A foolish President Obama and moronic Secretary of State Kerry have handed the United States government its worst diplomatic defeat in history and destroyed the credibility of the Office of the President, the Department of State, and the entire executive branch.
Intoxicated with hubris from past successful lies and deceptions used to destroy Iraq and Libya, Obama thought the US “superpower,” the “exceptional” and “indispensable” country, could pull it off again, this time in Syria.
But the rest of the world has learned to avoid Washington’s rush to war when there is no evidence. A foolish Obama was pushed far out …
There go the extremists again, with their assumptions of guilt in advance and embrace of the paranoid and fanciful. And they do not come any more extreme than Mr. Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal National Coalition who is cruising, on latest polls, to victory on September 8. The problem here is that an Abbott-led government is going to take the scissors to the Refugee Convention with manic purpose while enforcing a regime of permanent detention.
The topic is tedious and unnecessarily vicious. Asylum seekers and the seeking of refuge, mocked and restricted for years …
Bomb Fanatics Press Obama to Exercise Custer-like Leadership
by William Boardman / August 31st, 2013
Obama’s Choice: Bend under Pressure, or Act Presidential
President Obama is apparently wobbling on the edge of committing an impeachable offense, specifically a military attack on Syria without the authorization of Congress, without the approval of the United Nations Security Council, and without any imminent threat to the United States.
The President finds himself pressured on one side by his own rookie mistake on August 20, 2012, when he said at a press conference, in answer to a question about the civil war in Syria, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on …
Two recent events, while not of any great significance in themselves, reveal much about the state of Canadian foreign policy.
B’nai Brith Canada, Canada’s oldest Jewish service organization, founded in 1875, hosted Brigadier-General Eden Attias, Canada’s first Israeli defense attache (only the US and Canada have ‘Israeli defense attaches’), at the Asper Jewish Community Campus in Winnipeg on 28 August (free admission and refreshments).
The Canadian Jewish Defense League has invited Pamela Geller, founder of Stop Islamization of America, and Robert Spencer, founder of Jihad Watch, to speak at the Hilton Suites Hotel in Markham, on 17 September, despite lobbying by anti-racist …
This tactic is similar to other techniques used by the biotech industry that I describe in Genetic Roulette. GMO advocates, for example, often write up lengthy studies or reports that hardly anyone ever reads in detail. Instead, people generally look at the abstract and/or conclusion and accept the authors’ declaration that the findings demonstrate GMO safety. But when an expert actually takes the time to go through the details, he or she discovers that the conclusions are entirely unsupported and unjustified. In some cases, they are in direct opposition to the data. — Jeffrey Smith, author …
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s recent mission to Latin America cannot mask Canada’s unprecedented diplomatic isolation in the hemisphere. Despite shifting ‘aid’ to the region and claiming to have made Latin America a priority, Ottawa is increasingly offside with a region breaking free from centuries of Western imperialism.
On July 9 the Organization of American States (OAS) held a meeting to discuss four European countries’ refusal to let Bolivia’s presidential plane enter their airspace. Six days earlier Evo Morales was returning from a meeting in Moscow where he said Bolivia could be open to giving political asylum to former CIA contractor, …
The ritualistic month long celebration of Merdeka (independence) activities have largely lost their meaning. Discussion about the roles that different groups played in the road to independence has largely been rewritten to support the current rulers of today. The celebration of 31 August, the day Malaya gained independence from the British, as the major national day seems to exclude the aspirations of Sabahans and Sarawakians, where on 16 September 1963 they joined Malaya and Singapore in a union called Malaysia. Groups like the Communist Party of Malaya, which fought and lost many lives against both the British and Japanese, are …
In Syria, Answering Atrocity With Atrocity Should Achieve More Atrocity
by William Boardman / August 30th, 2013
Are you saying that doing nothing in Syria is the best option?
The unpleasant reality in Syria is that there are no good choices, for the U.S. or much of anyone else. But the crushing reality is that, comparatively, the U.S. and perhaps the world will be better off keeping Assad in power for the nonce, rather than coping with the likely chaos flowing uncontrollably from any other outcome.
There is no good reason to make a bad situation worse. It’s likely to get worse all on its own, and unimaginably worse if the government starts to fall.
The irony of the Obama presidency may hinge on whether he attacks Syria. He began his presidency prematurely winning the Nobel Peace Prize and could end it being impeached for starting an illegal war without congressional or UN approval – violating both domestic and international law.
Yesterday 163 Members of Congress sent letters to President Obama telling him that under the US Constitution he is required to get congressional approval before beginning a military attack. The letter drafted by Rep. Scott Rigel (R-VA) had 140 signatures, 119 Republicans and 21 Dems. Rep. Barbara Lee also circulated a letter that had 53 signers, that …
The issue-packed title of this event—“Our Democracy in Crisis: The Rise of the Total Surveillance State and the War on a Free Press”—offers a panelist a number of potential targets. Given the expertise of other panelists on the specifics of surveillance and journalism, I want to focus on what may seem like the least controversial part of the title, “Our Democracy,” to which I would add a question mark.
Our democracy? Really? Is the U.S. system a democracy, and if so, does it belong to us? This leads to uncomfortable questions: What do we mean by democracy, and who do …
Fast-food workers walked off the job in about 50 U.S. cities on Thursday, the latest show of force from a unionization campaign that began with a one-day strike involving 200 people in New York City last November. Since then, the union drive has taken root in several East Coast and Midwestern cities including Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, Flint, Mich., and Milwaukee. The actions on Thursday marked new territory for the campaign with picket-lines going up in West Coast and Southern cities — Los Angeles, Seattle, Tampa, Fla., Raleigh, N.C., and Houston among them.
The arrogance, the vanity, the sheer chutzpah of Love, passion, lust to rut!
We entered Beauty to the bone, discovered processes behind our dreams, like codes machines share — among their kind. Input. Output. Error. We lived, Crystal and I, to penetrate, absorb, possess, subsumed and saturated with ourselves, and in ourselves. For a time.
All lovers love differently, somebody Important once said. Yet all loves end in boredom. Passion is hard to maintain, much less control, especially after it is gone. Inevitably, rhetorical questions and/or accusations fly:
“You’re freaking out. What’s wrong? Something I did? Something I said?”
What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world. It defies any code of morality.
— US Secretary of state, John Kerry
John Kerry is correct. The massacre in Syria was a moral obscenity. However, just how credible is Kerry’s railing against the perpetrators of the massacre in the suburbs of east Damascus?
Kerry spoke of the “gut wrenching” emotions he felt: “As a father, I can’t get the image out of my head of a man who held up his dead child, wailing while chaos swirled around him; the images of entire families dead in their beds …
I had been in Trenton, I dunno, maybe two hundred times before I decided to know it a little. For years, I would stop there on the way to NYC from Philly, or vice versa, but I was never compelled to wander from the Trenton Transit Center. This lack of curiosity is inexcusable, for “there is no place that isn’t worth visiting at least once,” as Evelyn Waugh wrote somewhere, and which I’d amend to “a bunch of times,” for each subsequent encounter can only deepen one’s understanding, for people are always infinitely fascinating, no matter where they may …
It is happening, again. The grotesque similarities are haunting. Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States, along with its faithful, evangelically led air craft carrier in the form of Britain, decided to treat the United Nations as a body of opinion rather than worth. Efforts made to bring to light Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (more totem than taboo), had not been successful. The reserved and ever cautious Hans Blix of the UN Weapons Inspectors team urged restraint in the name of empirical certainty. There was, as it were, no smoking gun. There were, instead, hallucinations …
The West is apparently gearing up for an imminent invasion of Syria, an act which can ignite World War III.
Washington hawks have already warned of a strike as early as Thursday. Senior US officials told NBC News on Tuesday that Washington could “hit Syria with three days of missile strikes, perhaps beginning Thursday, in an attack meant more to send a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad than to topple him or cripple his military.”
The idea of attacking Syria was initiated and augmented by the US State Department when it announced that it was already “crystal clear” that Assad’s government …
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a satirical novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here.” In the book, a democratically elected President transforms the country into a totalitarian, ruthless regime, relying upon patriotic rhetoric and fear to dominate and control a docile populace.
Just as Lewis predicted it would, it has happened here:
1) Those who identify and expose government misconduct are labeled as traitors and criminals.
2) The bankers and corporations who gambled with the money entrusted to them get off Scot free for the theft of untold trillions of dollars, while the world’s people are forced into conditions of austerity and economic survival. The poor are prosecuted for trying to survive, while the rich are immunized from …
How many Egyptians have been killed since the January 2011 revolt? My pursuit for exact figures has proven to be futile. Various sources suggest all sorts of numbers, some scrambled in such a way as to make a political point. It is as if the life of the ordinary Egyptian doesn’t matter on its own, as an absolute value that must be guarded aside from any political considerations. If it does matter at all, it is only within a larger context to simply prove a point.
But the deaths are certainly in the thousands, with many more maimed and wounded. On …
by The Real News Network (TRNN) / August 28th, 2013
Educator and activist Brian Jones: Obama admin. promoting privatization, competition and attacking unions instead of aiming for universal access to quality public education.
It seems many have forgotten the last two-and-a-half years of western sabre-rattling and covert military aggression against the Syrian state. It is worth reiterating that without the vast amount of military, financial, and diplomatic largesse the west and their regional clients have thrown at the “revolutionary rebels” in Syria – who have now beyond doubt been exposed as sectarian extremists, lead and dominated by Al Qaeda ideologues – the violent insurgency in Syria would have been defeated long ago by the Syrian army.
I wrote a few years ago that corporate social responsibility (CSR) “is mostly a façade — to divert the public’s eye from corporate misdeeds and corporate welfare.” ((Gary B. Brumback. The Devil’s Marriage: Break Up the Corpocracy or Leave Democracy in the Lurch. Author House, 2011, pp. 144-145.)) Not that there is much of a difference in the meaning of the two nouns, but I write here that CSR is also a charade, the pretending of being socially responsible while being socially irresponsible.
CSR Buzz Word: The “Triple Bottom Line”
The “triple bottom line” has become a fashionable term in corporate circles …
“The Nationalists Now Wear Panties”. This sentence was grafittied onto a wall on a major artery, a street called Baho Lam, never used by tour buses and mostly unknown to expats and tourists. Yet, Baho Lam, which stretches from near downtown Yangon all the way to the outskirts of Rangoon alongside the vein of the Ayerwaddy River up to places where land exists as it must have existed during colonial times, hosts quite an interesting representation of Rangoon and its working class. There are many areas of green-forested tracts off the road with ram shackled and tilted old wooden shacks …
Despite a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that only 9% of Americans support military intervention in Syria, the White House today assured the public that a more recent and reliable poll leaves no doubt that the President’s constituency favors war.
The poll was conducted by Defense Industries Systems Information, Inc. (DIS Information). It shows that 99.9% prefer increased U.S. military intervention. The poll has a .1% margin of error. DIS Information spokesperson Lyon Daly spoke to this reporter about the polling methodology and findings.
Lyon Daly: We use the same scientific polling methods as Reuters/Ipsos, but our job is to come up with …
Almost one-third of Louisiana Republicans blame President Obama for the slow and largely ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast, Aug. 31, 2005. More than 1,800 were killed in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; estimates of property damage exceeded $100 billion.
Public Policy Polling reveals that 29 percent of the state’s Republicans blame Obama. Only 28 percent blame George W. Bush. The rest, according to the poll, don’t know who to blame.
The disaster occurred in the first year of George W. Bush’s second term. Barack Obama did not become president until more than three years later
The administration seems to be surpassing previous regimes in bloody hypocrisy as it feigns shock and awe at alleged crimes committed in Syria. After we have been told that more than 100 thousand Syrians have been killed in a civil (?) war mostly the responsibility of outside forces capitalizing on legitimate internal concerns, we are supposed to believe that shooting, stabbing, decapitating, bombing and burning are all tolerable forms of slaughter, but chemical weapons are shockingly inappropriate forms of murder. What’s a civilized nation do?
President Boobama works to make the previous pinhead look smart by comparison as he first steps …
The soldier in the bush does not forgive. All is not well with us, not always – what do we know from love? To reach informed decisions among fraudulent sources; that momentary rapprochement with the species – after all it is our planet, in some ways, but we are only the people, our leaders, responsible adults, architects of our…
…the photograph of my mother in a drawer somewhere I never saw again…I know there is a center and I’m walking toward it: union …
The Holy Land may be the cradle of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the three Abrahamic faiths that share much in common – but Israel has preferred to draw on a tradition that imagines the region in terms of a clash of civilisations.
Theodor Herzl, the father of Israel’s national ideology, Zionism, averred that a Jewish state should act as “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”. On this view, Israel is on the fault line between a Judeo-Christian west and the barbarian hordes of the Islamic east.
IPS — After initially insisting that Syria give United Nations investigators unimpeded access to the site of an alleged nerve gas attack, the administration of President Barack Obama reversed its position on Sunday and tried unsuccessfully to get the U.N. to call off its investigation.
The administration’s reversal, which came within hours of the deal reached between Syria and the U.N., was reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday and effectively confirmed by a State Department spokesperson later that day.
In his press appearance Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who intervened with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to call off the investigation, …
It was the news of the day on August 20, 2013 — or was it news at all?
The corporate-state media is well known for its “breaking news” but showing news clips of an event before it is alleged to have taken place is a stretch even for it.
That’s presumably what happened on August 20, 2013 when articles and videos appeared in Al Jazeera, (once considered a credible source for Middle East news but now another mouthpiece for the Qatari regime and “the West”), Reuters, and other media outlets, showing victims alleged to have been killed by a gas attack carried …
