I like Jewel. I just saw that and thought I'd note it because I don't think I've noted Jewel before. By the way, she has a new album coming out next Friday. My favorite Jewel song is "Hands." I will be listening to the new album, FREEWHEELIN" WOMAN. The first single, which she sings with Train, is "Dancing Slow."
That's the official video and here's the official audio.
After "Hands," my favorite Jewel song is either "Who Will Save Your Soul?" or "Foolish Games" or "My Father's Daughter"(a song she did with Dolly Parton).
Now a favorite moment from AMERICAN DAD.
I love that, Roger's frozen face as Hayley reveals she's deleted one of his episodes of BONES and Steve insists the quality of BONES has fallen.
We had a very long roundtable for the gina & krista round-robin Thursday night. Those who wrote after were doing theme posts on animated TV shows (plus Marcia doing THE BIONIC WOMAN which is one of my favorite 70s shows of all time):
Friday, April 8, 2022. We're staying brief to make one key point: NYT owes NYP an apology.
Do we ever learns? Or maybe the better question is: Do they ever learn>
As
2001 drew to a close, the US press began destroying their own
reputations. It was one act of professional suicide after another.
October 2001, for those who don't know, is when THE NEW YORK TIMES ran
their first cover story linking -- falsely linking -- the 9/11 terrorist
attacks on the US to the government of Iraq.
There was no link.
Saddam
Hussein ruled Iraq at the time. He did not allow al Qaeda to operate
in Iraq. Had they operated there freely, they would have overthrown him
because he was over a secular government and because they were
sympathetic to those who were not in power in Saddam's Iraq.
But
NYT, THE WASHINGTON POST, the broadcast networks, the cable networks,
etc, etc repeated one lie after another to start that illegal war.
It's
probably hard if you weren't there when it happened and if you weren't
of an age to have grasped it as it happened -- hard to now understand
what took place. Back then, the media could talk of nothing but Iraq.
That's the same US media that ignores Iraq today that barely noted that
the war hit the 19 year mark last month, that acts as though US troops
are no longer in Iraq and that the US created (imposed) some wonderful
government there.
They lied. They lied over and over.
Liars got rewarded.
Kevin Drum is at MOTHER JONES. No consequences. It's not just big media that rewarded liars, little media has done the same.
But they lied.
Oprah
didn't suffer. She brought Judith Miller onto her daily program to lie
and when an audience member challenged the lies Judith was spewing,
Oprah attacked the audience member.
No one ever took accountability.
And
the media suffered. In the aftermath, they wanted to pretend as though
there was no reason for so many to distrust them and even now they act
that way. Especially now. They don't mention Iraq and they hope
everyone else has forgotten.
But that was a sea change for perception of the media.
It
appears it was also a behavior shift because the media had not only
done nothing to restore trust in their own profession, they have
continued to present lies as fact and ignore reality while silencing any
questioning.
The rolly polly and disgusting
Brian Stelter of CNN was speaking this week about disinformation. No,
he wasn't finally taking responsibility for his multitude of
journalistic sins. The idiot really thought he had a soap box to stand
upon and lecture others from. A conservative student commented with a
list of the most recent appalling journalistic sins -- or some of them,
there are far too many for one person to ever list unless they're
delivering a 24 hour filibuster -- and Brian avoided the question and
wanted to instead wanted to talk about Ukraine and how others worked
with FOX NEWS there regarding a journalist and -- I'm sorry, we aren't
that stupid.
And we're not whining, "Why can't you all work together!"
In
fact, the problem has often been that you do work together -- right and
left -- such as when you sold the illegal war on Iraq.
Working together is frequently the only work you ever do.
You're certainly not working for the public good.
You 'work' to advances causes and candidates.
You're not telling the truth. You're actively suppressing the truth.
Anne
Applebaum, after disgracing herself as THE WASHINGTON POST for years
(Bob Somerby long ago dubbed her Annie Apples_ wanted to tell people
this week that there was no reason to cover Hunter Biden's laptop and
the proof of corruption it contained.
It appears that some media have a new narrative after admitting that the Hunter Biden laptop is legitimate after all.
According to Atlantic Magazine writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne
Applebaum, the story never did matter because it was just not
interesting and “totally irrelevant” to her. Strangely, however, it once
did. Applebaum pushed the false narrative as she was slamming others
for publishing “Russian disinformation” and using the Hunter Biden story
as an example. It only became uninteresting when it turned out to be
true. The one convincing assertion, however, is that it was simply not
viewed as “relevant.” What was clearly relevant for Twitter and most
media outlets was the election of Joe Biden. Otherwise, as captured by Gaston de La Touche, it is a matter of sheer boredom.
Applebaum was at my alma mater, The University of Chicago, for the Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference on
Wednesday. The conference appeared largely an echo-chamber, a
disappointing lineup for UChicago which is known to value a diversity of
opinion. Applebaum slammed Fox and its viewers: “Those who live outside
the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need
to learn any of this stuff.” (For the record, I work as a legal analyst
at Fox).
What an idiot and what a
liar. She's at THE ATLANTIC now so she can probably lie more freely.
But the country's not better off because of it.
Hunter
Biden's laptop was a news story THE NEW YORK POST can claim credit for
having broken in October 2020. I keep waiting for their triumphant
column. If i'ts run, I haven't heard of it. To be honest I don't have
time to comb through the web for it and depend on friends to keep me up
to date.
So when one called last night and
was reading from THE POST online, I was really sad. I thought it was
Miranda Devine and I thought she was a better writer than what was being
read. She is. It was by John Stossel. I loathe John and always
have. He can argue he's been mis-portrayed by the media and that may be
the case. I loathe him because he's an off-putting ass and that's from
his on air personality when he used to be on 20/20.
Is he as big of an idiot as I've always thought?
Yes, he is.
I
was going to destroy Mrianda for the column I thought she wrote. But
it was John. Writing at THE NEW YORK POST, he wanted you to know how
bad it was with the attacks on THE POST.
I'm tired of stupidity.
Ava and I covered the most important point regarding THE NY POST and the laptop and the media's response.
Do not offer that the report was dismissed.
That's not good enough.
If you're on some basic cable show, that might pass for informed.
You're not informed.
And only John could be so stupid to write for THE POST and to leave the most important detail out.
Yes,
as we all know, the report was censored -- TWITTER and FACEBOOK. And
as we all know, opinion columns insisted it wasn't true.
That's not the worst thing.
The
worst thing? THE NEW YORK TIMES did a 'report' that they called an
investigation and the 'report' centered on how supposedly people working
at THE NEW YORK POST were furious with their paper over that story and
did not feel it was accurate or truthful or even journalism.
NYT relied on no named source and most people in the kow say that NYT did a work of fiction (I believe that they did).
So grasp that NYT did not investigate the laptop but they did make time to 'report' on a rival paper, to attack the rival paper.
That's out of bounds. I twas out of bounds when it happened.
But that was part of the attack strategy to dismiss the story.
THE
NEW YORK TIMES owes THE NEW YORK POST an apology because when they ran
that article -- unsourced -- attacking the paper's integrity, they made
it personal.
I'm glad that C.I. covers the NETFLIX comedy special in this morning's snapshot. I really liked Ronnie Chieng's previous special and thought it was funny. He was trying to make it to his wedding and hadn't listened to his fiancee about this and that and it was all coming to a head. It was funny and relatable. This go round, he's just screaming at people for having questions. I'm assuming it's about COVID but he's not even being clear there. It really was annoying. I may have made it two minutes inot the special more than C.I. did because I think I endured ten minutes before I turned it off.
It was repellant. That truly is the only term for it. He came off like a cranky elderly man screaming for kids to get off his lawn and you want to go over and say, "Sir, there's no one on your lawn. Do we need to get you a doctor?"
And maybe that's exactly what we need to do. And should.
Or maybe he needs to try to do actual comedy next time and not just lines he think will get applause from the superior-than-thou set.
I will allow that after John Mulaney, he may be hesitant to mine his own life. John built his brand around:
I'm a good guy. I love my wife. We're happy together and we're not sure we'll ever want kids. She's the best thing that ever happened to me.
And the reality is that he was cheating on her the whole time. Then he got some actress pregnant (one of the Olivias, I can't tell them apart) and now what are we to make of John? Who is he? He's not the standup we knew and looked forward to hearing stories about Petunia from. (Petunia was the dog he and his wife raised.)
So maybe Ronnie doesn't want to get stuck with an imploding brand? I don't know. But the new special, SPEAKEASY, is not funny.
For two years the left has championed
policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine
mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns,
and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology
corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals – call them
the Lockdown Left – cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed
primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private
schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.
Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members
have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars,
grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did
so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate.
Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described
anarcho-syndicalist who called
for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested
that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit. [1]
In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded
the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: “one obvious
course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass
transport.” [2] Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: “Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.” [3]
But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of
safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments – a combination that
suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own.
Other left intellectuals, like Benjamin Bratton, author of a Verso book on the pandemic called Return of the Real,
are notable for hiding amidst academic blather: “the book’s argument is
on behalf [of] a ‘positive biopolitics’ that may form the basis of
viable social self-organization, but this is less a statement on behalf
of ‘the political’ in some metaphysical sense than on behalf of a
governmentality through which an inevitably planetary society can
deliberately compose itself.” [4] This is, as the late Alex Cockburn
once said, “what dumb people think smart people sound like.”
Even the American Civil Liberties
Union – long a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties
absolutism – has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship.
David Cole, the group’s legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with
a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the
last 100 years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and
overreach. [5]
The pandemic brought out a lot of ugly in some people.
What
we really needed was Michael Ratner to povide the voice of warning that
he so foten did when rights and liberties were under attack, when the
people were under attack. Naomi Wolf, who saw eye to eye with Michael
on many civil liberty manners, tried to raise issues and was attacked
and deplatformed for it.
There were serious
conversations that should have taken place and because she dared to
rasiet hem, she was attacked, her words distorted and the corporate
press ridiculed her. I'm sure they would have tried something siilar
with Michael but I would've hoped that he had enough frineds who were
willing to step up and refuse to allow him to be disappeared from the
conversation.
Whole rights were removed and
people were attacked. All the while, I don't remember the people
working to malign Naomi also taking the time to note the real crooks --
the ones making money off the pandemic.
In the second year of the pandemic, the chief executives of the top
US corporations are on track to set new compensation records while the
wages of their workers were reduced. This is the conclusion drawn by
several analyses of pay data submitted by a group of S&P 500
corporations to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part
of their annual filing requirements.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal
reported that median pay for CEOs rose to $14.2 million last year, up
from a record $13.4 million in 2020. The report said that half of the
companies reported median wages for their workers increased in 2021 by
3.1 percent. However, this is less than half of last year’s inflation
rate of 6.7 percent, and it means that these workers took an effective
paycut.
The Journal report noted, “Most CEOs received a
pay increase of 11 percent or more, and pay rose by at least 25 percent
for nearly one-third of them.” It also reported that for one-third of
the companies, median employee pay declined last year.
These figures are based on a review by the Journal
of “pay data for more than half the index from MyLogIQ LLC.” MyLogIQ is
a provider of SEC compliance services and has access to the government
agency public filings database.
But Naomi Wolf, not these greedy opportunists, was the one villified?
I
watched a NETFLIX special the other day -- or I tried to watch it.
Ronny Chieng was funny in his previous special. So, with SPEAKEASY, I
tried to endure it and hoped he'd turn it around. After eight minutes, I
couldn't stomach anymore.
How brave he must
feel to ridicule people. Not the powerful, of course. Cowards like him
never ridicule the powerful. Instead he goes after We The People. A
man with no science background wants to ridicule others for asking
questions regarding science. A man raised under a totalitarian system
has obviously instilled those lessons and feels no need to fight for
democracy or free speech. He instead tries to shame We The People and
tells people to shut up and go along with what they are told. How dare
they ask questions, why, they are like the person who skips calass all
semester and then shows up for the last day of the semester and is
failing the final and screaming that it doesn't make sense and is just
too stupid for words.
Do you ever have that dream, where you wake up and it's a final and somehow you managed to miss the entire semster of a class?
It's a nightmare I have repeatedly and that's, in part, because it did actually happen to me.
Because
I wouldn't go along with what others had planned for me, I had to pay
my own college costs (not the end of the world, many have to do the
same). As a result, I always worked at least two jobs each semester in
addition to classes. The last or the second to the last semester, I had
16 hours of classes and was working three jobs. I went to the first
two weeks of a class and that was it. It was the second to the last
semester. It was December when the final rolled around.
Sorry, Ronny, but I aced thefinal. I didn't scream or whine.
I guess that's how it happens in your world. Not in mine.
and
in mine world, we don't attack people for daring to demand answers and
acountability from tehir government. As you mock the so-called
stupidity of others, I hope you grasp in a few years, just how stupid
and pathetic and craven you sounded.
I don't
care who is in the White House, people should always demand
accountability, they should always question their government. That's
what a democracy is about.
Children say
inappropriate things. Especially when they're trying to be funny.
That's why I don't supoprt anyone using the n-word. A seven-year-old
watching Dave Chappelle (a great comedian and a friend) thinking he's
cool and wanting to be like him just knows the laughs came when he said
this or that. They copy it with no understanding of, for example, the
historial harm of that term, the n-word. They don't get it, they don't
have the history to understand it. They ust know that DAve's cool, Dave
said it and it' got laughs. Huge laughs. So they mimic.
I
bring that up because the post-Jon Stewart version of THE DAILY SHOW is
pure and utter garbage. And Ronny has worked there. His squeals were
apparently funny there. He'd squel about some Republcian and they'd
love it. And, like a child, he didn't really understand what was
getting the laughs. So now he makes a fool of himself in his NETFLIX
special that is so undemocratic, it's practically a parody. It's the
sort of thing you'd see some boot licker perform in the movie V FOR
VENDDETTA with Natalie Portman. And because Ronny's high pitched
squeals struck comic gold in the past, he assumes he knows how to make
people laugh. He might be making some people laugh, but I worry about
their state of mind.
In recent days, a longstanding investigation by the Department of
Justice (DoJ) into the taxes and financial affairs of Hunter Biden, the
son of President Joe Biden, has become the subject of prominent news
reports in the mainstream press. The reports, nearly all citing
anonymous sources within the DoJ, confirm that the investigation, which
began during the Trump administration but was not disclosed by Hunter
Biden until December 2020, has broadened in scope.
As of this writing, no official charges have been made against Hunter Biden or any other member of the Biden family.
Prominent articles on the federal investigation into the younger
Biden’s international business dealings began to appear in mid-March. On
March 16, the New York Times reported that the president’s son
recently paid off an outstanding tax liability of over $1 million.
Nevertheless, “a grand jury continued to gather evidence in a
wide-ranging examination of his international business dealings,
according to people familiar with the case,” the newspaper wrote.
Subsequent
reports, citing sources within the DoJ, confirmed that witnesses with
close ties to Hunter Biden, including former business and romantic
partners, are being interviewed by a federal grand jury located in
Wilmington, Delaware. Among them is former business associate and fellow
Yale University alumnus Devon Archer.
Archer was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment in February for his
participation in a fraud scheme, following his conviction in 2018. The
operation involved defrauding the Oglala Sioux tribe of roughly $60
million in bonds.
While Hunter Biden was not involved in Archer’s
fraud case, the former friends and business partners both sat on the
board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which, the DoJ
has confirmed, is under investigation.
Hunter Biden was appointed
to the Burisma board, despite having no experience in the field, during
the period when his father, then vice president, served as the point-man
for the Obama administration’s imperialist operations in Ukraine
following the US-backed Maidan coup of February 2014.
Burisma
paid Hunter Biden roughly $50,000 a month between 2014 and 2019. The
money was wired to a Delaware-based corporation called Rosemont Seneca
Bohai LLC, which was owned by Archer and registered by him on February
13, 2014. The company, according to a September 2020 report by Senate
Republicans, acted as “a shell entity” to receive an estimated $3.5
million in payments from Burisma to Archer and Hunter Biden. In the same
report, the Republicans detailed Hunter Biden’s business dealings in
China.
People need tod emand answers.
It
appears the Biden family, while pretending to be in public service, was
trading on Joe's name and his public service for years. It ceratinly
explains how a man who served on the public dime for his entire career
ended up out of ofice with millions and millions of dollars. It's
graft. It's corruption. And , in a democracy, politicians have to
answer for that.
Ronny wants everyone to shut up and just go along. This as the US government is pimping another war. Andre Damon (WSWS) reports:
In yet another major effort to escalate NATO’s proxy war against
Russia, the Biden administration is seizing upon claims by Ukrainian
officials of a massacre by Russian forces in the Kiev suburb of Bucha to
implement a new round of sanctions and undermine any effort at a
peaceful settlement of the war.
“I got criticized for calling
Putin a war criminal,” US President Joe Biden said Monday. “Well, the
truth of the matter, you saw what happened in Bucha. He is a war
criminal.” Biden added, “We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the
weapons they need in order to fight.”
The American government,
along with the media, proceeds according to the principle: first the
conclusion, then the investigation. Biden, who more than one year after
the January 6 coup attempt cannot make up his mind whether Trump is
guilty of a crime, has already decided that Russian President Vladimir
Putin is guilty of “war crimes” in Bucha.
The actual facts,
however, do not prove the conclusion. Russian troops withdrew from Bucha
right after the Kremlin promised to dramatically reduce its forces in
the direction of Kiev in peace negotiations last Tuesday. For days, no
significant civilian casualties were reported. On Saturday, Ukrainian
forces—including members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion—entered the
town, and a torrent of reports were unleashed in the Western press about
alleged atrocities.
The images shown widely only indicate that bodies were found, but not
who killed whom, when and under what circumstances. While video
evidence has emerged of Ukrainian forces executing and torturing unarmed
people, no similar evidence has emerged for Russian troops.
Given
the systematic use by the United States of false allegations of
atrocities to justify wars all over the world, and absent clear and
convincing evidence, there is no reason to view the claims of a massacre
in Bucha as anything other than war propaganda, aimed at enraging the
population to justify military escalation.
Even if it were
established that Russian troops fired on civilians—and that has not been
established—that would not mean that they were acting under the
instruction of the Russian government.
In the world Ronny promotes in his new special, you don't ask questions, you just go along.
Actually, that's the formula for a disaster -- as most people already know -- people far wiser than Ronny.
Sergeant
Tim Gordon is home and I'm very glad of that. I'm also glad that Sgt
Jake Pietsch, whom we noted earlier this week, is home as well.
I
hope people who learn of those two returning from Iraq grasp that US
troops remain on the ground there. And I hope that they grasp this is
troop rotation, not a withdrawal. I hope they question why, all this
time later, US troops are on the ground in Iraq and, maybe, they
question why two members of the National Gaurd were there to begin with?
A
lot of actions shold be raising questions but the Ronnys of the world
are bothered by that. I'm bothered by the people who don't ask
questions. Demadning accountability is more of a civic duty.
A number of Democratic Party strategists spoke to The Hill seven months ahead of the November midterms. One of them concluded the party is doomed.
With record gas prices and four-decade high inflation pricing some Americans out of basic commodities, party insiders weighed in. The consensus was President Joe Biden and Democrats are in serious trouble.
Worried about not only losing a majority in the House, but also in
the Senate, top strategists spoke of the issues Democrats face in
convincing Americans to turn out and vote for them in the fall.
Bill Galston, who advised former President Bill Clinton, said Biden’s approval numbers can only go so high right now.
“My hypothesis is that, unless and until inflation comes down
appreciably, that there’s going to be a ceiling on his job approval
that’s a lot lower than the White House wants it to be,” Galston said.
Gallup senior editor Jeff Jones concurred. “High gas prices are
one of the biggest anchors on presidential approval,” Jones said.
Biden’s approval rating is hovering at a round 40 percent. The RealClearPolitics average shows 41.0% approve of Biden’s job performance, while 53.8% disapprove.
The Biden administration has repeatedly attempted to attribute pain at the pump to Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. There was a consensus among experts that the message is not helping the president with voters.
When
you fail to deliver, when inflation rises and your predecssor at least
gave out toekn, tiny checks hwile you do nothing, when you have the
nerave to try to normalize a possible food shortage in the us, maybe
you've done enough harm to yourself and to your party.
I liked Stan's "AMERICAN DAD" post. I like all of his posts but since he covered AMERICAN DAD and since I cover that show here, I really do need to note it. I agree with him that the show really turned around when Roger and Hayley got makeovers. That was the first episode that just really clicked and showed how good the show could be.
Roger is primping in front of a make up counter mirror at a store while Hayley stands next to him.
Roger: I just had my colors done and Lydia tells me I'm an autumn.
Hayley: Roger, I've been standing her the entire time. You haven't talked to anyone. And you're putting lipstick on your eyelids.
Roger: Jealous!
That exchange all by itself is hilarious but the scene just gets better culminating in Roger's nip slip and his shudder -- two shudders -- after.
That was just the perfect episode. And you had Stan wanting a boys night out that went from really bad to even worse. (And poor Nathan, the kid at the eatery who keeps wanting to party with Stan and his CIA co-workers.) You have the missed connection at the mall that Klaus finds and he eggs them on (Hayley and Roger) to go to the food court to find out who is the pretty one. Roger quotes "America The Beautiful" -- or semi-quotes it to be suggestive -- and the guy doesn't catch it so Roger just says, "It's from a song." He's all thrilled that the guy picks him and not Hayley, never grasping that the guy is trying to find an ugly partner because his frat is having a pig contest.
Roger primps before leaving for his date and uses a linen brush as an IUD while saying, as he shoves it in somewhere, "No babies for Roger."
We're not even at the half-way point and this is just a drop down on the floor and roll around laughing episode.
Now there was funny before many times. But no episode pulled all the stories together as well as that one or had so many laughs until that one.
Roger trying to prove to Klaus that a guy would want to harass him and posing as Laura Van Der Booben was great but it wasn't surrounded by strong stories like the one where Stan goes out on the twon with his CIA friends.
And my big point here is that this is that was episode 20 of season four. (I know AMERICAN DAD is infamous for how they label seasons and episodes. That is what they've labeled it.) The thing with animated shows -- and as I see one after another cancelled early in their runs, I try to remember this -- is that it can take awhile for them to really hit their stride. If they have some strong elements, I think the networks should stand by them.
You don't have a studio audience so you lack that immediate feedback and, since you're animating overseas very often, that's even more of removal from the audience. It can take awhile for everything to come together and for a show to hit its stride.
THE SIMPSONS were not that great at the start. They were entertaining -- as they were on THE TRACEY ULLMAN SHOW -- but they weren't what they became. KING OF THE HILL was funny at the start but not as funny as it became in later years. Even BOB'S BURGERS, which started so strong, grew better as the series went along.
And it can take time to build an uadience. FUTURAMA, like FAMILY GUY before it, is brought back (on HULU shortly) because it built up a bigger audience after the show ended and it was in syndication.
The show I really loved that I wish they had continued the most? FOX's ALLEN GREGORY. I loved that show. Jonah Hill was hilarious as Allen. The Water Cooler Set hated the show but it was very unny.
Tuesday, April 5, 2022. It's time for a specail counsel to be
appointed for Hunter Biden, the Kurds do not have to sacrifice yet again
to make the US government happy, and much more.
“We absolutely stand by the president’s comment.” With those words, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield reaffirmed that President Biden maintains his son Hunter Biden did “nothing [that] was unethical” and never “made money” in China.
Those claims appear demonstrably false — and they make the positions of both the media and Attorney General Merrick Garland absolutely untenable.
For the media, the ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden by U.S. Attorney David Weiss in
Delaware has presented a growing danger of self-indictment over its
prior coverage (or noncoverage). Weiss has called a long line of
witnesses before a grand jury, and there is growing expectation of
criminal charges against Hunter Biden.
Nothing concentrates the mind as much as a looming indictment.
Thus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media
faced the embarrassing prospect of an indictment based on a story they
previously suggested was either a nonstory or Russian
disinformation. Suddenly, in recent days, they all rushed to declare the
story legitimate, 18 months after the New York Post reported it in
October 2020.
What quickly emerged, though, was a new narrative: None of this implicates President Biden. On CNN, White House correspondent John Harwood declared, “There
is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has
done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done.”
Anchor Brianna Keilar then added for emphasis that Harwood was making
“an important distinction.”
It was important, but not because it was true. While many media figures now willingly admit the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s
abandoned-laptop story, they are avoiding what the emails found on that
laptop actually contain. Hundreds of emails appear to detail a
multimillion-dollar influence-peddling enterprise by the Biden family, including Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden.
An
ongoing investigtation is taking place. Joe Biden and the White House
are not at liberty to comment. IAs the head of the federal government,
it is inappropriate for him to comment. From the beginning, the problem
has not only been the lies from Joe on behalf of his son, it has also
been that he doesn't grasp his role.
It is time for a
speical prosecutor. One should have been appointed long ago but this
behavior demonstrates that the rules are not being followedc and will
not be followed. This is outrageous. Joe has created a standard for
his son that is inappropriate and goes to how he is repeatedly
attempting to steer the investigation with his comments as president of
the United States.
He is not standing back. If this
were his best friend, as president of the United States, he would not be
able to comment. This is his son. We are seeing that Hunter means all
ethics go out the window. Gee, wonder what message that passed on to
Hunter growing up?
He has put himself into this
conflict. He didn't have to speak. The appropriate response is "We do
not have any comment at this time as a result of this being an ongoing
investigation."
More to the point, this issue came up
during the primaries and Joe lied repeatedly. His son did nothing
wrong!!!! No, his sond id huge wrongs. These were ethical issues and
they should have been addressed then. They weren't. But Joe ran for
the nomination knowing this was out there.
He may have thought he could bully the press intos ilence on this matter foerever.
Well he bet wrong.
That's on him.
And now it is necessary for a special prosecutor to be appointed.
He
has made it clear that he intends to put a thumb on the scales of
justice, that he is unable to prevent himself from doing so.
Here’s how we see all this. A free press must remain vigilant and
non-partisan while hunting for lies, crimes, abuse and neglect while
calling out politicians and pundits who try to quash a good story just
because it doesn’t fit the narrative of the prevailing political winds.
The New York Times and Washington Post can be great newspapers. They
sometimes do meaningful work. They just need to get out of their own
way.
The AP needs to stop trying to be the voice of America and just chase
down the news. If a tweet or post somewhere in the cesspool of trolls
and scam artists on the web does warrant coverage, then have at it. But a
running feature of every little oddity that fires up TikTok is just a
waste of time.
Joe Biden has become a portrait of hypocrisy. He's recently begun screaiming War Crimes at others. Richard Medhurst notes:
“Putin is a war criminal” — guy who pushed for Iraq war in the senate, and less than a year ago drone striked an entire Afghan family (the Ahmadi family), followed by a Pentagon cover up
While
the victims of U.S. wars are nameless, U.S. media is 24/7 on the tragic
death Russia is bringing to Ukraine. Children, pregnant women, elderly
have all died there, just as they have in Yemen by the Saudis with U.S. weapons, as they died in Libya by U.S./NATO forces.
People
here are being led to cheer for a dangerous U.S. escalation, including a
direct war with Russia that could ensue from a "no-fly zone," up to and
including a nuclear exchange. Everyone should oppose Russia's
aggression, but no one who understands what the U.S. empire has done across the globe should be cheering for U.S./NATO war on Russia.
Our WarCriminalsWatch.org site has a curated series of worthwhile background readings on this situation:
For Washington and other supporters of a sovereign and prosperous
Iraq, the October 2021 Iraqi parliamentary elections were a success.
Contrary to expectations, Iranian-backed Shiite Islamist parties and
their militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, or Hashd, were defeated at the ballot box.
The Hashd lost not to Western-oriented candidates but to another
credible local Shiite party whose leader’s hashtag, #NeitherEastnorWest,
was an unambiguous call for an Iraq dominated by neither Tehran nor
Washington. The election results mitigated toward the establishment of a
new, majoritarian government — the first since the 2003 U.S. invasion —
capable of pursuing better governance and an independent Iraq.
It’s cruel irony that this potential outcome, a longstanding U.S.
aspiration for Iraq, appears to have been undermined in part by
Washington’s best friends in Iraq: the Kurds.
The big winner in the electoral contest was Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric whose Sairoun political party won a plurality of the seats
in the Iraqi Council of Representatives. In the aftermath of the 2003
invasion, Sadr’s “Mahdi army” emerged as a leading adversary of the
U.S., and the firebrand was nearly targeted by U.S. forces. More
recently, however, Sadr, an unabashed populist who tapped into the
electorate’s resentment of Iranian overreach in Iraq, has developed into
a somewhat more responsible politician.
How
stupid do you have to be to write that garbage. Moqtada's cult turned
out. Not in the numbers they have in previous elections -- he had a
huge fall off. But they did turn out. He was not the clear winner. A
clear winner would be someone who had enough seats to move forward
without having to partner with anyone else. He had a few more seats.
But coaltitions could have been cobbled together without his seats.
Does the idiot even understnad how it works in Iraq or how many MPs are needed to form a coalition?
What a lying moron.
ANd now he wants to? Blame the Kurds.
The Kurds are not the problem.
Yes,
the KDP wants the presidency and yes the PUK wants the presidency. My
take? The KDP got sigfinicantly more seats in the eleeciton so they
should have the presidency. The PUK has consistently lost support -- a
trend that no one wants to talk about in the US because it requires
admitting facts that the US doesn't want to admit. Including? That
every time there's a problem, the US government expects the Kurds to
sacrifice their own goals and save the US government's ass by 'coming
together' with some other side.
I don't think the PUK deserves the presidency.
That's my opinion.
That
doesn't mean that they don't have the right to fight for it. That
doesn't mean the KDP doesn't have the right to fight for it.
But, yet again, another American has emerged to insist that it is time for the Kurds to sacrifice for the 'good' of Iraq.
In other words, for the good of what the US government wants in Iraq.
Elections
were held October 10th. There is no president still. That's not the
Kurds fault. It is the fault of Moqtada al-Sadr who does not know how
to assemble a governmentt.
Iraq had a poltiical
stalemate in 2010 that lasted eight months. There the problem wasn't
Nouri couldn't assemble a government. Back then, the problem was Nouri
al-Maliki lost the election and refused to step down as prime minister.
Eventually, Joe Biden led a negotiation resulting in The Erbil
Agreement which named Nouri prime minister-desigante. Nouri
imemediately put together a government.
This is the a six month political stalemate and it has lasted this long because Moqtada is incompetent.
That's where you start laying the blame, not at the Kurds.
