iraq iraq Iraq


    Wednesday, July 26, 2017

    Bruce Springsteen ain't the boss of anything

    I hope you've read Ava and C.I.'s "TV: The meanings of OZARK" which I'm about to pull from:



    As Dan Alexander (FORBES) noted earlier this year Barack went from $85,000 a year in 2005 to leaving the White House worth $20 million.  Of course, he'll also get at least $200,000 in pension each year as a former US president.

    Between that and all the corporate donors to his foundation as well as those big paying speeches he's giving to Wall Street, his boat has certainly been lifted.

    But it wasn't a boat, it was a yacht -- David Geffen's yacht -- that Barack took a pleasure cruise on after exiting the White House.  


    Strange.



    In 1984, Bruce Springsteen may have  sang, "Foreman says those jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back"

    But in 2017, he was off on David Geffen's yacht partying with former President Barack Obama who oversaw the working class and the middle class losing wealth to the already enriched..

    In other words, the big bellied, hair plugged Bruce could drop the blame on a foreman but couldn't challenge a president.
    No, Brucie was back to being Twinkie boy (as NOW once mocked him).




    Amen to that.

    F**k Bruce Springsteen.

    He can't sell albums anymore.

    He can't even go gold -- not for the last years.

    But he can sell out.

    And he did.

    F**k him and his so-called 'working man' politics.

    He doesn't believe in it or he wouldn't be yachting with Barack.

    This all reminds me of how when he and Julia (his first wife) broke up and how the media was running with stage photos of him and Clarence Clemmons on stage and he and Clarence would always kiss.

    And his manager Jon got all worried that rumors Bruce was gay would take hold.

    So they set him up to be photographed with Patti.

    Remember those staged photos?

    Bruce wearing blue briefs.

    Holding onto Patti?

    Bruce is just so fake and so terrified.  He's not the boss of anything.

    Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"


    Wednesday, July 26, 2017.

    On his trip to Russia, Nouri al-Maliki has now met with the country's president Vladimir Putin.





    1. Meeting with Vice President of Nouri al-Maliki
       


    : Meeting with Vice President of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki
     



    Former prime minister of Iraq and forever thug Nouri al-Maliki is now one of Iraq's three vice presidents.  He sometimes elevates himself to 'senior' vice president but he's not and there is no such position or ranking.


    Dwayne Harmon (NEWBURG GAZETTE) reports, "During a meeting with Iraq's vice president near Saint Petersburg Tuesday, Putin said the situation in the Middle East is complicated, but the two countries must work together."  SPUTNIK notes the two "discussed the issue of supplying Russian T-90 tanks delivery to Iraq, Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation (FSMTC) Director Dmitry Shugaev said."  XINHUA adds:

    Russia's participation in Middle Eastern issues has prevented the region from falling apart, specifically in Syria and Iraq, said visiting Iraqi Vice President Nouri al-Maliki here on Tuesday.
    Maliki made the remarks ahead of an official meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a Kremlin transcript.

    "If it were not for Russia's contribution, the map of the region would have changed for the worse for us," Maliki told Putin.


    Ahead of the trip, Nouri was making these sort of statements.  He's continued to make them.


    Despite?


    Let's drop back to Sunday:


    Today on NPR's MORNING EDITION, the topic came up.  Excerpt.


    LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Andrew Exum is a veteran of the Iraq War. He was also the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy in the Obama administration. I asked him about the role of the U.S. military in Iraq right now. [. . .] So the idea is to train Iraqi troops, support Iraqi troops and let them do the fight. But how many people does the United States have on the ground there, and what are they doing?

    EXUM: So the United States has about 6,000 forces on the ground in Iraq. Most of them are serving as advisers. Some of them are serving as trainers. Some of them are helping the Iraqis with things in which the Iraqi military has traditionally struggled, such as logistics. The United States obviously is also engaging in direct combat in the skies. And there's also a very small special operations component that exists in order to do the kind of direct action special operations raids. If, for example, you get an opportunity to go after senior leadership of the Islamic State, but those strikes are very, very rare. The vast, vast majority of the fighting and the dying, it has to be said, has been done by the Iraqi forces. And they, and specifically the Iraqi special operations forces, have really borne the brunt of the human cost of this conflict.



    As this exchange took place, KURDISTAN 24 reminded, "About 2,100 US soldiers will deploy to Iraq later this year to take over the mission to train and advise Iraqi security forces fighting Islamic State (IS) militants following the fall of Mosul, the US announced last week."




    Meanwhile PRESS TV notes:

    Washington now seeks to establish military bases on Iraqi territory in a bid to maintain influence in the region, he said.
    “ISIL resembles the Taliban which was created by the US administration to counter the USSR in Afghanistan. The same way, ISIL was created to counter the Iraqi stance, which did not agree to blockade Syria, was against no-fly zones in Syria and against American military bases,” said the Iraqi vice-president in an interview with Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency.
    “The Iraqi society is against foreign military bases on the country’s territory,” al-Maliki noted, adding that he has already warned the Americans against “coming back to Iraq and setting up bases here.”



    Per the law, the US shouldn't be in Iraq now or providing financial or weapon aid.  The Iraqi forces are attacking the Iraq people.  Treaties, laws and the Leahy Amendment are clear that when this happens, the US has to step away.

    Nancy A. Youssef and Mike Giglio (BUZZFEED NEWS) report:


    In the two weeks since Iraqi forces declared victory over ISIS in Mosul, local and international media have told a grim counterstory to the scenes of celebration — a rash of extrajudicial killings of suspected ISIS members at the hands of Iraqi security forces.
    The killings are no secret. Videos of Iraqi soldiers executing ISIS suspects have been posted to social media. Human Rights Watch and other watchdogs have issued reports. Iraqi military officers have openly discussed their participation in torture and revenge killings with reporters.
    Yet US troops embedded with the Iraqi military have reported seeing little of this, a US military official told BuzzFeed News — fewer than five instances. The lack of US reports raises an uncomfortable question: Have US forces simply been absent when the most horrific abuses have taken place or are they ignoring them?
    “My presumption would be that they don’t want to know that all the forces they are supporting have to go on the blacklist,” Belkis Wille, senior Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch, told BuzzFeed News. “The vast number of abuses we are seeing in Mosul are by Iraqi government forces.”







    New content at THIRD:





    The following community sites -- plus Cindy Sheehan and BLACK AGENDA REPORT -- updated:











  • iraq iraq iraq iraq iraq Iraq