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Kept getting distracted when trying to put this one down. Forgive the lateness!
• Felix Salmon just savages the White House’s new refinancing initiative. I’ll have more on this tomorrow.
• The alarming news that Hamid Karzai would support Pakistan in a war with the US needs to be tempered by the fact that he said this on Pakistani TV. But clearly, the man who we’ve invested much of our strategy in the Af-Pak reason is completely unreliable, untrustworthy and perhaps unbalanced. We knew that, of course. But it highlights the fact that we have no local partner in Afghanistan worth continuing a counter-insurgency campaign to prop up. And that doesn’t end with Karzai.
• Tunisian elections, the first in a post-Arab uprising country, featured massive turnout and led to a win for moderate Islamists. This will be a pattern in any one of these countries with actual fair elections, and it spells trouble for our relationship with Israel and our general standing in the Middle East. Would like to have been a fly on the wall on that call between President Obama and Egyptian Field Marshal Tantawi, to those ends.
• In other global election news, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner won a landslide re-election in Argentina, and the experts are confounded. I mean, she’s only brought about 8% GDP growth and earned the respect and admiration of the masses, while the opposition is a shambles. But she didn’t do it the preferred neoliberal way! So how could it have happened?
• I think we’re going to hear a ton about benefits for undocumented immigrants in the Massachusetts health care law signed by Mitt Romney.
• Let’s be fair to Republicans: they are fighting these jobs programs because they would put a crippling burden of confiscating 1/2 of 1% of total income from the top 0.2% of the country. I don’t see how those millionaires could survive.
• US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who bravely appeared with opposition leaders and protesters during the uprising, has been pulled out of the country due to fears for his safety. Meanwhile, even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has criticized the brutal killings carried out by the Assad regime (the physician should heal himself in this case).
• The Transitional National Council in Libya will formally investigate the death of Moammar Gadhafi. Peter Welch (D-VT) wants Libya to pay the US the $1-2 billion expended in helping with the liberation.
• Hey, anyone else noticed that we’ve been bombing the crap out of Somalia recently? I’m assuming this has something to do with the Kenyan invasion, which seems like another bad interventionist policy destined to fail like the Ethiopian invasion and all the other ones in Somalia.
• Occupy Wall Street has tapered off a bit online, reports Micah Sifry. Maybe the repression by Rahm Emanuel’s boys in Chicago, and the bomb thrown at their encampment in Maine, will spark attention anew. True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street on MTV should help, too.
• Nevada blinked and moved their caucuses to February 4, and now the GOP primary calendar is finally fairly set. You have Iowa Jan. 3, New Hampshire Jan. 10, South Carolina Jan. 21, Florida Jan. 31 and Nevada Feb. 4. Nevada got leapfrogged, but they will get good seating and hotel space at the convention. Politics! Unless someone breaks out in those early primaries, Michigan and Arizona, decent-sized states both going on Feb. 28, look to loom pretty large in the decision-making process.
• Americans rightly believe that the Electoral College is stupid, antiquated and unworthy of anything but elimination. National Popular Vote FTW.
• Former lobbyist Herman Cain must be seen as a real threat, now that Karl Rove is attacking him. I think you have to run an actual campaign – aside from the Lincoln-Douglas debates with Newt Gingrich, to be an actual threat, no?
• The earthquake in Turkey sounds terrible.
• Here’s a shocker, Joe Lieberman’s being a petty jerk on the way out the door.
• It’s under the radar, but some Senate Democrats are actually rallying to stop some pretty draconian detention legislation.
• I don’t really know the Super Committee’s purpose beyond being a full employment program for lobbyists.
• The new chief economist for the Treasury Department just destroyed the GOP refrain that regulatory uncertainty is at the heart of our economic woes.
• I hate to say this, but Dana Rohrabacher is right.
• Nebraska is proving a major hurdle in the efforts to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. NIMBYism and environmentalism come together!
• Who deserves free legal services more than torture judge Jay Bybee?
• Another part of the problem with the Administration’s Secure Communities and deportation policies are the warrantless searches.
• BP’s back in business in the Gulf of Mexico, despite no changes to oil spill liability.
• Great writeup of the spectacular Democracy Now and their early coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests. The comparison to NPR’s latest afraid-of-their-own-shadow actions is pretty revealing. Speaking of which, Michele Norris just stepped aside from political coverage because her husband got a job in the Obama White House. By the Lisa Simeone standard, shouldn’t NPR just ban Norris from the network outright?
• John Podesta out, Neera Tanden in running the Center for American Progress.
• Kenneth the page gets four more years in Louisiana.
• The Obama campaign has a Tumblr.
• Are you ready for some football, Rick Santorum?
• The New York Times gets Angry Birds right on the second try. Scroll down to the correction.
• Batman is the 1%, Spiderman the 99%. In case you were wondering.
• The failed 1980s Matthew Perry sitcom Second Chance almost nailed Gadhafi’s death date. They got the year right and just missed the month.
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About FDL News Desk
They’ve been hiding information from the American people using the “national security” cover. Now, they’re planning to just flat out lie.
Government Could Hide Existence of Records under FOIA Rule Proposal
More here.
Speaking of NPR, they’re still in Gandhi’s `then they ridicule you’ phase of OWS coverage.
Why be alarmed about Karzai’s comments? The man knows the U.S. will be leaving soon, and he’s probably getting late night calls from the ISI asking about his allegiance; he knows which side of his falafel is buttered.
Besides, the chance of Pakistan and the United States actually going to war is near zero, you might as well ask Karzai who he thinks would win if a Polar Bear fought a Great White Shark.
Contrary to perceptions of the State Department, where is the “clarification” in this statement and what about it seems “encouraging”? Sounds like the guy got up and said what he thought they wanted him to say without saying much at all.
Libyan leader seeks to calm West on Sharia fears
‘”I would like to assure the international community that we as Libyans are moderate Muslims,” said Abdul-Jalil, who added that he was dismayed by the focus abroad on his comments Sunday on polygamy. A State Department spokeswoman said the U.S. was encouraged that he had clarified his earlier statement.”
Link.
Robert Ford, who bravely appeared with opposition leaders and protesters during the uprising (paid ikwan) has been pelted with tomatos and rotten fruit.
He’s there to stir up trouble, and he’s much more than an Ambassador. When he first claimed that Syrian Government goons were beating on his car the state dept. also released a short video of it, but I saw another video that was longer and those goons were actually with his car, not threatening it but more like protecting it as he drove right through the middle of the street protest. They were obviously producing a video for western consumption.
(I saw this at a link from the Angry Arabs site months ago, I’m not going to look for it)
Arranging a civil war in Iraq:
“John Negroponte- Robert S. Ford. The Iraq “Salvador Option”
In January 2005, following Negroponte’s appointment as US ambassador to Iraq, the Pentagon confirmed in a story leaked to Newsweek that it was “considering forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target leaders of the Iraqi insurgency in a strategic shift borrowed from the American struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago”. (El Salvador-style ‘death squads’ to be deployed by US against Iraq militants – Times Online, January 10, 2005)
John Negroponte and Robert S. Ford at the US Embassy worked closely together on the Pentagon’s project. Two other embassy officials, namely Henry Ensher (Ford’s Deputy) and a younger official in the political section, Jeffrey Beals, played an important role in the team “talking to a range of Iraqis, including extremists”. (See The New Yorker, March 26, 2007). Another key individual in Negroponte’s team was James Franklin Jeffrey, America’s ambassador to Albania (2002-2004). Jeffrey is currently the US Ambassador to Iraq.
Negroponte also brought into the team one of his former collaborators Colonel James Steele (ret) from his Honduras heyday:
“Under the “Salvador Option,” “Negroponte had assistance from his colleague from his days in Central America during the 1980′s, Ret. Col James Steele. Steele, whose title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Mehdi Army, the two largest Shi’ite militias in Iraq, in order to target the leadership and support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance. Planned or not, these death squads promptly spiralled out of control to become the leading cause of death in Iraq.
Intentional or not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies which turn up on the streets of Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was John Negroponte. And it is this U.S.-backed sectarian violence which largely led to the hell-disaster that Iraq is today. (Dahr Jamail, Managing Escalation: Negroponte and Bush’s New Iraq Team,. Antiwar.com, January 7, 2007)
John Negroponte described Robert Ford while at the embassy in Baghdad, as “one of these very tireless people … who didn’t mind putting on his flak jacket and helmet and going out of the Green Zone to meet contacts.” Robert S. Ford is fluent in both Arabic and Turkish. He was dispatched by Negroponte to undertake strategic contacts:
[O]ne Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called “snatch” operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries. (Newsweek, January 8, 2005, emphasis added)”
here’s the source for #5 http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=26043
I returned the fundraising email from wnyc with the message: Simeone. All NPRs are now dead to me.
U.S. is fomenting unrest in Syria! say it isn’t so. /s
Not that Syrians shouldn’t try to get rid of the Assad regime. Just keep the U.S. out of it.
Oh noes! Muslim people whose main experience of Western mores has been at the hands of multinationals and their gunsels seeking to plunder their land are, when given a free choice, likely to reject Western mores as being tainted by corporatism. Quelle surprise.
I don’t think it’s really Gandhi though.
But but but Nichelle Norris’ husband works for Obama! That means that NPR is Communist! (That’s what the commenter trolls say.)
wnyc has two really good interviewers: Brian Lehrer (10a-noon) and Leonard Lopate (noon-2). I used to love them, but as I read more books & learned more stuff, I outgrew them in the sense that I no longer learned much that was new. If I still listened, I’d actually continue to support them. But I thought it would send a wee little message to tie the lack of support to Simeone.
“Wesley Clark: Decision made to invade 7 countries after 911″
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNOWeUH1PDk
And he ain’t talkin’ Denmark.
The project is badly behind schedule.
Well, don’t blame John McCain.
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2011/10/ap-syria-john-mccain-libya-over-action-possible-102311/
Didn’t people vote against McCain in order to avoid this stuff? (Just cause it’s fun to ask).
WRT Podesta stepping down at Center for American Progress, I’m looking forward to his farewell speech, since his tenure since 2003 has produced nothing but American Regress.
I have to give O credit. He’s trying badly (snort) to catch up. Even adding a buncho countries that weren’t on the original list. Rummy’s imagination just wasn’t rich enough.
OccupyOakland Livestream is spotty and intermittent, but here it is.
They’ve been shut down pretty effectively. MSNBC reporting 10 arrests.
And women and girls will suffer, greatly–sacrificed for oil.
There’s an app for that.
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/10/24/2011-10-24_occupy_wall_street_sympathizer_creates_im_getting_arrested_app_to_help_protester.html
There’s just so much to hide! And it’s so “sensitive” that it has to be kept hidden for a long, long time.
Wartime Contracting Panel Seals Records for Next 20 Years
“Established by Congress to investigate and expose government waste, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan has decided to not reveal its volumes of materials to the public for another two decades.”
LINK.
Thanks
That wouldn’t correspond with the “statute of limitations” would it????
Boy, this “transparency” Obama promised is more “opaque” than “transparent”.
Hey, that’s “change we can believe in”, right?