Friday, October 11, 2024

Iraq snapshot

Friday, October 11, 2024.  Barack Obama returns to the public square to serve up the hard truths.


Voting is under way in many places in the United States -- there is early voting, voting by mail and voting in person.  The final day to vote in the presidential election is November 5th and that is 24 days away.


Former US President Barack Obama: [T]here is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anything but himself.  I said it before.  Donald Trump is a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago.  You get the Tweets in all caps, the ramblings and the ravings about crazy conspiracy theories.  You got the two hour speeches.  Word salad.  Just -- it's like Fidel Castro -- just on and on.  Constant attempts to sell you stuff.  Who does that?  Selling you gold sneakers and $100,000 watch and, most recently, a Trump BIBLE.  He wants you to buy the word of God Donald Trump edition -- got his name right there next to Matthew and Luke.  I mean, you could not make this stuff up.  If you saw it on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, you'd say, "Well nah, I mean that's going too far."  No, he's doing that. 

[Calls of "He's weird!"]


Barack Obama: It's crazy.  And the reason he does it is because all he cares about is his ego and his money and his status.  He's not thinking about you.  Donald Trump sees power as nothing more than means to an end. He wants the middle class to pay the price for another huge tax cut that would mostly help him and his country club buddies. Doesn't care if costs more women their reproductive freedom because it won't make a difference in his life 

[Boos]


Barack Obama: Do not boo.  Vote. They can't hear your boos but they can hear your votes.


Last night, in Pittsburgh, Barack took the stage in a front of a huge crowd -- the kind of crowd Donald Trump couldn't get in his best days back in 2016 and so much bigger than the smatterings that he attracts today.  Barack laid it on the line about what mattered.



And what mattered is you.


And me.


And all of us working for a better future and a better country.  

He spoke truth to power.  















ABC NEWS reports on a Pittsburgh meet up Barack has with Black males.  Barack explained,  "When you have a choice that's this clear, when you have somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences -- who's had to work harder and do more and overcome -- and achieves the second highest office in the land and is putting forward concrete proposals to correctly address the things are vital in our neighborhoods and in our communities from housing to making sure our mothers and our fathers and our grandparents are going to be able to afford medicine and making sure that we are dealing with prices that are too high and rents that are too high and is committed to making sure that we maintain The Affordable Care Act so that everybody's got health insurance, that cares about education and entrepreneurship in our neighborhoods -- and that's on one side.  And on the other side, you have someone who has consistently shown disregard not just for the communities but for you as a person.  And you're thinking about sitting out? " 




Some polling indicates that some Black males are thinking of sitting out this election.  I'd argue that the remarks Barack made should also be directed at THE PROGRESSIVE, THE NATION, DEMOCRACY NOW!, IN THESE TIMES and other outlets.  In fact, let's note the both-sides nonsense THE NATION just did. 

"Democrat or Republican, the next presidency will still mean death for others in faraway places"

That garbage is from Ahmed Moor.  He's a Palestinian American and -- as his Tweet on the article makes even more clear, he's only referring to and concerned about Gaza. 

I knew there was a reason I wasn't familiar with his name.  


See, I've called out the destruction of Iraq, the decimation of its population which turned the country into a land of widows and orphans.  I've spoken out, I've written, I've marched.  And I'm generally familiar with at least the name of other Americans addressing it.


Not familiar with his name.  


Is he so young that he wasn't old enough to protest?  No.  He was in college in 2002.  Before the Iraq War began.  I see he had time to work on Wall Street after college.


I don't see any writing about Iraq.


So when Iraqi people died, it didn't matter to him. 


But when it's people in Gaza, suddenly, it's important.


He is all that is wrong with the left at present.  Not all of the left, but a small sliver -- a sliver with far too much say about what 'independent' media covers and what it doesn't.


Palestinians matter, the people of Iraq matter, the people of Lebanon matter, the people of Syria matter, go down the list.  


But when you can reduce the entire world's suffering to just one group of people?  Your purity test has left you not just a virgin but an idiot virgin.

Are we in this together or not?


Because together we can win.  But together means we work for all of us.  And that's not happening currently.  Again, Barack's remarks could be directed to 'independent' media.  Last night, Marcia noted:



Well thank God we can rely on Mother Jones, The Nation, The Progressive, In These times, et al to build excitement, right?

Nope.  As C.I. notes, they're actually depressing turnout if you go to Common Dreams  and read the comments left on their articles.  People saying they're not voting, that there's no point in voting.  

Isn't it strange and funny how when it's a Black woman running for president, these same outlets that honestly whored for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman in 2000, can't even note Kamala's good qualities and good programs?  And we're talking about the threat of Donald Trump getting back into the White House.  

But that doesn't matter to them.

So I don't matter.  Thanks for clearing that up.  Thank you, Nation, Mother Jones, The Progressive, In These Times, ZNet, etc, ect.  As a Black lesbian, I'm under threat three ways -- a woman, an LGBTQ+ member and an African-American.  

But The Nation and Common Dreams and Democracy Now! and all of them don't care about me at all.

I am so sick of it.  As a Black woman, I'm also damn tired of doing the Democratic Party's heavy lifting for them.

The refusal to stand by a Black woman after all the years that we have ensured the Democratic Party's election victories?

What a slap in the face. 



8 days ago Democracy Now! did coverage -- not a headline -- on the vice presidential debate.  That was their last segment on the presidential race.  Before that?  Four weeks ago, they did segments (with Kamala haters) on the presidential debate.  

Grasp that.  Grasp that there has been nothing on Kamala's housing plan.  There has been nothing on what she's proposing regarding home healthcare.

Grasp that.

They're doing everything that they can to elect Donald Trump.  Grasp that.

Black women do.  You can see it online, you can see it in YouTube videos, I heard when I was registering voters and I hear it now as I'm going to nursing homes to talk about Kamala.  And Mike is right, C.I. was not mistaken about the importance of doing this.  I wouldn't have gotten how important this is.  I asked C.I. how she knew.  That was the first place she ever spoke to in high school about a presidential election.  And she's right, it does make a difference. 


Jill Stein is not going to be president.  She is, however, doing her best to ensure that Donald Trump will become president.  Radio host, podcaster, author and activist Thom Hartmann writes:


Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying goes, a flying f*ck about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game.

Fresh off her 2016 political quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump, this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House.

As her Wisconsin campaign manager, Pete Karas, told Politico:

“We need to teach Democrats a lesson.”

Arguably, Democrats have already learned that lesson.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.

Had Clinton carried those three states she would have become president.

The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.

Those slim margins may be a distant memory, however, given how hard Stein is pounding on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania Democrats against President Biden’s unfortunate support of Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza. As Newsweek reported last week:

“In Michigan, a battleground state where the Greens are campaigning hard, and which has a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed Stein versus just 12 percent for Harris and 18 percent for Trump, according to a late August poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

“Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim voters and 300,000 with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Biden won there in 2020 by 154,000 votes, while Trump carried the state with a victory margin of just 10,700—or 0.23 percent—in 2016.

“In Wisconsin, the CAIR poll showed Stein on 44 percent and Harris on 29 percent, while she also leads the Democrat candidate among Muslims voters in Arizona.”

I moderated the 2012 presidential debate between Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson; she and Johnson both had the smell of cheap political hustlers to me then, a feeling that’s only been reinforced in the years since.

Stein certainly hasn’t done much to advance the stated goals of the Green Party. Back in the day, it was the Greens leading the charge against climate change and in favor of instant runoff voting, having considerable success with the latter.

David Cobb, a Texas environmental attorney, ran on the Green ticket in 2004 and was a regular on my radio program that year. He explicitly told people listening to my show in swing states to vote for John Kerry instead of him, calling it his “safe states” strategy.

He refused to campaign or even appear in battleground states, a statement of both high integrity and real patriotism.

Stein has neither. This is her third run for president (Howie Hawkins was the Green candidate in 2020 and was not on the ballot in most swing states.)

Instead, she’s bragging about how she’s going to hand the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Presumably she’ll be spared the imprisonment that Trump says he’s preparing for the rest of us in politics and the media. As Stein boasted to Newsweek:

“Third Way found that, based on polling averages in battleground states, the 2020 margin of victory for Democrats would be lost in four states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin — because of third party support.

“So they can’t win. There’s a fair amount of data now that suggests the Democrats have lost. Unless they give up their genocide.

“We’re doing outreach all the time to a lot of different groups, but it’s really been the Muslim Americans and Arab Americans who have really taken this campaign on like it’s theirs — like they have enormous ownership over this.”

Running for president and keeping an iron grip on the once-noble Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission. And she’s killing the Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the process. As Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said:

“If you run for years in a row, and your party has not grown, has not added city council seats, down ballot seats and state electives, that’s bad leadership. And that to me is what’s upsetting.”

As Peter Rothpletz wrote for The New Republic in an article titled Jill Stein Is Killing the Green Party:

“As of July 2024, a mere 143 officeholders in the United States are affiliated with the Green Party. None of them are in statewide or federal offices. In fact, no Green Party candidate has ever won federal office. And Stein’s reign has been a period of indisputable decline, during which time the party’s membership—which peaked in 2004 at 319,000 registered members—has fallen to 234,000 today.”

Stein brought along a Fox “News” film crew when she crashed the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, cementing her reputation as a hustler who’ll hook up with anybody who’ll provide her with fame or fortune.

There are, apparently, no Democrats in America clean or pure or virginal enough for Stein; as Rothpletz reports, she even attacked Bernie Sanders for being a “DC insider” and “corrupted” by corporate money.

Meanwhile, her campaign, theoretically opposed to giant monopolies and defense contractors, has taken money from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.


Jill Stein has never delivered anything to the American people but empty words.  She shows up every four years to deliver empty words and then vanishes.  Spending that money she raised for recounts in 2016 apparently -- she never did, as she said she would, donate it to charity.  


It's a good little grift.  And she goes around attacking Kamala Harris.  While defending and apologizing for Putin.  At ZETEO, Mehdi has posted his full interview with Jill Stein.  Previously, clips had gone viral but the full interview was only available to ZETEO subscribers.



In the past, some have argued that the point of voting for a Jill Stein is so that the Greens can hit a certain percent and have ballot access.


Why?


I've made the argument before for that.  And I do understand the argument and I could endorse it before.


I cannot now.


Why?


The 2016 vote gave them access in 20 states.  That's on the ballot, that's not needing petitions or write-ins or anything. 


20 states.


And yet, per their own website, this year, they have four candidates for Congress.  Four people running for the House and the Senate.  The House has 435 members, the Senate has 100. 


And with their automatic ballot access, they can only offer four candidates?


No, I don't buy the nonsense that a vote for Jill helps the Green Party.


Nor do I buy the argument that we burn the playhouse down and rebuild something better.


That's a theoretical in good times.  We're not in good times.  The notion of sinking this election and something better will emerge from the disgust?


Who believes that?


Oh, I know!


People who take pictures of their children's genitals and are stupid enough to then try to have them developed at a drug store and they are called -- because they're a big name that everyone reading this would know -- and told to come pick them up and told that, by law, the drug store is actually supposed to call the cops but since this person is a big, big, big star, they'll do a favor for them this time and just pretend they never saw the kiddie porn that the parent took of their own child.


I've teased this one before.  Certain people better get their act together real damn quick because when I burn the playhouse down, I burn it down.  And I have no problem naming this one person we've been teasing out for some time.


But while I'll burn the fake asses' playhouse down, I'm not stupid enough to think we destroy our way of life -- and the way of life for so many Americans -- by voting for Trump or sitting it out because wah-wah Kamala doesn't say everything on Gaza that we want.  Wah!  Wah! Wah!



Aurora DeStefano (2 PARAGRAPHS) reports:


GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has a habit of referring to the grand dame of traditional news media (or mainstream or legacy media), The New York Times, as the “failing New York Times.”

It’s the same phrase he uses to describe the country he hopes to lead, frequently saying “we are a failing nation.”

But both entities — The New York Times and U.S. citizens — are helping Trump more than he deserves, according to critics. In the case of the Times and other so-called liberal media outlets, they say, Trump is extended the benefit of a pernicious both-sides-ism that consistently creates false equivalencies between Trump and his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.

Media critics have long criticized the Times for its Trump coverage, but two adjacent headlines this week serve to encapsulate the kind of coverage each candidate receives and, critics says, shows the media bending over backwards to make Trump’s latent racism palatable while questioning Harris’s veracity.

The journalistic malpractice is so stark that the headlines “should be studied in journalism classes for decades,” according to anti-Trump pundit and author Stuart Stevens, a Republican in exile during the MAGA insurgency.

Stevens writes, incredulous, that the “Trump headline could apply to an article about a Nobel prize winner in genetic studies.”

This alleged false equivalence in coverage is occurring against the backdrop of a Trump-launched storm of disinformation about FEMA and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.

These Trump hurricane lies are so patently untrue that four Republican governors in Southern states refuted them, meaning even a cadre of Trump loyalists publicly rejected the former President’s fabrications.

On active X user called ScaryLawyerGuy, an unrelenting critic of the differing levels of accountability demanded from the two candidates, wrote:

“The New York Times thinks Trump is better for its business model, the (literal) fortunes of multiple people on their politics desk depend on him winning and they will sane wash his Hitlerian views on eugenics if it helps him win.”

Back in May, after Times editor Joe Kahn defended his paper’s coverage of what was then the Trump-Biden race, an article in The New Republic asked:

“When one of the candidates is running on an express vow to wreck the political and legal systems themselves, do typical conventions of political reporting-ones geared around presenting both sides as equivalently conventional political actors fighting on an even civic playing field-really get the job done in communicating what that means?”

Greg Sargent, TNR

TNR also credits the Times for producing “indispensable journalism about Donald Trump's authoritarian designs for a second term” exposing “Trump's schemes to unleash the Justice Department on political enemies, to gut the bureaucracy and stock it with loyalists, to functionally wreck our intelligence agencies.”


But it's not just THE NEW YORK TIMES -- it's 'independent' media as well.  They are depressing and suppressing turnout and there's no excuse for that.


This is nonsense.  People will be harmed and, look at the areas effected by climate change right now, people are being harmed.  And they're harmed further by liars who tell them hurricanes are from cloud seeding and other b.s.  No, the weather is the effect of climate change.  And when the future looks so potentially stark, I don't know how you waste your vote or your voice or your platform by acting as though Donald and Kamala are the same.  They are not.  


One person can lead us forward over the next four years.  It might mean work on our part, getting off our lazy asses and marching and making demands of our elected officials.  But we already know Donald Trump won't respond to pressure.  We already know he'll just come up with a new lie to tell the world and himself while most likely either trying to imprison us or sick the national guard on us.  The choices are not vague or in doubt.  Donald is not an unknown.  We have seen the damage he can do and he tells us every day the damage that he wants to do.




Charlotte Alter (TIME) writes:

On a sunny Wednesday in late September, Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage at Carnegie Mellon University for the first comprehensive economic-policy speech of her short presidential campaign.

Addressing a sedate audience in suits and ties, the Vice President outlined plans to strengthen small businesses, cut taxes on the middle class, and build more affordable housing. "I am a capitalist," she told the Pittsburgh crowd, detailing how she would invest in startups and increase public-private partnerships, and describing an approach to economic growth that stressed stability.


It was a business-friendly speech tailored to business-­friendly voters. But in a neck-and-neck presidential race, wonky pitches like these could make the difference. In a September New York Times/Siena poll, nearly 30% of likely voters said they felt they needed to learn more about the Vice President before making their choice. The fight to define Kamala Harris—who she is, what she stands for, and what kind of President she would be—will be one of the central battles of the campaign’s final weeks.



To examine these questions, TIME spoke with 20 current and former Harris campaign advisers, former aides in her vice presidential and Senate offices, senior officials from each of the past five presidential administrations, and a range of policy experts. The portrait that emerged was of a politician who is more practical than ideological—a cautious candidate running in a change election, juggling the liabilities and benefits of her ties to her boss, President Joe Biden, as well as her own past positions, all while trying to keep the focus on her opponent. For Harris, policy specifics are in service to the larger goal of her campaign, which is to present a credible alternative to a second Donald Trump presidency.

At Carnegie Mellon, Harris offered the most detailed look at her economic plans since taking over as the Democratic nominee. She’s proposing a $50,000 tax deduction to help Americans start more small businesses, and a $6,000 Child Tax Credit for families in the first year of a baby’s life. She plans to extend $35 insulin to all Americans and eliminate degree requirements for 500,000 federal jobs. She wants to invest in research and development in new manufacturing industries, and trim red tape to further the Biden Administration’s overhaul of America’s infrastructure. Perhaps more than any other presidential candidate in recent memory, Harris has focused on solving America’s housing crisis. She plans to offer $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers, a tax credit to incentivize builders, and pledges to build 3 million affordable housing units in her first term.


The following sites updated:


 

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