Saturday, March 05, 2016

Iraq snapshot

Saturday, March 5, 2016.  Chaos and violence continue, Moqtada stages another rally, Hillary Clinton loses another state, trash emerges to insist the party must rally around Crooked Clinton, and much more.




Tuesday, War Hawk Hillary Clinton managed to dupe enough people to win the Democratic Party primary in seven out of eleven states.  Or, as one friend put it, supposed Ms. Inevitable managed to lose four states to Senator Bernie Sanders:  Oklahoma, Vermont, Colorado and Minnesota.  Oklahoma must have been especially painful for Hillary to lose.  In 2008, Hillary carried Oklahoma.  She won with 55% of the voters to Barack's 31%.

But Tuesday?

Bernie won the state by 51%.

From 55% in 2008, Hillary's support in Oklahoma dropped to 41.5%.


Ms. Inevitable is far, far from Ms. Incredible.

A point underscored today when Sanders defeated her in Kansas.


And her inability to close the deal is a reality a number of people have noted this week on Twitter because Incredible People don't back illegal wars.



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  • . u acknowledge that support for Iraq War was a mistake, so why did you encourage military option in Libya?

















  • But you can't have a rush of reality without a backlash of whoring.


    Enter the courtesan.


    Michelle Manning Barrish.

    Is she know for anything besides who she slept with?

    Supposedly, she's an activist.

    I've been speaking out against the Iraq War since February 2003.

    I never heard of her doing any activism.  (MOVEON commercials are not activism.)

    But then I don't consider sleeping with rich men to be radical action.  Although maybe big divorce settlements count as one way of redistributing the wealth?

    She shows up at -- where else -- THE HUFFINGTON POST to insist that she's always been against the Iraq War, to toss around mentions of her "brother" repeatedly (is she trying to hide behind him) and insist that when Hillary is crowned the nominee, everyone must unite behind her.


    Let's be really clear on that.

    Michelle Manning Barish?

    She's not running a damn thing.

    She needs to sit her tired  ass down already.

    No one asked her.

    Your vote is your vote.

    It's not her vote.

    No one needs anyone to tell them how to vote -- and when someone tries to tell you how to vote, they need to be told to mind their own damn business.

    Your vote belongs to you.

    You can use it to vote for Hillary, to vote for Donald Trump, to vote for Jerry White, to vote for whomever.


    You can use your vote by not voting because you don't feel anyone has earned your vote.

    If Michelle wants to stick to why she's supporting Hillaary, that's fine.

    But when she thinks she has any right to tell anyone else how to vote?

    She needs to grasp that if we need to know where to get vast amounts of collagen shot into our lips, then she's out go to.


    But to know how to vote?

    No.

    You have to be at least 18 to vote in the United States.  Which means every voter in the US is an adult.

    No adult needs to be told how to vote.

    Michelle insists:

    When you are faced with making many decisions, you aren't going to always be right. When you don't have anything important to decide on, or much at all, your averages of not making mistakes improves greatly, because you didn't have anything to decide on in the first place. These other candidates can shout their "positions" from the rooftops with conviction and great certainty, but until they have actually had to create policy or negotiate a treaty with a world leader...their words aren't worth anything. They are merely opinions and soundbites.
    Hillary Clinton has had to make the tough decisions. I want someone tough sitting across the table from Vladimir Putin. I want someone who understands the economy to make decisions about Wall Street. I want someone who has always been a champion for Reproductive Rights, to fight hard, and not let the Republican party play the games they have played throughout the entire Obama presidency. 


    What tough decisions has Hillary made?

    To vote for war?

    Yeah.

    To change her hair constantly?

    Yeah.

    What else?

    To attack women who accuse her husband of something?

    Yeah.

    I'm not getting what else she's done.

    I'm also not getting how she has any experience on the economy.


    She's also not been a champion of reproductive rights.

    Stop whoring, Michelle, stop whoring.

    Mid '00s found her being rightly criticized for her move away from support of abortion.

    So just stop whoring,  Michelle.

    You're welcome to lie to yourself all you want but when you lie to others, you just embarrass yourself.

    For many of us, we will never vote for Hillary.

    She's a War Hawk.

    If the Iraq vote didn't make it clear, her pushing for war on Libya did.

    Her response is always "war!"

    Me personally?  I could vote for Bernie if he got the nomination.  I could vote for Cynthia McKinney if she ran.  I could vote for Michael Bloomberg if he ran.  There are many people who could win my vote.  Hillary is not one of them.

    And her support of the Iraq War is no minor thing.


    And I'm not some hardened and unfeeling person, I can cry like a baby watching an episode of FIX IT AND FINISH IT  where Antonio Sabato Jr. and crew are helping some mother with a special needs child get the improvements she needs for her child to live comfortably in their home.



    But I'm not such a softie that I'll forget what Hillary has done or overlook the destruction her support of war has dealt to so many civilians.

    As Lillian Hellman once declared, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

    Michelle Manning Barish takes a pair of garden shears to her conscience and turns it into Daisy Dukes.



    She's not the only one disappointing this week.

    He vowed they'd take the battle to the gates of the Green Zone.

    He vowed they'd make a difference.

    Instead, Friday's turnout, Friday's rally?

    Not at all unlike the one Moqtada al-Sadr already staged last week.


    Mid-week, ALL IRAQ NEWS reported Baghdad Operations Control has announced they will be providing security for the rally.


    Of course, they didn't protect real protesters, not from December 2011 through Janaury 2014, when actual protests took place in Baghdad.

    Instead, they harassed the press (to keep them from covering the protests), they harassed and attacked the protesters, followed them home to intimidate them, etc.

    But Moqtada wasn't protesting, he was backing up Haider's call for reform.

    Which might also explain why Moqtada was allowed to send his armed militia into the streets of Baghdad.












  • Unprecedented numbers of armed Sadr militants flocking from all of towards the Green Zone now..






  • 100s of heavily armed Sadr Shiite militants gearing up for 'peaceful' protests in Green Zone..











  • AP notes thousands gathered and that Moqtada urged peace.  Lars Hauch (MEE) reports:

    His speech wasn’t opposing the government in general though. In fact, Sadr called for support for the politics of Haider al-Abadi, the current prime minister who has found himself under pressure from pro-Iranian politicians and militia leaders who confront his reform plans.


    Meanwhile, the US government continued bombing Iraq with the US Defense Dept announcing today:



    Strikes in Iraq
    Ground attack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 12 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq’s government:
    -- Near Al Baghdadi, a strike destroyed an ISIL rocket rail and an ISIL mortar position.
    -- Near Albu Hayat, a strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle bomb.
    -- Near Fallujah, a strike struck a large ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL bed down location.
    -- Near Kisik, two strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed two ISIL vehicles, two ISIL mortar positions, four ISIL vehicle bombs, and seven ISIL fighting positions.
    -- Near Mosul, a strike destroyed an ISIL heavy machine gun position.
    -- Near Qayyarah, a strike destroyed an ISIL rocket position.
    -- Near Ramadi, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position, an ISIL staging area, an ISIL tunnel, and an ISIL front end loader.
    -- Near Sinjar, a strike destroyed an ISIL heavy machine gun position.
    -- Near Tal Afar, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL assembly area.

    Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target.