markpkessinger
markpkessinger's Journal
The NY Times runs a piece 'encouraging' Sanders -- a subtle, patronizing trivilization of it
I mean, seriously? Talking about a campaign for President in terms of a Broadway show that won the Tony? Don't get me wrong: I am a huge fan of the show "Fun Home." I grew up in the same town, and at the same time, as the author of the book on which it is based, Alison Bechdel. Her father, who features so prominently in the story, was one of my high school English teachers, and I worked in summer stock theater productions alongside her mother. One of her brothers was in my Boy Scout troop! I saw the show both off-Broadway and on Broadway -- it is absolutely brilliant, and I was overjoyed that it won Best Musical. But really, saying a campaign for the presidency can "take heart" from a Broadway champ? Really????
By PATRICK HEALY
JUNE 13, 2015
IF you want to support Senator Bernie Sanders for president but worry that he doesn’t have a shot against Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, take heart from the Broadway show “Fun Home,” which won the Tony Award for best musical last week.
“Fun Home” was the decided underdog: a nominee with little money, bold themes, no frills and a small team on the payroll. (Sound familiar, Sanders-ites?) The story of a lesbian cartoonist and her relationship with her closeted gay father, “Fun Home” is about facing difficult truths and the tragic consequences when we don’t — the very message, as it happens, that the Sanders campaign is offering to America about income inequality and climate change. Compared with the flashy big-budget musical “An American in Paris,” which was the safe bet to win the Tony, “Fun Home” looked like a fringe contender, too dark and offbeat to have wide appeal, not unlike certain politicians who are easily dismissed as quixotic nonfactors.
In other words, “Fun Home” isn’t the sort of musical you imagine on Broadway — just as Mr. Sanders isn’t the sort of politician you imagine in the White House. (He would be the first socialist president, after all.)
What does it take for an underdog to succeed? In politics and on Broadway, two worlds I’ve covered as a reporter, some of the factors are similar. Message and perseverance are crucial. Money — not a fortune, but at least enough — is essential. And authenticity matters most of all.
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The relative silence regarding the decision to send troops back into Iraq . . .
. . . and to build more bases there, is positively stunning. From today's New York Times:
NAPLES, Italy — The United States is considering establishing a new network of American military bases in Iraq to aid in the fight against the Islamic State, senior military and administration officials said Thursday, potentially deepening American involvement in the country amid setbacks for Iraqi forces on the battlefield.
Speaking to reporters aboard his plane during a trip to Italy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, described a possible future campaign entailing the establishment of what he called “lily pads” — American military bases around the country from which trainers would work with Iraqi security forces and local tribesmen in the fight against the Islamic State.
General Dempsey’s framework was confirmed by senior Obama administration officials, and comes after an earlier decision this week to send 450 trainers to establish a new military base to help Iraqi forces retake the city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. The general said that base could be the model for a new network of American training bases in other parts of the country.
“You could see one in the corridor from Baghdad to Tikrit to Kirkuk to Mosul,” General Dempsey said. Such sites, he said, could require troops in addition to the 3,550 that the president has authorized so far in the latest Iraq campaign, although he said later some of the troops at the new bases could come from forces already in Iraq.
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Obama lawyers asked secret court to ignore public court's decision on spying
The administration is still as duplicitous as ever on this subject.; From The Guardian:
[font size=Justice Department’s national security chief cites six-month transition period in the USA Freedom Act as a reason to turn the bulk surveillance spigot back on[/font]
The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.
The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.
US officials confirmed last week that they would ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court – better known as the Fisa court, a panel that meets in secret as a step in the surveillance process and thus far has only ever had the government argue before it – to turn the domestic bulk collection spigot back on.
Justice Department national security chief John A Carlin cited a six-month transition period provided in the USA Freedom Act – passed by the Senate last week to ban the bulk collection – as a reason to permit an “orderly transition” of the NSA’s domestic dragnet. Carlin did not address whether the transition clause of the Freedom Act still applies now that a congressional deadlock meant the program shut down on 31 May.
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Any Hillary supporter who wants to talk about Bernie's age would do well to remember . . .
. . . that should Hillary get the nomination, she will almost certainly be running against a younger -- possibly considerably younger -- Republican opponent. Hillary is only 6 years younger than Bernie. Ben Carson is the oldest one of the bunch, and he's 63. Jeb Bush, at 62, is five years younger than Hillary. Scott Walker is 47; Rand Paul is 52; Carly Fiorina is 60; Graham is 59; Cruz is 44 . . . do I need to continue? You really might want to think twice before you go down that particular path! Just sayin'.
About that violinist on the derailed train many were so quick to pillory. . .
I posted the article linked in the original thread on this topic to Facebook. An ex of mine (whom I am still good friends with), who is also a classical violinist (and a staunch and politically active Democrat in Putnam County, NY), and who happens to know Jennifer Kim, responded as follows:
And another violinist, a friend of my ex's, also chimed in:
Sy Hersh Stunner: The Killing of Osama bin Laden
Hersch exposes a series of self-serving lies, as well as double crossings, on the part of the President regarding the killing of bin Laden. Bin Laden's location was not discovered by our crack CIA, but by a walk-in tip from a Pakistani official, he wasn't 'hiding out' in Abbottabad, but had been held in custody by Pakistan since 2006, the Pakistani intelligence services were fully aware of the raid in advance, and even made sure the Seal helicopters would be able to fly in over Pakistani airspace without triggering an alert, bin Laden was not armed and there was no firefight with the Seals, the story about removing garbage bags full of computers and Al Qaeda operational materials was a fiction concocted to justify killing bin Laden rather than taking him into custody, since he was no longer operationally relevant -- it was a premeditated hit. And the President, in making an immediate public announcement of the killing over the objections of Secretary Gates, violated an agreement that had been made with two Pakistani intelligence officials who had cooperated with the raid and without whose efforts the raid would not have been possible. And there's more. From the London Review of Books:
Seymour M. Hersh
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Five days after the raid the Pentagon press corps was provided with a series of videotapes that were said by US officials to have been taken from a large collection the Seals had removed from the compound, along with as many as 15 computers. Snippets from one of the videos showed a solitary bin Laden looking wan and wrapped in a blanket, watching what appeared to be a video of himself on television. An unnamed official told reporters that the raid produced a ‘treasure trove … the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever’, which would provide vital insights into al-Qaida’s plans. The official said the material showed that bin Laden ‘remained an active leader in al-Qaida, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group … He was far from a figurehead [and] continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management and to encourage plotting’ from what was described as a command-and-control centre in Abbottabad. ‘He was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation’s security,’ the official said. The information was so vital, he added, that the administration was setting up an inter-agency task force to process it: ‘He was not simply someone who was penning al-Qaida strategy. He was throwing operational ideas out there and he was also specifically directing other al-Qaida members.’
These claims were fabrications: there wasn’t much activity for bin Laden to exercise command and control over. The retired intelligence official said that the CIA’s internal reporting shows that since bin Laden moved to Abbottabad in 2006 only a handful of terrorist attacks could be linked to the remnants of bin Laden’s al-Qaida. ‘We were told at first,’ the retired official said, ‘that the Seals produced garbage bags of stuff and that the community is generating daily intelligence reports out of this stuff. And then we were told that the community is gathering everything together and needs to translate it. But nothing has come of it. Every single thing they have created turns out not to be true. It’s a great hoax – like the Piltdown man.’ The retired official said that most of the materials from Abbottabad were turned over to the US by the Pakistanis, who later razed the building. The ISI took responsibility for the wives and children of bin Laden, none of whom was made available to the US for questioning.
‘Why create the treasure trove story?’ the retired official said. ‘The White House had to give the impression that bin Laden was still operationally important. Otherwise, why kill him? A cover story was created – that there was a network of couriers coming and going with memory sticks and instructions. All to show that bin Laden remained important.’
In July 2011, the Washington Post published what purported to be a summary of some of these materials. The story’s contradictions were glaring. It said the documents had resulted in more than four hundred intelligence reports within six weeks; it warned of unspecified al-Qaida plots; and it mentioned arrests of suspects ‘who are named or described in emails that bin Laden received’. The Post didn’t identify the suspects or reconcile that detail with the administration’s previous assertions that the Abbottabad compound had no internet connection. Despite their claims that the documents had produced hundreds of reports, the Post also quoted officials saying that their main value wasn’t the actionable intelligence they contained, but that they enabled ‘analysts to construct a more comprehensive portrait of al-Qaida’.
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Regardless of whether you support HIllary or Bernie, I hope we can all agree. . .
. . . that the Democratic Party looks pretty good right now. I mean, we have two very different potential nominees, both of them serious and substantive (irrespective of what anybody may think of either one). Meanwhile, the other side is closing in on 20 potential nominees, and every one is either a lunatic, an egomaniac, a sociopath or a retread -- or some combination thereof!
VIDEO: Fox Issues Startling On-Air Retraction: 'Nobody Has Been Shot'
Internal conversation at Fox News:
Exec #1: Let's see . . . things are quieting down in Baltimore. But surely we can find a way to milk this story a little more. Any ideas?
Exec #2: HEY, I KNOW! Let's make a false report of a cop shooting a fleeing African American, wait an hour to see what happens, and then retract it, claiming it was a 'mistake!'
Exec #1: Yeah, that's the ticket!
Fox News host Shepard Smith issued a startling on-air retraction on Monday, saying the channel had "screwed up" when a reporter said an hour earlier that he'd witnessed a black man being shot while running from Baltimore police.
"What's happened is we screwed up what it sounds like," Smith said. "I can tell you one thing, Mike Tobin would never — I've been through this. Mike Tobin thought he saw somebody get shot. And there was a gun. And there was a patient on a stretcher. And there was a woman who said she saw the cops gun him down and there's gonna be violence and all the rest of that. And what we have is nothing."
"Nobody has been shot," Smith said. "No police officer pulled the trigger."
Smith said the conditions were unusual and that the news crew had made an "honest" mistake.
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Kent State and Baltimore: A sad parallel
With tomorrow marking the 45th anniversary of the tragic events at Kent State, I cannot help but to see a very sad parallel in the way many Americans reacted to those events at the time and the way many have reacted to the events in Baltimore in recent days. 45 years ago, many Americans responded to the deaths of four college students, and the wounding of nine more, at the hands of the Ohio National Guard, with an attitude of, "It's about time they started shooting some of these dirty, smelly hippies." They focused on the violence of the anti-war protesters that had occurred in the days leading up to the shootings, while remaining willfully ignorant of the violence being perpetrated by our government on the people of Southeast Asia, as well as on a generation of Americans that was being forced to serve as cannon fodder in a totally unjustifiable war. Today, many Americans have chosen to focus on the violence of the demonstrations in Baltimore, while remaining willfully ignorant of the pattern of violence and oppression levied against a particular community, of which the death of Freddie Gray has become such a potent symbol. We never learn.
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