The budget! The budget!
There are three e-mails noting the passing of the Iraqi budget yesterday and that I forgot it in the snapshot. It wasn't forgotten, our focus was on the UN.
This is also the budget that, back in August, would be passed in a matter of weeks. I didn't see the need to weigh in. I still don't.
This morning Alsumaria has published it in PDF format and, at some point today, I will try to read it. Prior to that, it's a sentence: Iraq passed a budget worth $150 billion US dollars. Saif Hameed (Reuters) has that here.
Considering the way programs to rebuild Iraq were being slashed when oil was at a high, I can't imagine that the programs didn't suffer even more as the oil prices dropped.
That's what the story of the budget's about: Where the money is going.
That is passed is meaningless without knowing that.
No one published the budget yesterday -- none of the Iraqi government sites, no one.
Alsumaria has published it now.
Time permitting, I'll read over it at some point today. If I can find that time and there's nothing more pressing in the news, then we may discuss it in the next snapshot.
Without the details, it's just a meaningless headline.
Then there's the guy e-mailing the public account about how I'm ignoring "the whistle-blower."
Thinking it's an e-mail referring to Ed Snowden, I quickly open to discover it's the always useless Larry Wilkerson.
And, yes, e-mailer, Vice magazine does call him a whistle-blower.
I have no doubt that Larry knows how to put his lips together and blow.
And I wouldn't be the least surprised to learn he has demonstrated the technique, on more than one occasion, to Colin Powell.
But Larry and Vice are idiots.
Wilkerson is not a whistle-blower.
A whistle-blower steps forward and exposes corruption or abuse.
All Wilkerson does is wait until it's exposed and then show up to insist Colin Powell stood tall and firm and, apparently gazing up at Powell as he stood on his own knees, Wilkerson was moved -- very, very moved.
Wilkerson is a weak critic. He is not a whistle-blower.
And five e-mails insist I've missed the countdown on the hostages the Islamic State has.
If they're released or if they're killed, we may cover it. Otherwise, we won't. We don't do the death watch and I can only take so much lying in one day from Jen Psaki and the State Dept.
On that topic, we may have to tackle it because it goes to the lies and deception of the United States government.
(The killers of US soldiers were released by Barack so that the British could get four corpses and one living computer tech. Though it was largely ignored, it did take place. The killers are Shi'ite thugs whose release impacted the current turmoil so we may have to -- again -- cover it.)
But I'm not doing breathless passages of: "Are they dead? Are they dead?"
If you need that sort of tabloid coverage, I believe you can get it on CNN, every hour on the hour.
The following community sites -- plus Black Agenda Report, Antiwar.com and Jody Watley -- updated:
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
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