October 14, 2015

The commentary is tripe

but that's only to be expected....after all, who paid for that microphone?

I don't know why she had to drag her mother into it....it's beyond tacky.

Bernie is amazing....the Energizer Candidate. He cannot be dragged off topic.

October 14, 2015

Well, based on the introductory remarks, it's Bernie by several lengths

Hillary is just pitiful....the other guys were touching, but not big-time ready.

October 13, 2015

City of Dearborn responds to segment on The O'Reilly Factor

http://www.wxyz.com/news/region/wayne-county/city-of-dearborn-responds-to-segment-on-the-oreilly-factor

DEARBORN, Mich. (WXYZ) - Dearborn residents are chiming in after a report that aired on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor earlier this week that portrayed the Detroit suburb as a “Mecca” for Muslims, a city where Muslims control the city council and the chief of police is also Muslim. The report spawned a rash of negative comments on social media, including ones that called for Dearborn to be bombed. The segment comes as Anti-Islamic protesters - some of them armed - are scheduled to protest at the Islamic Center of America this weekend. They are being told to bring firearms, if they are legally able to do so.

The satirical segment is not sitting well with Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly.

“People around the country who have no idea who we are and have already gotten some mixed messages to say the least, are just going to have reinforced, this negative and false image of what this community is,” he said.

In the video bit, correspondent Jesse Watters is seen asking people questions like, “Do you like Christmas?” “Do you miss the desert?” “Does the FBI ever come snooping around here?” “What is Sharia Law?”

Dearborn resident Alice Alaouie said the piece was hurtful and offensive.

“I was heartbroken, I was devastated because I knew that our community was misrepresented, a lot of things were taken out of context,” she said.

Mayor O’Reilly sent a letter to host Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday, expressing his dismay at how the segment lacked sensitivity, including factual errors that Muslims control the city that the police chief is Muslim.

Chief Ron Haddad, who happens to be Christian, asks even if he were Muslim, why would that be frowned upon?

“Dearborn is like any other American city, it’s progressive, it’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s a welcoming place, and it’s safe place and that’s something I take great pride in,” Haddad said.

MAYOR'S LETTER AT LINK

October 13, 2015

Afghan Doctor Slaughter Pulls Back Curtain (US SPECIAL FORCES) By Nicolas J S Davies

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/04/afghan-doctor-slaughter-pulls-back-curtain/

The apparent U.S. slaughter of at least 22 people at an Afghan hospital, including Doctors Without Borders medical staff, is part of the grim reality of indiscriminate death when U.S. Special Forces undertake their secret raids and often toss aside the rules of warfare, reports Nicolas J S Davies...On Dec. 26, 2009, a U.S. Special Operations team flew from Kabul to Ghazi Khan village in the Narang district of Kunar province. They attacked three houses, where they killed two adults and eight children. Seven of the children were handcuffed before they were shot. The youngest was 11 or 12, three more were 12, and one was 15. Both the United Nations and the Afghan government conducted investigations and confirmed all the details of the attack.

U.S. officials conducted their own inquiry, but no report was published and no U.S. military or civilian officials were held accountable. Finally, more than five years later, a New York Times report on Joint Special Operations Command’s (JSOC) Seal Team 6 named it as the U.S. force involved. But JSOC operations are officially secret and, to all practical purposes, immune from accountability. As a senior U.S. officer told the Times, “JSOC investigates JSOC, that’s part of the problem.”

Accountability for the U.S. attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz on Saturday, killing at least 22 people, is likely to be just as elusive. The bilateral security agreement that President Karzai refused to sign, but which President Ghani signed in September 2014, provides total immunity from Afghan law for U.S. forces and officials. So whoever should be held legally responsible for the massacre at the hospital will only be subject to accountability under U.S. military and civilian legal systems, which routinely fail to prosecute anyone for similar war crimes.

What makes this attack unique is not that U.S.-led forces attacked a hospital or killed civilians, but that, for the first time in many years, a Western NGO found itself operating behind enemy lines in territory controlled by Anti-Coalition Forces (ACF) or Taliban. Doctors Without Borders (or MSF for its French initials) thus found itself subject to U.S. rules of engagement under which Afghans have lived and died in their thousands for the past 14 years, effectively excluded from the protections formally guaranteed to civilians, the wounded and medical facilities by the Geneva Conventions...MORE


NO, WE CANNOT HAVE DEATH SQUADS, UNACCOUNTABLE TO THE US PEOPLE OR THEIR REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT. WE JUST CANNOT.

October 10, 2015

Hillary Clinton Spent Money Nearly as Fast as She Raised It in Third Quarter

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-10-01/hillary-clinton-spent-nearly-90-percent-of-funds-raised-in-3q

She shelled out approximately $9 of every $10 she raised in the latest quarter, according to preliminary figures...Hillary Clinton may have a burn rate problem.

The Democratic front-runner's presidential campaign spent about $25 million of the $28 million it raised in the third quarter of 2015, according to preliminary figures released by spokesman Josh Schwerin. Clinton expanded staffing in early primary states, and began spending money on television ads to try to solidify her position in the race against challenger Bernie Sanders.

While Clinton spent approximately $9 of every $10 she raised in the latest quarter, she has still built up a sizable war chest. According to Schwerin, Clinton has more than $32 million cash on hand, much of that remaining from the total $75 million the candidate has raised since entering the race in April. Larry Biddle, Howard Dean's former finance director, attributed Clinton's burn rate to staffing.

“I think Hillary is stacking her expenses on staffing,” Biddle said. “She's getting those higher-dollar folks that she needs to have for protection.”

MORE AT LINK

SO, WHAT IS SHE GETTING FOR ALL THAT MONEY? A BUNCH OF HAS-BEENS? OR RECYCLED ROVIANS? IF THE DEMOCRATS HAVE ANY "EXPERTS", THEY'VE BEEN KEEPING THEM UNDER WRAPS FOR YEARS.

October 10, 2015

The Power of False Narrative (BLACK HATS AND PROPAGANDA) By Robert Parry

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/09/28/the-power-of-false-narrative/

In this age of pervasive media, the primary method of social control is through the creation of narratives delivered to the public through newspapers, TV, radio, computers, cell phones and any other gadget that can convey information. This reality has given rise to an obsession among the power elite to control as much of this messaging as possible...So, regarding U.S. relations toward the world, we see the State Department, the White House, Pentagon, NATO and other agencies pushing various narratives to sell the American people and other populations on how they should view U.S. policies, rivals and allies. The current hot phrase for this practice is “strategic communications” or Stratcom, which blends psychological operations, propaganda and P.R. into one mind-bending smoothie.

I have been following this process since the early 1980s when the Reagan administration sought to override “the Vietnam Syndrome,” a public aversion to foreign military interventions that followed the Vietnam War. To get Americans to “kick” this syndrome, Reagan’s team developed “themes” about overseas events that would push American “hot buttons.” Tapping into the Central Intelligence Agency’s experience in psy-ops targeted at foreign audiences, President Ronald Reagan and CIA Director William J. Casey assembled a skilled team inside the White House led by CIA propaganda specialist Walter Raymond Jr. From his new perch on the National Security Council staff, Raymond oversaw inter-agency task forces to sell interventionist policies in Central America and other trouble spots. The game, as Raymond explained it in numerous memos to his underlings, was to glue black hats on adversaries and white hats on allies, whatever the truth really was.

The fact that many of the U.S.-backed forces – from the Nicaraguan Contras to the Guatemalan military – were little more than corrupt death squads couldn’t be true, at least according to psy-ops doctrine. They had to be presented to the American public as wearing white hats. Thus, the Contras became the “moral equals of our Founding Fathers” and Guatemala’s murderous leader Efrain Rios Montt was getting a “bum rap” on human rights, according to the words scripted for President Reagan. The scheme also required that anyone – say, a journalist, a human rights activist or a congressional investigator – who contradicted this white-hat mandate must be discredited, marginalized or destroyed, a routine of killing any honest messenger.

But it turned out that the most effective part of this propaganda strategy was to glue black hats on adversaries. Since nearly all foreign leaders have serious flaws, it proved much easier to demonize them – and work the American people into war frenzies – than it was to persuade the public that Washington’s favored foreign leaders were actually paragons of virtue. Once the black hat was jammed on a foreign leader’s head, you could say whatever you wanted about him and disparage any American who questioned the extreme depiction as a “fill-in-the-blank apologist” or a “stooge” or some other ugly identifier that would either silence the dissenter or place him or her outside the bounds of acceptable debate...

AND SO THEY DID, REPEATEDLY, WITH A VENGEANCE: LIBYA, SYRIA, UKRAINE...OBAMA, CLINTON AND KERRY...AND THIS HAPPENS EVERY DAY ON DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND, TOO. IT'S DISGUSTING AND DISHONEST.

WE CAN ONLY FIGHT AND WIN WITH TRUTH!

MORE AT LINK--MUST READ!

October 10, 2015

Robert Reich: Bernie Sanders Tells the Truth

http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-bernie-sanders-tells-truth?akid=13552.227380.qzrMS2&rd=1&src=newsletter1043635&t=9

VIDEO INTERVIEW AND TRANSCRIPT AT LINK

October 9, 2015

The U.S. Is Much More Violent Than Other Countries

http://wonkwire.com/2015/10/02/the-u-s-is-much-more-violent-than-other-countries/



Slate: “The U.S. really is far more violent than other advanced countries, and you need only to glance at the above chart to see it. The chart, created by Kieran Healy, a professor of sociology at Duke University and republished here with permission, shows the rate at which people die by assault in the U.S. and how that rate has changed over time in orange. In blue, it shows the rates of 23 other wealthy countries. The good news is that the U.S.’s rate has steadily declined since 1980. The bad news is that we’re still about three times as violent as any other country in the dataset.” http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/02/is_the_u_s_more_violent_than_other_countries_what_the_data_shows.html

October 9, 2015

Insiders: Sanders needs big money

I AM POSTING THIS FOR DISCUSSION---WHAT DO YOU ALL THINK ABOUT THIS?

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/insiders-bernie-small-donors-214350

The consensus on the Vermont senator's cash haul: Small-dollars donors aren't enough to beat Hillary Clinton...Bernie Sanders rails against big money in politics and insists that he doesn’t want an allied super PAC — but the majority of Democrats in early states say he can’t rely on smaller-dollar donors alone if he wants to beat Hillary Clinton. That’s the assessment of this week’s POLITICO Caucus, our bipartisan survey of the top activists, operatives and strategists in the early states. This week, the Caucus has expanded to include South Carolina and Nevada in addition to our insiders already participating in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The consensus on Sanders’ need for big money was strong: 83 percent of South Carolina Democrats, 62 percent of Nevada Democrats and 54 percent of New Hampshire Democrats said he cannot beat Clinton with only small-dollar donors. Of Iowa Democrats, 40 percent said the same. Insiders from those states said that at best he could win a contest or two, but the big donations and unlimited contributions that a super PAC brings would be essential if his campaign stretches into the later stages of the primary season.

"Small donors are an important component but if the campaign drifts into the larger more expensive states he will need more dollars than he will receive from just small donors," said one South Carolina Democrat, who like all participants was granted anonymity in order to speak freely.

Agreed an Iowa Democrat, "During the caucus, absolutely. But it's difficult to go deep into the primary without the resources to back a full campaign in several states."

An Iowa Republican was more skeptical: "Even a socialist has to understand math. It doesn't add up. She'll crush him."

...On the Democratic side, Clinton had the best ground game across the board, insiders said.


MUCH MORE AT LINK

October 8, 2015

Edward Snowden interview: 'Smartphones can be taken over'

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34444233

Smartphone users can do "very little" to stop security services getting "total control" over their devices, US whistleblower Edward Snowden has said. The former intelligence contractor told the BBC's Panorama that UK intelligence agency GCHQ had the power to hack into phones without their owners' knowledge. Mr Snowden said GCHQ could gain access to a handset by sending it an encrypted text message and use it for such things as taking pictures and listening in. The UK government declined to comment....He did not suggest that either GCHQ or the NSA were interested in mass-monitoring of citizens' private communications but said both agencies had invested heavily in technology allowing them to hack smartphones. "They want to own your phone instead of you," he said.

Mr Snowden talked about GCHQ's "Smurf Suite", a collection of secret intercept capabilities individually named after the little blue imps of Belgian cartoon fame.

"Dreamy Smurf is the power management tool which means turning your phone on and off with you knowing," he said.

"Nosey Smurf is the 'hot mic' tool. For example if it's in your pocket, [GCHQ] can turn the microphone on and listen to everything that's going on around you - even if your phone is switched off because they've got the other tools for turning it on.

"Tracker Smurf is a geo-location tool which allows [GCHQ] to follow you with a greater precision than you would get from the typical triangulation of cellphone towers."

Mr Snowden also referred to a tool known as Paronoid Smurf.

"It's a self-protection tool that's used to armour [GCHQ's] manipulation of your phone. For example, if you wanted to take the phone in to get it serviced because you saw something strange going on or you suspected something was wrong, it makes it much more difficult for any technician to realise that anything's gone amiss."

Once GCHQ had gained access to a user's handset, Mr Snowden said the agency would be able to see "who you call, what you've texted, the things you've browsed, the list of your contacts, the places you've been, the wireless networks that your phone is associated with.

"And they can do much more. They can photograph you".

MORE