That's Isaiah's latest THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "House Reject, House Mess and House Dunce" and that made me smile.
Tara Reade? She just makes me shake my head in dismay.
Tara was assaulted by Joe Biden. I believe her story. I've defended her over and over and so has everyone in this community. As a victim of assault myself, let me be clear to Tara Reade: F**k you if you're going to be promoting pedophile Scott Ritter.
She reTweeted an interview with Scott Ritter.
Grasp this, Tara, you're a f**king bitch. You want people to stand with you and you're promoting a man repeatedly arrested for trying to have sex with underage girls? A man convicted of it, sent to prison for it and who is now a register sex offender?
Is if three times or four times he was busted for trying to have sex with underage girls? They finally took him to court and he was convicted. He served time in prison and is a registered sex offender.
And Tara Reade wants to promote him?
Tara, I'll still believe you. But I no longer give a s**t about you. You're pormoting a pedophile. You're giving him your stamp of approval.
You better pray he doesn't try to assault again. It's on your head.
Your stupid, idiotic head.
You don't deserve sympathy because you don't care enough about others. Whine and cry about how you were assaulted but then go out of your way to promote a registered sex offender.
You're a damn hypocrite.
And we're all seeing it.
I agree with C.I.:
Here's a thought, Tara, it's really hard to continue to support you when you put convicted pedophile Scott Ritter on your thread. I thought you cared about victims, I thought you were a survivor. But Pig Ritter belongs on your thread?
— Common Ills (@CommonIlls) October 15, 2022
Tara Reade is a huge and disgusting disappointment.
Closing with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for today:
When the first wave of rumors that Talabani had either died or was permanently incapacitated, took hold in May of 2013, Jalal was posed for a series of photos that appear to indicate his body was present but that was all.
The photos were compared to the film Weekend At Bernie's in Arabic social media. (In the 1989 film, Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman play two men who drag the corpse of their boss, Bernie, around and pretend he's alive.)
When Jalal left Iraq the Talabani family was down playing his condition. They were falling back on the 'knee surgery' nonsense.
In May of 2012, Jalal stabbed many Iraqi political leaders in the back and outraged many in the KRG by refusing to allow the no-confidence motion to be passed on. As a result of the outrage directed at him, Jalal retreated to Germany where he remained for months. He needed to have, his flunkies and family insisted, immediate surgery to take care of a life threatening condition. This lie was repeated for weeks and weeks. Jalal had knee surgery.
In his first statement, Mr Al Sudani thanked those who supported him and promised to submit his cabinet “as soon as possible”.
He also promised to form a “strong government" that was able to "build the country, to serve the citizens, to preserve security and stability and build balanced international relations”.
Mr Al Sudani started his political career as a member of the Shiite Dawa Party and then ran for election with the State of Law Coalition led by former prime minister Nouri Al Maliki. He has won three terms in parliament since 2014.
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 death.
And closer to my own work as a writer and editor, journalists and their sources are being targeted by governments, especially our own, for revealing inconvenient, embarrassing and criminal acts by those very same institutions. This censorious enterprise is entirely bipartisan. Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers than Bush or Trump. At this very moment, Julian Assange is confined in a bleak cell in Belmarsh Prison (now stricken with Covid) awaiting extradition to the US on charges that could lock him away in a super-max for the rest of his life. His crime? Disclosing documents leaked to him by Chelsea Manning and others revealing atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq.
If the Biden Justice succeeds in prosecuting and convicting Assange, all kinds of prosecutorial authorities will be emboldened to come after any of the rest of us who excavate and publish stories about official corruption and villainy or film cops films as they beat the crap black kids. As writers and readers, we must resist these moves to criminalize journalism and to enforce a suffocating stupidity upon the population.
The inconvenient truths about our own nation’s past–including the very recent past–are the truths it is the most urgent to hear, to learn from and work to rectify.
Thanks to the Before Columbus Foundation and the San Francisco Public Library for being at the forefront of this struggle and for honoring our work at CounterPunch.
Dear brothers and sisters,
In less than one week, you will begin receiving ballots in the mail for the UAW elections. I have included information on how to vote and how to obtain a ballot if you don’t get one on my website. I urge all of you to vote, and to vote for me, Will Lehman, for UAW president. I am campaigning to build rank-and-file power on the shop floor in opposition to the entire UAW apparatus.
I am writing to you today, however, on another matter that is critical to the interests of all workers, in the US and throughout the world. That is the case of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Assange is currently imprisoned in the United Kingdom and faces extradition to the US, where he would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He could receive a 175-year sentence or even be executed.
Assange is being persecuted for one reason and one reason alone: He revealed the truth about the actions of the American government abroad, the same government that represents the corporations that exploit us here in the United States.
One of the most significant initial exposures by WikiLeaks was a video, released in 2010, depicting the US Army killing unarmed civilians and journalists in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The footage was filmed three years earlier, in 2007, in the early years of the US occupation of Iraq. I urge all of you to watch this video, which is titled “Collateral Murder.”
The video was followed by the release of the Iraq and Afghan war logs in 2010 and the Guantanamo files in 2011. These documents, which were made available to the public thanks to the heroic actions of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, exposed a lie that is central to the propaganda of the US government, Democrat and Republican alike: that the wars abroad are about defending democracy.
For this reason, Assange has been subjected to more than a decade of vicious and uninterrupted persecution. He is currently in London’s Belmarsh maximum-security prison, where he recently contracted COVID-19. The UK High Court ruled late last year that he could be extradited to the US, even though the trial itself revealed that the CIA had plotted to kidnap and murder him.
Beyond his personal fate, there are two critical issues for workers in the defense of Assange.
First, the persecution of Assange is an attack on basic democratic rights, including the First Amendment right to free speech and a free press. Assange is guilty of telling us the truth, of exposing lies that the government does not want exposed.
The corporations and the wealthy in this country depend on a bought-and-paid-for media, which parrots whatever the government tells them. We experience this every day, when workers are denounced in the media for our efforts to secure a decent wage and a future for ourselves and our families. If an individual can be jailed and prosecuted for revealing true information, it sets a dangerous precedent that will be used against any worker who speaks out and opposes the demands of the corporations, aided and abetted by the union apparatus.
Second, Assange has helped to expose the reality of American militarism. How much money has been spent and how many lives lost, including of US soldiers, to wage endless war abroad? And for what? They throw around words like “democracy” and “freedom” to convince workers that these wars are worth the cost, but the reality is that they are about securing the domination of American corporations over the entire globe. More than 1 million Iraqis and Afghans have died to achieve this end.
The consequences of these wars are felt by all of us. More than $1 trillion is expended on the US military every year, while they claim that no money is available to provide decent living conditions for workers. One veteran kills him or herself every 80 minutes in the US, the consequence of post-traumatic stress disorder from what they saw and experienced at war. As soon as their bodies are no longer useful to the ruling class, veterans are essentially discarded by the government.
Now, the Biden administration is escalating a conflict with Russia that Biden himself said last week could lead to “Armageddon”—that is, the annihilation of the entire planet in nuclear war. And what is this all about? The government of Vladimir Putin represents the oligarchs in Russia, and the invasion of Ukraine must be opposed by all workers. However, this invasion was a response to the expansion of the US-led NATO military alliance up to Russia’s borders and the massive armament of Ukraine by the US.
Everything that the media tells us about this war is a lie. It is not a war about “democracy.” Ukraine’s government is comprised of neo-Nazis who praise people who helped carry out the Holocaust during World War Two. The oligarchs who run Ukraine recently passed a labor law eliminating the right of millions of workers to collectively bargain. You won’t hear that on the nightly news.
The same military-industrial complex that provoked the war in Iraq is escalating war against Russia today, but on an even larger and more dangerous scale. The US banks and corporations are fighting to control Eastern Europe at the expense of their Russian rivals. The US ruling elite is prepared to make the working class suffer greatly, and even sacrifice millions of lives, to expand the domination of American corporations.
Workers in the US and throughout the world have no interest in the war. We have the same interests as workers in Russia, Ukraine and in every country. We are exploited by the same corporations. We confront the same problems. We will suffer the same consequences if the catastrophe of nuclear war is not prevented.
Workers should know that the labor movement has a long and proud tradition of defending democratic rights, as these rights are critical for all workers. It should also be recalled that the UAW withdrew from the AFL-CIO in 1968 in opposition to the Vietnam War. The fact that the trade unions no longer even raise these critical issues is part of the same process that has led to their domination by a privileged apparatus that serves the interests of the companies.
For these reasons, it is critical that all workers take a stand in defense of Julian Assange. It will not be through appeals to the ruling elite and their politicians that his freedom will be secured, but only through our intervention. We must connect the fight to defend our interests with the defense of Assange, the defense of democratic rights, and opposition to war.
Sincerely,
Will Lehman