KoKo
KoKo's JournalHillary Clinton is playing a Dangerous Game: How her Anti-Bernie TP's Could Cost Her & America
Hillary Clinton is playing a dangerous game: How her anti-Bernie talking points could cost her — and America — big time
As her lead in the primary widens, Clinton seems to be moving back toward the center. This could be a huge mistake
Conor Lynch
Hillary Clinton is starting to remind progressives why the name Clinton brings up such a mixed bag of emotions, and why it’s so hard to believe Clinton’s pivot to the left this campaign season. Lately, the “progressive who likes to get things done” has gone after her main competition, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for his advocacy of a single-payer healthcare system, which is a staple of progressive policy, found in many other industrialized states like Canada and Taiwan. Taking a page out of the GOP handbook, Clinton and her campaigners have gone into fear-mongering mode about the fact that such a plan would cause an increase in taxes on the middle class.
“Hardworking, middle-class families need a raise, not a tax increase,” said Clinton during the second Democratic debate, while a senior adviser to a pro-Clinton organization tweeted: “Hillary Clinton was the only one who ruled out raising taxes on the middle class – others talked about raising taxes to 70 and 90 percent.” Of course, this is nonsense. Sanders only stated the fact that the top rate was over 90 percent under Dwight Eisenhower. He was quite clear when he said: “We haven’t come up with an exact number yet, but it will not be as high as the number under Dwight D. Eisenhower, which was 90 percent. I’m not that much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower.” (Plus, people seem to forget that he is talking about a progressive tax, with top rates only on income over a certain level, not all of the income an eligible individual earns.)
Indeed, the Clinton campaign is starting to sound more and more like Republicans. Chris Christie said something similar last month (albeit more crudely): “The socialist says they’re going to pay for everything and give you everything for free, except they don’t tell you they’re going to raise your taxes to 90 percent to do it.”
“Pants on Fire,” ruled PolitiFact, calling it a “grossly misleading characterization.”
Grossly misleading characterizations are expected from GOP candidates, but the Clinton campaign? Nobody mentions the fact that a single-payer plan (which would admittedly be impossible to get through Congress in today’s political climate) would significantly lower the expenses of middle-class families and, with the proper regulations and price controls, lower the outrageously high healthcare costs in the United States.
It is certainly an interesting strategy for the Clinton campaign, which has regained its confidence over the past month or so, as her numbers have jumped more than 10 percentage points since the first debate in October. (Sanders has also gone up about 6 points, but is now more than 25 points behind Clinton.) Things are going well, so why would Clinton attack Sanders with a petty GOP-style tactic?
-------
Sanders has been quite clear from the onset that he will not be a spoiler and that he will vote for the Democratic nomination. But Clinton is making it harder for progressives to support her. With a history of hawkish foreign policy and Wall Street backing, she truly is the lesser to two evils. (A neoliberal is better than a fascist, after all.) But many on the left tend to vote with their conscience, and going after single-payer healthcare and hurling dishonest attacks on Sanders will only alienate progressives further.
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/20/hillary_clinton_is_playing_a_dangerous_game_how_her_anti_bernie_talking_points_could_cost_her_and_america_big_time/
War in Yemen: The Yemen Peace Talks Turn into Crisis Management--A View: TRNN
Yemen Peace Talks Turn into Crisis ManagementA resolution to the conflict is at risk because key players that have enormous power in the conflict are not at the table, says Souciant.com associate editor Bilal Ahmed. - December 17, 2015
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS THE "YOU TUBE:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=15318
Bio
Bilal Ahmed is the associate editor of Souciant.com. He is also a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London.
SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.UN-sponsored Yemeni peace talks in Switzerland appear to be at risk. The Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed government forces loyal to President Mansur Hadi have stopped talking directly to each other amid differences over the government demands for the release of senior officials being held by the Houthi rebels. The dispute comes amid fresh fighting between the Houthis and the government forces in which at least 15 people were killed from both sides. The Houthis say they are ready to free the prisoners once a permanent ceasefire has been agreed upon. UN special envoy to Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, was shuttling between the two sides trying to bridge differences. In spite of all these new developments, let's assume the talks will resume. If they do, what kind of settlement and government would be expected in Yemen?We are taking this up with our next guest, Bilal Ahmed.
Bilal is back by popular demand. You must see his interview yesterday. And he is an associate editor of Souciant.com. He's also a Ph.D. student at SOAS of the University of London. Thank you so much for joining us again, Bilal.
BILAL AHMED: It's no problem.
PERIES: So Bilal, let's start with some prognosis on the peace talks first.
AHMED: Well, the peace talks are under threat, as your report indicated. And the, there are two main reasons why. Three, if you want to get a bit more abstract, which of course we favor. But the first reason why is these prisoners that the Houthis have that they don't want to release--so two of the prisoners are Mahmoud al-Subaihi, who is the defense minister under Hadi, and also Hadi's brother, whose name is Nasser. So as you can imagine, this is a bit personal for Hadi's side, because one of the people is his brother. And these are also people who have been involved in intelligence operations, as well as military operations all over Yemen. But especially in Saada and the northern provinces, where the Houthis are primarily based.So part of this is that the Houthis want a more permanent ceasefire and a promise of one. But some of this is also that there's a great deal of controversy, especially in the coalition itself, about how to feel about these prisoners and whether or not they should be released.
PERIES: These are high-stake prisoners that they have. I can see why they're holding onto them. So Bilal, yesterday right after the interview you indicated really what we should be discussing is what's next. If these formalities and negotiations succeed, what kind of result and settlement we are going to be looking at, and what the actual government might look like in Yemen. So let's take that up.
AHMED: Well, the problem is that these talks can't possibly result in a new governing framework, because of the people that are actually there. These talks are currently occurring between Hadi's loyalists, [inaud.] Saleh, who are there alongside the Houthis because Saleh's loyalists are currently backing the Houthis, which is itself a bit complicated given that Saleh waged multiple wars against the Houthis before he was deposed from power. But they are, as you can see from that, those aren't all, those aren't all the power interests that are currently at play in Yemen. So you don't have Saudi Arabia at the peace talks. You don't have the United States. You also don't have tribal groups.
For example, your report talked about the fighting in [amare] which left 15 people dead on both sides. The tribal forces in Marib are particularly strong, and they've been particularly well-mobilized against the Houthis. However, the tribal forces don't have their own representative at the talks. They're simply de facto represented by Hadi's loyalists and Hadi himself. But that's not going to be a sustainable governing framework, given the fact that there are so many interests in Yemen with their own ambitions and their own desires from a post-civil war framework.And it's worth noting that a successful prisoner exchange did occur in the south of the country, but it wasn't strictly speaking between the coalition and the Houthis, as though these are two neat sides that can be neatly defined as such. They were given over by the southern resistance movement, which is, has been jump started especially as of late, out of the interest to form an independent southern federation or an independent southern autonomous zone based on the principles of the old peoples' democratic republic of Yemen.So as you can see from all this, even at the peace talks, we're talking about sides that are being represented by different sides that don't totally reflect the complexity of the Yemeni political situation.
And that is, before we even talk about the fact that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Islamic State more recently, but Islamic State's a bit new, are also operating within the country, especially in the province of Hadramaut, to the southeast. And you could see a potential situation, even if they resolve these problems in the fact that not everybody who is fighting the war is actually independently sitting at the peace table. Even if they do solve that, you still don't have a strategy for dealing with these terrorist groups. So you could easily just see the civil war evolve into being shifted away from the capital city and major metropolitan centers and towards where these al-Qaeda forces actually are.
PERIES: Now, Bilal, yesterday when we were talking about this, we were talking about the advancements that the IS is making in the country, which probably has given a sense of urgency to trying to settle the civil dispute in Yemen. But as you say, if all the players involved and has interest there is not at the table, this is not going to work. Is there any measures underway to make sure that all the players are at the table?
MORE AT THIS LINK:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=15318
Why the Bernie Sanders Revolution is Not Televised
Why the Bernie Sanders Revolution is Not Televised
Will Bunch
Posted: 12/17/2015 10:51 pm EST
As a writer, I never expected to fall in love with the 2016 election. As recently as 6 or 7 months ago, I fully expected that America was on a collision course with dueling oligarchic dynasties -- Bush 3 vs. Clinton 2 -- in a race where the (not unimportant) differences would be overshadowed by their similarities, including the fact that Wall Street would be happy with either one in the Oval Office.
Then a gruff, 74-year-old grandfather showed up to change everything. Like a lot of progressive-minded folks, I'd grown more aware in recent years of Sen. Bernie Sanders, and his cast-out-the-money-changers rants against income inequality, corporate greed, and billionaire influence in American politics. But I thought his entrance in the 2016 race was basically a protest move, nothing more. Then came the crowds, and the enthusiasm, which led to more crowds and more enthusiasm, which led to a surge in the polls, especially in New Hampshire and Iowa.
The Sanders surge stirred something within my 56-plus-year-old soul. When I was 9 years old and watched cops assaulting hippies in the streets of Chicago in 1968 -- my first true political memory -- I knew instinctively that I was on the side of the hippies. And I was sure -- in my pre-pre-adolescent naivety -- that someone from this surge of Baby Boomers in the American streets would one day lead this nation into an Age of Aquarius, a new era that would advance civil rights and personal freedom while putting the kibosh on foolish wars like Vietnam. But someday never came. The two Baby Boomer presidents turned out to be a Young Republican Yale cheerleader (Bush 2) and a didn't-inhale, middle-of-the-road triangulator (Clinton 1). The dream went unfulfilled -- until Sanders arrived at the end of his 50-plus year odyssey -- tousled grey hair, slightly stooped, voice grown hoarse.
By this fall, I had to hit to road to see for myself. I traveled to Sanders' rallies in places like Manassas, Va., where his fans had to pass a phalanx of protesters waving Confederate flags, and Boston, where 20,000 supporters filled every inch of a concrete convention hall or waited for him in a dark and frigid park. I went to rural Vermont to find the no-electricity "sugar shack" where Sanders retreated in the mid-1960s, and I went to the very-electric neon lights of the Las Vegas Strip for a climactic face-off against Hillary Clinton, with Bernie's name on the big video screen just as you might find Don Rickles or Wayne Newton. The result is my new e-book, The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream -- an Amazon Kindle Single.
I learned a lot -- some things that surprised me and some things that I'd suspected but needed to see for myself. I went to the Brooklyn neighborhood where Sanders grew up in a cramped, second-story flat off of Kings Highway, and I talked by phone with the candidate's older brother Larry from England, where he's a Green Party activist. Larry Sanders told me his little brother was the kid in grade school who couldn't tell a lie -- even if it got him in trouble. As he grew, it was other people's lies that drove him to activism -- his beloved Dodgers promising to stay in Brooklyn before splitting for L.A., the falsehoods that both Nixon and Kennedy told about U.S. policy toward Cuba and the Third World, and finally the lies from the Nobel laureates who ran the University of Chicago and who claimed, falsely, that university-owned housing wasn't segregated.
I also learned about the remarkable bond between a candidate who never altered his core political values over a half-century, and a new generation of voters who were craving the kind of authenticity that only Sanders -- with a real track record, not an agenda driven by pollsters or focus groups -- could provide. It was a bond that had its more modern roots in the Occupy Wall Street movement, with many veterans of that short-lived 2011 protest -- determined to see real social change and not just make a statement -- getting down with the Sanders campaign, especially after another popular liberal senator, Elizabeth Warren, didn't run. The result was those enormous crowds from Boston to Seattle.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/why-the-bernie-sanders-re_b_8823988.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
Yes!!!-- Liberal group Democracy For America endorses Bernie Sanders--Politico
Liberal group Democracy For America endorses Bernie Sanders
By Gabriel Debenedetti
12/17/15 12:00 PM EST
Bernie Sanders picked up his second significant progressive endorsement of the day on Thursday afternoon, and this one might sting for Hillary Clinton.
Democracy For America, the 1 million-member liberal group that helped stoke much of the pro-Elizabeth Warren movement early in the 2016 election cycle, is backing the independent Vermont senator after he earned 88 percent of the over 270,000 votes cast in the group’s online membership poll, compared with 10 percent for Clinton and 1 percent for both Martin O’Malley and the option not to endorse at all.
The move is significant given DFA's high threshold for endorsing. The group has existed since 2004, and no candidate had ever previously made it past the two-thirds mark necessary for the nod — which will come with fundraising help and an on-the-ground organization in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, DFA executive director Charles Chamberlain wrote in an email due to go to supporters on Thursday.
“This isn’t the first time DFA has stood side by side with Bernie Sanders. Our organization has been working with him to make progressive change happen for years,” wrote Chamberlain, announcing the results after all three candidates wrote DFA members letters asking for their support in recent weeks. “Together, we’ve run issue campaigns focused on raising the minimum wage, overturning Citizens United, and stopping the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership — and he has regularly chatted with our members on several DFA Live conference calls over the years."
“With today’s endorsement, DFA members are joining Bernie’s ‘political revolution’ and working to take it both to the White House and up-and-down the ballot, in races coast to coast,” added Chamberlain in a statement.
Sanders has the backing of a large and active online community, but DFA also has close ties to Clinton: It was founded by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who is an active surrogate for the front-runner in the early-voting states. The group is even based in Vermont — Dean's and Sanders’ shared home state.
The nod makes Thursday an extra-sweet day for the underdog Sanders, coming just hours after news broke that he also picked up the endorsement of the Communication Workers of America, one of the few national unions to back him over the former secretary of state.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/bernie-sanders-democracy-for-america-endorsement-216902
McCain furious over Russian rocket engine provision
What isn't McCain furious over? His whole life and political career has been over "Being Furious."And, he is no less crazy than Trump/Palin-------------
McCain furious over Russian rocket engine provision
Language in the omnibus spending bill would remove restrictions on buying them.
By Jeremy Herb and Seung Min Kim
12/16/15 01:04 PM EST
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/john-mccain-russian-rocket-engine-216864
The Arizona Republican is infuriated at Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) for tucking a provision in the massive 2,000-page bill that allows defense contractor United Launch Alliance to keep buying Russian-made rocket engines — reversing language McCain championed in the National Defense Authorization Act that limited ULA to purchasing nine rocket engines.
“I can’t speak for him nor do I give a damn,” McCain said of Shelby. “Why would I give a damn what he says?”
McCain was so angry over the Russian engine provision being added to the bill that he indicated he would oppose the entire $1.1 trillion spending bill.
He slammed Shelby and Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, for big-footing his committee’s bill “in the middle of the night in the worst, disgraceful fashion,” while never proposing an amendment on Russian rocket engines during debate on his defense policy bill.
-------------
Shelby, who has ULA’s rocket-building facilities in his state, argues the Pentagon wants to give ULA the relief in the omnibus to ensure that it has at least two rockets it can use to launch satellites into space.
The Air Force is developing an American-made alternative, but Pentagon officials have warned it may not be ready by the 2019 deadline set by Congress. The omnibus bill included an additional $144 million for developing the U.S.-made engine.
“The language included in the omnibus would reverse the reckless restriction put on the use of the RD-180, which undermines our national security,” Shelby said in a statement. “This language directly addresses the concerns of our nation’s military leaders who argue that there will be a multi-year gap in access to space for national security launches under current policy.”
But McCain has accused ULA of manufacturing a crisis to get the law changed by not bidding on the first military satellite launch. On the Senate floor Wednesday, he vowed to take up the issue again in next year’s defense authorization bill — threatening a “complete and indefinite” ban on Russian-made engines.
“This omnibus appropriations bill will send hundreds of millions of dollars to Vladimir Putin, his cronies, and Russia’s military-industrial base as Russia continues to occupy Crimea and destabilize Ukraine,” McCain said. “We have sought to be flexible and open to new information, but if this is how our efforts are repaid, then perhaps we need to look at a complete and indefinite restriction on Putin’s rocket engines.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/john-mccain-russian-rocket-engine-216864
NATO’s Got a Brand New (Syrian) Bag--The Latest Pepe Escobar
NATO’s Got a Brand New (Syrian) Bag
By Pepe Escobar
December 15, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "RT" -
The FSB, SVR and GRU in Russia, while drawing all the right connections, cannot help but conclude that Washington is letting Cold War 2.0 escalate to the boiling point.
Imagine Russian intel surveying the geopolitical chessboard.
A Russian passenger jet is bombed by an affiliate of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. A Russian fighter jet is ambushed and downed by Turkey; here is a partial yet credible scenario of how it may have happened.
Ukrainian right-wing goons sabotage the Crimean electricity supply. A Syrian army base near Deir Ezzor - an important outpost against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh in eastern Syria – is hit by the US-led Coalition of the Dodgy Opportunists (CDO). The IMF “pardons” Ukraine’s debt to Russia as it joins, de facto, Cold War 2.0.
And this is just a shortlist.
This is a logical progression. The NATO-GCC compound in Syria is devoured by angst. Russia’s entry into the Syrian war theater – a proxy war, not a civil war – threw all elaborate, downright criminal regime change plans into disarray.
If the US-led CDO were really committed to fighting ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, they would be working side by side with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), not bombing it or trying to stall it.
And they would be actively trying to shut down the key Turkey-Syria crossroads - the Jarablus corridor which is in fact a 24/7 Jihadi Highway.
NATO’s game in Syria wallows in slippery ambiguity. Discussions with dissident EU diplomats in Brussels, not necessarily NATO vassals, reveal a counter-narrative of how the Pentagon clearly mapped out the Russian strategy; how they interpreted Russian forces to be relatively isolated; and how they decided to allow Ankara under Sultan Erdogan to go wild - a perfect tool offering plausible deniability.
Continued at........
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43733.htm
A Special Relationship: The United States Is Teaming Up With Al Qaeda, Again--Alexander Cockburn
A Special Relationship
The United States Is Teaming Up With Al Qaeda, Again
By Andrew Cockburn
December 14, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "Harpers"
- One morning early in 1988, Ed McWilliams, a foreign-service officer posted to the American Embassy in Kabul, heard the thump of a massive explosion from somewhere on the other side of the city. It was more than eight years after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the embassy was a tiny enclave with only a handful of diplomats. McWilliams, a former Army intelligence operative, had made it his business to venture as much as possible into the Soviet-occupied capital. Now he set out to see what had happened.
It was obviously something big: although the explosion had taken place on the other side of Sher Darwaza, a mountain in the center of Kabul, McWilliams had heard it clearly. After negotiating a maze of narrow streets on the south side of the city, he found the site. A massive car bomb, designed to kill as many civilians as possible, had been detonated in a neighborhood full of Hazaras, a much-persecuted minority.
McWilliams took pictures of the devastation, headed back to the embassy, and sent a report to Washington. It was very badly received — not because someone had launched a terrorist attack against Afghan civilians, but because McWilliams had reported it. The bomb, it turned out, had been the work of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedeen commander who received more CIA money and support than any other leader of the Afghan rebellion. The attack, the first of many, was part of a CIA-blessed scheme to “put pressure” on the Soviet presence in Kabul. Informing the Washington bureaucracy that Hekmatyar’s explosives were being deployed to kill civilians was therefore entirely unwelcome.
“Those were Gulbuddin’s bombs,” McWilliams, a Rhode Islander with a gift for laconic understatement, told me recently. “He was supposed to get the credit for this.” In the meantime, the former diplomat recalled, the CIA pressured him to “report a little less specifically about the humanitarian consequences of those vehicle bombs.”
I tracked down McWilliams, now retired to the remote mountains of southern New Mexico, because the extremist Islamist groups currently operating in Syria and Iraq called to mind the extremist Islamist groups whom we lavishly supported in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Hekmatyar, with his documented fondness for throwing acid in women’s faces, would have had nothing to learn from Al Qaeda. When a courageous ABC News team led by my wife, Leslie Cockburn, interviewed him in 1993, he had beheaded half a dozen people earlier that day. Later, he killed their translator.
In the wake of 9/11, the story of U.S. support for militant Islamists against the Soviets became something of a touchy subject. Former CIA and intelligence officials like to suggest that the agency simply played the roles of financier and quartermaster. In this version of events, the dirty work — the actual management of the campaign and the dealings with rebel groups — was left to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). It was Pakistan’s fault that at least 70 percent of total U.S. aid went to the fundamentalists, even if the CIA demanded audited accounts on a regular basis.
The beneficiaries, however, have not always been content to play along with the official story. Asked by the ABC News team whether he remembered Charlie Wilson, the Texas congressman later immortalized in print and onscreen as the patron saint of the mujahedeen, Hekmatyar fondly recalled that “he was a good friend. He was all the time supporting our jihad.” Others expressed the same point in a different way. Abdul Haq, a mujahedeen commander who might today be described as a “moderate rebel,” complained loudly during and after the Soviet war in Afghanistan about American policy. The CIA “would come with a big load of ammunition and money and supplies to these [fundamentalist] groups. We would tell them, ‘What the hell is going on? You are creating a monster in this country.’ ”
Continued at........
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43724.htm
Negotiating the Whirlwind: Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria?
(David Remnick's "Insider Visit" with SOS John Kerry--seems a fitting post here on "Foreign Affairs" given the situation we find ourselves in with fighting ISIS/DAESH which has many worrying about WWIII.)
Its a long, wonky article...but, as it goes on, eventually gets into the issues we discuss here daily. Remnick is well respected, in some circles of power, and it is the kind of long journalistic article with interview/insight of those in power that we rarely see these days.
------------
Negotiating the Whirlwind Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria? -- New Yorker
Profiles December 21, 2015 Issue
Negotiating the Whirlwind
Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria?
By David Remnick
John Kerry, the sixty-eighth Secretary of State of the United States, was born to a temperament of wintry rectitude. He is descended from the Winthrops, who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the Forbeses, a Brahmin clan that made its money in railways and in exporting tea, silver, and opium to China. His father was a diplomat. Kerry attended St. Paul’s and Yale (where he was in Skull and Bones) and, as a naval officer in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star, and the Silver Star. He dated Jacqueline Kennedy’s half-sister, sailed with J.F.K., and married twice into substantial fortunes. Despite the codes of his class, however, Kerry was never entirely subtle about his ambitions. When he was in prep school, his classmates used to play “Hail to the Chief” to him on the kazoo.
In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presidential race to George W. Bush, who is widely considered the worst President of the modern era, he refused to challenge the results, despite his suspicion that in certain states, particularly Ohio, where the Electoral College count hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines. But he could not suffer the defeat in complete silence. He was outraged that Bush, who had won a stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, used campaign surrogates, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to slime his military record. He was furious, too, at Robert Shrum, his chief strategist, and other campaign advisers who had restrained him from hitting back.
“For a long period, after 2004, every time he even half fell asleep all he saw was voting machines in the state of Ohio,” Mike Barnicle, a close friend of Kerry’s and a former columnist for the Boston Globe, told me. This summer, Barnicle spent time with Kerry on Nantucket, where Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz, have a house on the water and a seventy-six-foot, seven-million-dollar sailboat called Isabel. “We were sitting in the bow,” Barnicle recalled, “and we were talking about a bunch of different things—about Iran, about what the President of Iran was like—and I said, ‘Other than not being President, this is pretty good.’ There was a security boat sailing off to the side of us. Then he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I realize how badly Shrum screwed me.’ ”
Continued at..........
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/negotiating-the-whirlwind?intcid=mod-most-popular
Fmr. Bush Official Reveals --The Pentagon/MIC More Important than Congress or The People!
Empire Files: Fmr. Bush Official says the Empire's Ship is Sinking
Published on Dec 11, 2015
Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff says Pentagon is the Problem and it Rules our Presidents more than Congress or the American People (Voters).
Abby Martin interviews retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former national security advisor to the Reagan administration, who spent years as an assistant to Secretary of State Colin Powell during both Bush administrations. Today, he is honest about the unfixable corruption inside the establishment and the corporate interests driving foreign policy.
Hear a rare insider's view of what interests are behind U.S. wars, the manipulation of intelligence, the intertwining of the military and corporate world, and why the U.S. Empire is doomed. http://multimedia.telesurtv.net/v/the...
Negotiating the Whirlwind: Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria? -- New Yorker
(Its a long, wonky article...but, as it goes on, eventually gets into the issues we discuss here daily. Remnick is well respected, in some circles of power, and it is the kind of long journalistic article with interview/insight of those in power that we rarely see these days.)
-----------
Profiles December 21, 2015 Issue
Negotiating the Whirlwind
Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria?
By David Remnick
John Kerry, the sixty-eighth Secretary of State of the United States, was born to a temperament of wintry rectitude. He is descended from the Winthrops, who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the Forbeses, a Brahmin clan that made its money in railways and in exporting tea, silver, and opium to China. His father was a diplomat. Kerry attended St. Paul’s and Yale (where he was in Skull and Bones) and, as a naval officer in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star, and the Silver Star. He dated Jacqueline Kennedy’s half-sister, sailed with J.F.K., and married twice into substantial fortunes. Despite the codes of his class, however, Kerry was never entirely subtle about his ambitions. When he was in prep school, his classmates used to play “Hail to the Chief” to him on the kazoo.
In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presidential race to George W. Bush, who is widely considered the worst President of the modern era, he refused to challenge the results, despite his suspicion that in certain states, particularly Ohio, where the Electoral College count hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines. But he could not suffer the defeat in complete silence. He was outraged that Bush, who had won a stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, used campaign surrogates, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to slime his military record. He was furious, too, at Robert Shrum, his chief strategist, and other campaign advisers who had restrained him from hitting back.
“For a long period, after 2004, every time he even half fell asleep all he saw was voting machines in the state of Ohio,” Mike Barnicle, a close friend of Kerry’s and a former columnist for the Boston Globe, told me. This summer, Barnicle spent time with Kerry on Nantucket, where Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz, have a house on the water and a seventy-six-foot, seven-million-dollar sailboat called Isabel. “We were sitting in the bow,” Barnicle recalled, “and we were talking about a bunch of different things—about Iran, about what the President of Iran was like—and I said, ‘Other than not being President, this is pretty good.’ There was a security boat sailing off to the side of us. Then he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I realize how badly Shrum screwed me.’ ”
Continued at..........
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/negotiating-the-whirlwind?intcid=mod-most-popular
Profile Information
Member since: 2001Number of posts: 84,711