busterbrown
busterbrown's JournalWe have a Black POTUS!!!
Would the Tea Party even be in existence if Hillary had been elected?
I think the answer is no. The 1% could not have found a such a fanatical extreme base unless they could extract a huge racist element from the general population.
Boehner, might I remind you of this prop?
How much do you think tax payers were hit for on the PSA?
Never heard a peep out of you then...
I’m just asking....
when and if the POTUS should have one of those 9:00 p.m televised podium announcements to explain to the American people what exactly the Sequester means to the the country’s economic future...In my opinion there are millions of people who have no idea of what is up with this crap fest.
Does anyone agree with me or what. I’m beginning to freak out. Markets look like they are going to take a beating from this.... Yea, I know about Italy.. Still frightened!
The challenge of expectations ruined Seth Macfarlane tonight.
You can not expect someone who makes a living by being over the top to go out in front of the televised world and work with “how far can I go”, dilemma. He practically was apologizing before every attempted gag or joke....It was also way too long and last number was almost unbearable. The whole show needs to be shortened by 30 minutes...
Watching Golf Today, Accenture Championshup in Az.
Two Americans are playing in the championship round. Kuchar and Mahan, they just finshed the 12th and Mahan sinks an important clutch putt to keep close.
The Crowd immediately responds approvingly, by shout U.S.A. U.S.A. USA.
WTF this not a Ryder or President Cup. There are no Foreign golfers near the green and this dumb crowd starts shouting USA.
Let me tell, you most avid golfers in my opinion who show up at PGA events are nothing more
than Tea Bagger Republicans. It really makes it a drag to attend one of these events.
USA, USA, in my opinion is code for “We hate Obama”........ Yep, thats what I think.
What else could that have fucking meant?
4 year old shoots himself in stomach with Dad’s gun.
How the hell do you fall asleep with your son, knowing that your gun is within his reach?
These kind of heartbreaking stories need to get a lot more coverage by MSM every day.People need to know it could easily happen to them.
Funny how, Murders lead the nightly local news almost every night. Encourages people to fear and arm themselves. How about some fucking counter balance as well!
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/24/texas-4-year-old-dead-after-shooting-himself-with-fathers-gun/
Saw Stephen Soderbergh’s Side Effects tonight.
I enjoyed several films last year, but my favorites were two French Films, Rust and Bones and
the Intouchables......Lincoln was good and Argo was good. Never saw Zero, feared I would be too pissed off.....So thats my taste.
Not a big Soderbergh fan, but I really enjoyed this try to figure it out legal thriller.....Solid 8 which is practically impossible to find in February.
Have any of you seen the Horse show Cavalia?
I pass the Tent everyday as it is being set up in Burbank
I love horses when I was a kid. My father owned a small camp which had horses.
But man, the pure white tent which has a sort of a Cinderella/ Arabic feel to it seems
awfully creepy. I’ve seen clips on t.v. perfectly trained white horses...
Who wants to bet against me that the owners of the show are active right wingers...
I’m just saying..... have absolutely no proof of anything, but just having some fun throwing it out there.
Back to Cop whistle blowing story.
I know a lot of cops and I would say in general, that until they become more informed, 80% are hard right wingers..... Even though they get great healthcare and other benefits from
our “socialist govt”,, The ones I know are all caught up in moral issues, Abortion, Minority
crime issues and are very egotistical.
Since 2001 they have been riding the hero thing, even if they work in the suburbs of a wealthy
community in long Island. City Managers and local mayors are mostly all intimidated by the captain of the force and try to give him everything he desires.
Its time they all wake up and realize who they are working for...
This reporter definitely has blood on her hands!!!!!
One would have to consider Judith Miller to be in the top 10 contributors to the lies which put us
on the devastating path to the Iraq war. We should consistently remind the N.Y. Times of their
role in the blood letting as well!
Alexander Cockburn lays it all out on the table!!
WEEKEND EDITION AUGUST 16-18, 2003
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CounterPunch Diary Judy Miller's War
Judy Miller’s War
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Lay all Judith Miller’s New York Times stories end to end, from late 2001 to June 2003 and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an agenda, both manipulating and being manipulated by US government officials, Iraqi exiles and defectors, an entire Noah’s Ark of scam-artists.
And while Miller, either under her own single by-line or with NYT colleagues, was touting the bioterror threat, her book Germs, co-authored with Times-men Steven Engelberg and William Broad was in the bookstores and climbing the best seller lists. The same day that Miller opened an envelope of white powder (which turned out to be harmless) at her desk at the New York Times, her book was #6 on the New York Times best seller list. The following week (October 21, 2001), it reached #2. By October 28, –at the height of her scare-mongering campaign–it was up to #1. If we were cynical…
We don’t have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller’s major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam’s palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration’s propaganda drive towards invasion.
What does that make Miller? She was a witting cheer-leader for war. She knew what she was doing.
And what does Miller’s performance make the New York Times? Didn’t any senior editors at the New York Times or even the boss, A.O. Sulzberger, ask themselves whether it was appropriate to have a trio of Times reporters touting their book Germs on tv and radio, while simultaneously running stories in the New York Times headlining the risks of biowar and thus creating just the sort of public alarm beneficial to the sales of their book. Isn’t that the sort of conflict of interest prosecutors have been hounding Wall Street punters for?
The knives are certainly out for Miller. Leaked internal email traffic disclosed Miller’s self-confessed reliance on Ahmad Chalabi, a leading Iraqi exile with every motive to produce imaginative defectors eager to testify about Saddam’s biowar, chemical and nuclear arsenal. In late June Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post ran a long story about Miller’s ability in recent months to make the US Army jump, merely by threatening to go straight to Rumsfeld.
It was funny, but again, the conflicts of interest put the New York Times in a terrible light. Here was Miller, with a contract to write a new book on the post-invasion search for "weapons of mass destruction", lodged in the Army unit charged with that search, fiercely insisting that the unit prolong its futile hunt, while simultaneously working hand in glove with Chalabi. Journalists have to do some complex dance steps to get good stories, but a few red flags should have gone up on that one.
A brisk, selective timeline:
December 20, 2001, Headline, "Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms".
Miller rolls out a new Iraqi defector, in the ripe tradition of her favorite, Khidir Hamza, the utter fraud who called himself Saddam’s Bombmaker.
Story:
"An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.
"The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, gave details of the projects he said he worked on for President Saddam Hussein’s government in an extensive interview last week in Bangkok. The interview with Mr. Saeed was arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, the main Iraqi opposition group, which seeks the overthrow of Mr. Hussein.
"If verified, Mr. Saeed’s allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction."
Notice the sedate phrase "if verified". It never was verified. But the story served its purpose.
September 7, 2002: Headline: "US says Hussein intensifies quest for a-bomb parts".
This one was by Miller and Michael Gordon, promoting the aluminum tube nonsense: "In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium." All lies of course. Miller and Gordon emphasize "Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s chemical and biological arsenals".
Another of Miller’s defectors takes a bow:
"Speaking on the condition that neither he nor the country in which he was interviewed be identified, Ahmed al-Shemri, his pseudonym, said Iraq had continued developing, producing and storing chemical agents at many mobile and fixed secret sites throughout the country, many of them underground.
"All of Iraq is one large storage facility," said Mr. Shemri. Asked about his allegations, American officials said they believed these reports were accurate."
A final bit of brazen chicanery from Gordon and Miller:
"Iraq denied the existence of a germ warfare program entirely until 1995, when United Nations inspectors forced Baghdad to acknowledge it had such an effort. Then, after insisting that it had never weaponized bacteria or filled warheads, it again belatedly acknowledged having done so after Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein’s brother-in-law, defected to Jordan with evidence about the scale of the germ warfare program."
What Gordon and Miller leave out (or lacked the enterprise or desire to find out) is that Hussein Kamel told UN Inspectors that he had destroyed all Iraq’s WMDs, on Saddam Hussein’s orders.
September 13, 2002, headline: "White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons".
Miller and Gordon again, taking at face value the administration’s claims that it was "the intelligence agencies’ unanimous view that the type of [aluminum]tubes that Iraq has been seeking are used to make such centrifuges."
If nothing else this shows what rotten reporters Miller and Gordon are, because it now turns out the intelligence analysts across Washington were deeply divided on precisely this issue.
September 18, 2002: "Verification Is Difficult at Best, Say the Experts, and Maybe Impossible".
This is Miller helping the War Party lay down a preemptive barrage against the UN Inspectors: "verifying Iraq’s assertions that it has abandoned weapons of mass destruction, or finding evidence that it has not done so, may not be feasible,
according to officials and former weapons inspectors"
A cameo appearance by Khidhir Hamza reporting his supposed knowledge that "Iraq was now at the ‘pilot plant’ stage of nuclear production and within two to three years of mass producing centrifuges to enrich uranium for a bomb."
December 3, 2002, a Miller Special, murky with unidentified informants: "C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox".
Classic Miller: "The C.I.A. is investigating an informant’s accusation that Iraq obtained a particularly virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist who worked in a smallpox lab in Moscow during Soviet times"
January 24, 2003:"Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say".
Another Miller onslaught on the UN inspectors:
"Former Iraqi scientists, military officers and contractors have provided American intelligence agencies with a portrait of Saddam Hussein’s secret programs to develop and conceal chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that is starkly at odds with the findings so far of the United Nations weapons inspectors."
Al-Haideri is still in play: "Intelligence officials said that some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a contractor who fled Iraq in the summer of 2001. He later told American officials that chemical and biological weapons laboratories were hidden beneath hospitals and inside presidential palaces. Mr. Haideri was relocated anonymously to a small town in Virginia."
We’ll leave al-Haideri in well-earned retirement and Miller heading towards her supreme triumph of April 20, 2003, relaying the allegations of chemical and bio-weapon dumps made by an unnamed Iraqi scientist she’d never met.
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