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Topic of the Day

Another great Matt Taibbi article just posted. Here's the close of it.

...Democratic congressman and ex-Mueller deputy Dan Goldman, present during Archer’s in camera hearing and usually a font of viperous overconfidence, looked like an elk taking a bullet yesterday as he stammered out the admission that Biden was on the phone with his son’s “potential business partners — or business partners.” Watch this agonizing sequence as Goldman tries to thread a needle between Archer’s testimony about the phone calls and Biden’s former comments that “I’ve never spoken to my son about his business dealings”:




...The cognoscenti never figured out or accepted that the support for protest candidates like Trump or Bernie Sanders even is rooted in wide generalized rage directed their way. To this day they don’t accept it. They keep thinking they can wish it away, describe it away (see Bump’s description of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as “not at this point serious competition”), indict it away. If you drop 76 charges on a candidate and he goes up in polls, you might want to consider that you might be part of the problem. But they can’t take even that heavy a hint.

This race is turning into a parodic repeat of 2016, the difference being the shock waves that rippled across Washington on Election Day that year are already here, with all conceivable counter-measures already deployed. Instead of starting up a Russia investigation leaders hope will end in indictment, this time the guy is already indicted many times over, and voters have already signaled they’ll be unfazed by conviction.

Democrats meanwhile are repeating the process of cooling turnout by blasting their own protest candidate, and instead of an alert-if-off-putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket, the standard-bearer is a half-sentient, influence-peddling version of Donovan’s Brain, with no one behind him but Kamala Harris — who just got asked by a trying-to-be-friendly reporter at ABC if “race and gender” were a cause of her own historically low approval rating. Absent a big switch, our future is either Donald Trump, who by next year will be in more restraints than Hannibal Lecter on the tarmac, or this DNC dog’s breakfast. Other countries are surely already laughing. It’s getting harder to resist joining them.
 
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This from scheerpost.com:

Chris Hedges: The Crucifixion of Julian Assange


...Imperial powers do not forgive those who make public the sordid and immoral inner workings of Empire. Empires are fragile constructions. Their power is as much one of perception as of military strength. The virtues they claim to uphold and defend, usually in the name of their superior civilization, are a mask for pillage, corruption, lies, the exploitation of cheap labor, indiscriminate mass violence against innocents and state terror.

The current American Empire, damaged and humiliated by troves of internal documents published by WikiLeaks, will, for this reason, persecute Julian for the rest of his life. It does not matter who is president or which political party is in power. Imperialists speak with one despotic voice.

Julian, for this reason, is undergoing a slow-motion execution. Seven years trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Four years in Belmarsh Prison. He ripped back the veil on the dark machinations of the U.S. Empire, the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lies, the corruption, the brutal suppression of those who attempt to speak the truth. The Empire intends to make him pay. He is to be an example to anyone who might think of doing what he did...
 
It won't happen but

Joe said he wanted to mend the country. well here's his chance, pull out that pen and pardon Trump. he can say enough is enough, or whatever his writers like I guess. it would put Joe above the fray. add in it would be hard for Trump to beat the Guy who pardoned him.
Also down the line if he should need to pardon Hunter, it wouldn't look out of character.
 
madmadworld said:
It won't happen but

Joe said he wanted to mend the country. well here's his chance, pull out that pen and pardon Trump. he can say enough is enough, or whatever his writers like I guess. it would put Joe above the fray. add in it would be hard for Trump to beat the Guy who pardoned him.
Also down the line if he should need to pardon Hunter, it wouldn't look out of character.
Click to expand...
Biden doesn’t know what day it is.

His handlers have zero ethics or integrity. Think of pure evil and then imagine 10x worse.

That’s what we’re dealing with.

Maybe the democrats of 30 years ago but not the socialist pigs in charge now.
 
hammertime said:
Biden doesn’t know what day it is.
Click to expand...
Depends what time of day you would ask him. while he is not 50 anymore. he's not totally gone.
hammertime said:
His handlers have zero ethics or integrity. Think of pure evil and then imagine 10x worse. That’s what we’re dealing with. Maybe the democrats of 30 years ago but not the socialist pigs in charge now.
Click to expand...
What they care about is Winning. that has not changed in the past 30 years.
 


I believe this is a free article from scheerpost.com. Free after signing in and creating an account.
Aug 28
By David Swanson

World BEYOND War

I’m pretty sure I usually read the New York Times differently from how some people read it. I read it looking for two things: the insinuations and the independent evidence.
By insinuations, I mean the bulk of it, the stuff that’s put in there to communicate without any straightforward assertion of verifiable facts. Here’s a sample article from Sunday, starting with the headline:
“A Former French President Gives a Voice to Obstinate Russian Sympathies
“Remarks by Nicolas Sarkozy have raised fears that Europe’s pro-Putin chorus may grow louder as Ukraine’s plodding counteroffensive puts pressure on Western resolve.”
Click to expand...
“Russian Sympathies” we know, as we begin to read, could end up meaning anything. We’ll see. But “Obstinate” means that it’s something enough people believe to bother the New York Times which does not believe it. The Times would never refer to sympathies it wanted you to have as “obstinate.”
The subheadline identifies the problem as “pro-Putin.” So we’re talking about some sort of agreement with the Russian government, and one that the Times considers extremely evil. And yet “chorus” tells us that a large number of people in Europe are holding this sort of evil belief.

​

With the name “Nicolas Sarkozy” we learn that a disgraced, corrupt, warmongering man has been needed to “give a voice” to what is apparently a common belief. Of course it is largely the Times itself — at least for U.S. audiences — giving Sarkozy this voice through its very reporting on his “giving a voice.” But, as principled peace advocates are virtually banned, and opponents of both sides of a war are strictly taboo, this is just normal. And, as the Times is trying to paint such beliefs — whatever they are — as vile and corrupt, it only makes sense to have found them in Sarkozy rather than in numerous respected diplomats, historians, or U.S. chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, etc. The article may go on to mention other former or current European presidents or parliamentarians, but we can count on it being done with the same selectivity.
The topic is revealed in the end of the subheadline: there is a need for more “Western resolve” because the “counteroffensive” is “plodding.” If someone had ever read the New York Times before, they would know that “counteroffensive” is simply warmaking by the favored side of a stalemated war — a side which one is to imagine as not really, you know, waging war. The other side is waging war, and waging offensives, and your side, the good and noble side — no matter its role in creating the war, and no matter its refusals to negotiate peace — is waging something other than war: simple, inevitable, non-optional defense — in short, non-war killing albeit with bragged-about body counts. This is called “counteroffensive.” A Times reader would also know that victory has been imminent for a very long time, and “resolve” has needed to be — one is tempted to write obstinately — maintained for quite a while now. As decades will probably be required before the words “failed” and “counteroffensive” find each other, the attentive reader will also understand what “plodding” means.
The words “raised fears” are typical in that they do not tell us who is afraid. At this point we only know that it includes the New York Times and is meant to include us. And yet we ordinary readers, who know we haven’t signed up for any pro-Putin choruses or accepted any funding from the horrible warmongering Russian government, may nonetheless recall an ancient practice known as independent thinking. And if we recall that, we may wonder what the difference would be, factually, between these two sets of headlines:
“A Former French President Gives a Voice to Obstinate Russian Sympathies
“Remarks by Nicolas Sarkozy have raised fears that Europe’s pro-Putin chorus may grow louder as Ukraine’s plodding counteroffensive puts pressure on Western resolve.”
Click to expand...
and
Corrupt Warmonger Worthy of Our Attention Joins Significant Number of People in Disagreeing with the New York Times About Russia
Times Owners, Advertisers, and Sources Fear We Won’t Be Able to Go on Claiming Imminent Victory Much Longer, Request Public’s Help in Painting Naysayers as Loyal to the Enemy
Click to expand...
Let’s read the article looking for insinuations and any independent evidence.
“PARIS — Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, was once known as ‘Sarko the American’ for his love of free markets, freewheeling debate and Elvis. Of late, however, he has appeared more like ‘Sarko the Russian,’ even as President Vladimir V. Putin’s ruthlessness appears more evident than ever.”
Click to expand...
This is just “with us or against us” framing. There may be no further mention of free markets or debate or Elvis in the article. I wouldn’t expect it. In fact “freewheeling debate” is hard to square with the notion that either one loves all good American things or one loves Russia-Putin. We can already expect that the article will include Sarkozy saying something positive about Russia but little or nothing negative about the United States or the U.S. government. Hence the need to delay the news in this news report in order to pre-condition the reader to understand that a positive statement about Russia simply is a negative statement about the United States.
“In interviews coinciding with the publication of a memoir, Mr. Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, said that reversing Russia’s annexation of Crimea was ‘illusory,’ ruled out Ukraine joining the European Union or NATO because it must remain ‘neutral,’ and insisted that Russia and France ‘need each other.'”
Click to expand...
Here is the bit of independent evidence. The Times links to an interview in Le Figaro. I call it independent, not because it is in Le Figaro but because it is a transcript of, or at least a selective and biased and translated report on, an interview. It could be a Times interview and I’d say the same. While I suspect the Times of trying to mislead the world into catastrophic policies resulting in huge numbers of deaths (and the Times has itself apologized for that in regard to the war on Iraq), I do not suspect it of blatantly misquoting anyone. It has standards. Without paying for a subscription to Le Figaro and without being good at French, one can see from the link — though it’s not really necessary to go to it — that the interview does include the idea that France and Russia need each other. It would be surprising if it did not also include the idea that conquering Crimea is a fantasy and that Ukraine should be neutral...

There is more if you choose to go to scheerpost.com.
 
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