Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Who I want to trust

 Never forget that some people tried to tell you the truth -- people like Jimmy Dore tried.



So many others rush to lie and rush to trick you or bully you into voting for Joe Biden.  He is as corrupt as his family and he is not fit to be president.


 

Some people tried to tell you what was possible and let you make up your mind, they trusted you.  

 

Those are the people I want to listen to, the people who trust me to make my own opinion.

This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 

 Wednesday, October 21, 2020.  Mustafa learns how unpopular of a prime minister he is in Iraq while, in the US, Joe Biden goes back into hiding.


Starting with Glenn Greenwald.



We've made many of the points Glenn does and they're strong points.  But one point we haven't made that he makes above is the collaboration between journalists and the spy agencies (including former spooks) to spread propaganda domestically.  


Joe Biden took himself off the campaign trail on Saturday allowing him to avoid the press and allowing his whores to work overtime.  Sam Seder is a damn dirty whore.  Janeane Garofalo may forgive his back stabbing but no one else should.  A failed comic who flamed out at one audition after another (he even failed at his audition to play Jim's brother on LIFE ACCORDING TO JIM), he got his break finally when he got to be her co-host on THE MAJORITY REPORT and he quickly stabbed her in the back.  He had a lot of help with that.  Hey, Bill Scherr, you still pretending that you have ethics?


Those of us who listened to the pro-homophobic interview that you and Sam conducted with Simon Rosenberg would beg to differ.  Whatever else she's done, Rachel Maddow stood up to Simon Rosenberg.  Rosenberg was preaching homophobia and pro-Iraq War and Sam and Bill Scherr just coddled him.  The anger?  That was saved after the interview when Sam lashed out at the listeners who had openly called him a whore on the show's official message board.  


Again, Rachel asked him hard questions and didn't let him spew his homophobia.  Sam and Bill were happy to whore for a New Democrat (the new name, at that time, for the DLC-ers).  There was no excuse for the soft-balls and whoring that Sam and Bill offered.  Not only had Rachel already demonstrated how to stand up to Simon but it's also true that the day before the interview, we posted a series of problems that Simon should address.  And Sam got very mad at all the people on the message board posting parts of that throughout his soft ball, hand holding with Simon Rosenberg.


Sam was also "Ad Nags" which goes to what a damn coward he is.  Ad Nags was a parody of NYT reporter Adam Nagourney.  It was the only thing funny that Sam had ever done. But THE NEW YORK TIMES complained to AIR AMERICA RADIO, threatened to pull their advertising and Sam caved.


Sam's a whore.  I have no idea why RING OF FIRE employs him (especially considering the trash he talks about RFK Jr.).  But they do or they distribute him.  And he's using his tiny post to whore for Joe Biden.  It would be sad if it weren't so predictable.  Sam won't deal with the e-mails or what they say.  He'll just spew lie after lie trying to discredit them.  Because he's a whore.


When you see people lying, you shouldn't cheer them on.  You shouldn't think, "Oh, this is great for our side."  It's not great for our side.  It's part of the David Brock-ization of the Democratic Party where we've become as appalling and disgusting as the GOP was in the 80s and 90s.  


Sam Seder is continuing his long, long history as a whore for powerful Democrats.  He's not there to tell the truth, he's not there to help your life be better.  He exists solely to promote centrist Democrats and to lie for them.  (He also exists to lie about himself but that's a story for another time.)


There are real issues here.  Corruption is a real issue.  Joe Biden should be answering basic questions (instead of hiding, yet again).  The American people deserve to have those questions asked and answered -- and deserve to have the claims investigated.  Instead, whores like Sam Seder run interference to try to bury the issues that should be raised -- while pretending to give a damn about free speech and about democracy and about blah blah blah.


He's just a dirty whore.  Not unlike Heather Schwedel who is a sad, sad person.  Looking at photos of Hunter in the throes of an active addiction, Heather's rush was to drool online about how 'sexy' he was.  


Heather would like to be a feminist.  She'd also like to lose weight.  Neither is happening.  Feminists don't glorify men who refuse to admit that they are a father -- men who have to be taken to court to force them to admit that they are a father, men who are dead beat dads who don't paid child support until the court orders it (and threatens a messy public hearing).  Heather's not a feminist.  


I hope she finds her type of man in an NA meeting -- keep going back, Heather, he comes if you jerk it.


Sunday night, we noted this:


Back to social media, a big story in Iraq this weekend has been a woman apparently throwing her two children to their deaths off the Imamas Bridge into the Tigris River.  Surveillance cameras caught the alleged act and video of it has been all over Arabic social media.


For two drive-bys to the public e-mail account, it's not a made up story.  There's the video that was captured by the surveillance camera.





This was a huge story Saturday and Sunday on Arabic social media.  It's the sort of story that gets no play from the US media because the US media -- guilty dog that they are -- wants not part in covering Iraq.  They helped create the tragedy by promoting the rush to war and the false claims and outright lies of the Bully Boy Bush administration.  They continued to lie in the early years of the war to keep it going.  They only got honest when public opinion shifted.  Now?  They act as though Iraq doesn't even exist.  To acknowledge Iraq now might mean people noticing that all those promises to go back and look at those stories and to offer something more than those 2004 mini-culpas never took place.


On Iraq, we'll note this Tweet:


has met with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Berlin, confirming that Germany
Flag of Germany
will continue to support Iraq as part of the anti-IS coalition. #germany #Deutschland #Iraq Source & Image - Deutsche Welle
Image



While he visits Germany, France and the UK, Iraq struggles.  THE JORDAN TIMES notes:

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhimi is facing a pressing challenge that threatens to push Iraq once more into a sectarian furnace. He needs the political will and the means to isolate and neutralise tens of renegade pro-Iran militias. Two events that took place this week underline the limited capabilities of the federal government and its military and security arms. The first was the burning on Saturday of the offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in central Baghdad by loyalists to the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU) while the second was the gruesome execution of 12 citizens in Salahuddin province, also on Saturday, allegedly a pro-Iran militia. Sixteen other victims remain unaccounted for.

The kidnapping and execution of the victims is said to be in retaliation for the killing a few days before of a member of a pro-Iran militia in an attack blamed on [ISIS].

The massacre has focused attention on the presence of pro-Iran militias in liberated Sunni provinces and their refusal to allow tens of thousands of displaced people, mostly Sunnis, from returning to their homes. The case underlines the limitations of the federal government in Baghdad in extending its authority over a number of provinces that the PMU had entered to clear them from [ISIS] terrorist groups between 2014 and 2017.


Mustafa should be at home, in Iraq, addressing the many problems.  Instead, as many observers have noted, he's now trying to be more than a one-term prime minister -- despite earlier claims.  This trip to Europe is about building up his image.  And the Iraqi people suffer.  As he realizes how unpopular he is and how so many are opposed to him, Mustafa gets desperate to retain power.  REUTERS notes:


It was a series of intercepted phone calls on a tense night in June that made Iraq’s new prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi fully realise how few friends he had.

During one call, a senior Iraqi leader with strong ties to Iran instructed the security chief for Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, which hosts government buildings and foreign embassies, not to stand in the way of militiamen who were storming the area, two Iraqi security officials said.

The militiamen were angry at the arrest of comrades accused of firing anti-U.S. rockets. During the hours-long standoff, the militia detained several members of a U.S.-trained counter-terrorism force, according to the security officials and two militia sources.

On the June 25 call, the leader with ties to Iran warned the Green Zone security chief, Shihab al-Khiqani, that “a clash would open the gates of hell” between the militias and the forces guarding the area, according to one of the security officials, who viewed a transcript of the call. The second security official and the two militia sources corroborated that call and said Khiqani was told by militia commanders in other phone conversations that night to avoid any standoff with the paramilitaries.



In other news, At Human Rights Watch, Belkis Wille observes:

A well-known TV station in Baghdad was torched by protesters after it broadcast a music concert during Ashura, a Shia holy day which was underway at the time. The offices of Dijlah TV station, which has links to Jamal Karbouli, a Sunni politician from Anbar, were badly damaged in the incident, which took place on August 31. But how have Iraqi officials since responded to this dangerous act? Not by investigating those who set the fire, but by issuing an arrest warrant for Karbouli, claiming the broadcast offended religious views under article 372 of Iraq’s Penal Code

Meanwhile, three Dijlah staffers told Human Rights Watch that they have received numerous threats during phone calls and on social media, and that armed men came looking for them. The threats have now forced all of them to resign from their jobs, via public announcements posted on Facebook. But even that was not enough to stop the threats, and all three have now also fled their homes.

One employee said that after the governor of Diwaniya told government departments “not to deal with” Dijlah staff, he could no longer rely on local security forces to keep him safe. In Wassit, where another of the staffers lived, the governor called on security forces to prevent anyone with a Dijlah badge from reporting from the governorate. A total of six colleagues from Dijlah have now reportedly gone into hiding. The journalists’ fears for their safety are not unfounded - four reporters have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of 2020, according to Reporters Without Borders.  

Earlier this month, several weeks after Human Rights Watch released a report on the growing number of prosecution of journalists under defamation and incitement laws in the country, the Iraqi embassy in Beirut finally responded, saying that the government had formed a ministerial committee to “look into cases of assaults against journalists” back in 2016. The committee was still in operation, the embassy said, but did not provide evidence of any reports or other outputs by the body.  

Over the last few years Human Rights Watch has interviewed over a dozen journalists who were victims of violent attacks, including by state forces, and not a single one of them knew of this committee or had ever been contacted by it. If it exists, it is clearly not taking its job seriously. After the public torching of a TV station, what more needs to happen for Iraqi authorities to take these attacks seriously? 


 


The following sites updated: