Ann's Mega Dub: 9/17/23

Saturday, September 23, 2023

Shady Bob Menendez

It was just Thursday that C.I. was warning about shady Bob Menendez. And now? It's hit the fan and then some. CNN reports:

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez was charged on Friday with corruption-related offenses for the second time in 10 years.

Menendez and his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, are accused of accepting “hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes” in exchange for the senator’s influence, according to the newly unsealed federal indictment.

Prosecutors allege the bribes included gold, cash, home mortgage payments, compensation for a “low-or-no-show job” and a luxury vehicle.

This is the second set of corruption charges levied against Menendez by the Justice Department in a decade. He previously fought off conspiracy, bribery and honest services fraud related to alleged personal favors.

Maybe they need to look at Senator Cory Booker as well? He and Menendez just came out crying for a Russian-Israeli citizen. They're US senators. There are plenty of Americans to focus on. A dumb woman who went to travel Iraq? Not our problem. If she's not a spy for Israel, she's a fool for going into Iraq when she's Jewish. She is not my problem. She is not this country's problem. But Menendez and Booker tried to make her our problem.

More on Shady Bob:

The 69-year-old, who is facing re-election next year, was accused of taking a series of official acts and breaches of official duties in exchange for bribes that benefitted both him directs, and indirectly through his wife, Nadine Arslanian.

The breadth of the charges were stunning. The indictment alleged a wide-ranging series of corrupt and dark actions by the senior senator for New Jersey that not only represented hundreds of thousands of dollars in payoffs to him while helping his friends, but even more shockingly that he provided U.S. government information and took other steps to secretly aid the government of Egypt.

The indictment by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan said the senator promised to use his influence to disrupt an investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office of Jose Uribe, a New Jersey businessman who was also indicted.

ABC NEWS reports on shady Bob here.

This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

Friday, September 22, 2023. Shia al-Sudani uses his US visit to meet with many, Rupert Murdoch heads off for his coffin as the sun rises, Ronald DeSantis drops further in the polls and much more.

Iraq's Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani came to the United States this week to address the United Nations' General Assembly. He's also met with numerous politicians and world leaders as well as business leaders and journalists. Late yesterday, the White House issued the following statement:

Deputy Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk and Deputy Assistant and Senior Advisor to the President for Energy and Investment Amos Hochstein met last night with Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani of Iraq to confirm the strong U.S. partnership with Iraq as outlined in the Strategic Framework Agreement between the two countries. The United States took special note of Prime Minister Sudani’s leadership moving Iraq’s policy towards strengthening its own energy security, including with electricity grid connections to Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, as well as major energy deals with western firms to capture flared gas in southern Iraq for domestic use and future export. Hochstein and McGurk also welcomed recent agreements between the Government of Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government regarding monthly budget allocations, and emphasized the urgency of reopening the Iraq-Turkiye Pipeline as soon as possible. On regional matters, McGurk pledged full U.S. support to help finally resolve outstanding maritime boundary issues with Kuwait, particularly in relation to UNSCR 833. Sudani welcomed this support, and reaffirmed Iraq’s longstanding and clear policy recognizing Kuwait’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, all prior bilateral agreements between the two friendly countries, and adherence to international law, including UN Security Council Resolutions.

###

He spoke with CNN's Becky Anderson here and here. And here for AL-MONITOR's video of him addressing The Middle East Global Summit.

In other news, Rupert Murdoch is returning to Bran Castle in Romania. Paul Rudnick Tweets:

David Folkenflik (NPR) reports:

Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate who built an unmatched global media empire over seven decades from a single newspaper he inherited in his native Australia, announced on Thursday that he would step down.

"I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change," Murdoch wrote in a memo to employees at Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the many other properties that make up his two corporations, Fox Corp. and News Corp. "The time is right for me to take on different roles."

Murdoch's career has been marked by a singular drive for business success, an eagerness to have sway over elections and policies, and the repeated eruption of scandals. Fox News, which he founded in 1996, has played an increasingly prominent role in his profits, his influence, and his crises.

[. . .]

Murdoch's Sun tabloid relied on anonymous police sources to blame soccer hooligans for a deadly stampede after a stadium collapse; in fact, the police's own poor disaster response was found to be responsible. News Corp. later paid hundreds of millions of dollars after it came to light that people acting on its behalf had hacked into the mobile phones, voicemails and emails. The Murdochs closed down one of its tabloids, News of the World, and abandoned hope of taking full control of Sky, a major British satellite television outfit in which it held a significant stake.

In the U.S., Fox News paid nine figures to resolve a growing wave of sexual harassment accusations against then-Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, among others. It later paid millions of dollars to the family of a slain Democratic National Committee staffer whom it baselessly claimed had leaked thousands of party emails that had actually been hacked during the 2016 campaign by the Russian government.

Yet nothing matched the debacle after the 2020 presidential election.

Murdoch's role in allowing Fox News stars to embrace discredited claims of fraud in that race came into sharp view during a defamation suit filed against the network and Fox Corp. The company settled for $787.5 million this spring, just before opening arguments in the trial were to begin. Dominion Voting Systems, the plaintiff, planned to make Murdoch one of the first witnesses to testify before the jury.

Despite Murdoch's contempt for Trump, Fox amplified his baseless claims of having been cheated out of victory. Documents from that legal case show network leaders were desperate to win back viewers angry that Fox News journalists had projected Trump would lose Arizona on Election Night.

Nothing matched the debacle after the 2020 presidential election?

Nothing?

I guess that's true . . . if you write a 920 word column and none of the words are: Iraq War.

But in the real world, far away from NPR apparently, the Iraq War is the debacle of the 21st century. As the UK's HEAD TOPICS notes:

An MSNBC presenter, Mehdi Hasan, linked Mr Murdoch’s influence and Fox’s news agenda to different political events in the past 20 years. He said in a post on X that “some of the worst things we have had to experience in recent years – the Iraq war, the rise of Trump, the Big Election Lie – are all thanks to him and Fox”. headtopics.

At THE NEW REPUBLIC, in a piece titled "Rupert Murdoch Made The World Worse," Alex Shephard writes:

The worst thing that you can say about Rupert Murdoch, who resigned from the board of the Fox and News Corporations on Tuesday, is that no one has had a greater influence on the news over the last half-century. Murdoch’s influence is both incalculable and fantastically corrosive. It is impossible to look at all of the most malignant aspects of the current news environment—its pace, its callousness, its rancor—without seeing his impact. It is also a fully baked cake. Murdoch may be exiting the scene, but there is no undoing the damage he has done.

[. . .]

Much will be made about Fox News, Murdoch’s greatest and most destructive creation. With Roger Ailes, he turned it into a juggernaut and transformed the media. The cable news industry as we know it is, more or less, the invention of Murdoch and Ailes. News had long been packaged as entertainment, but this reached new heights at Fox News. The network itself existed as an answer to long-standing conservative complaints that the media had a “liberal” bias. It portrayed itself as a “fair and balanced” corrective. It was, instead, a new, powerful partisan machine. It worked immaculately.

Fox News, with Murdoch and Ailes at the helm, transformed news into a massive engine of confirmation bias. It was a safe space for Americans, most of them older and white, to have their fantasies affirmed: Immigrants were pouring into the country, crime was out of control, their way of life was under threat from sources both foreign and domestic. For decades, it pushed conspiracies of every stripe and played a major role in pushing numerous disasters, from the Iraq War to the January 6 insurrection. Pushing conspiracies was and is Fox’s business plan: It exists to tell its viewers that their political opponents are not just their adversaries but represent an existential threat.

Before Rupert Murdoch began illegally making inroads in the US media (foreign ownership was forbidden when Murdoch began his media empire building in the US and he had not yet become a US citizen -- wouldn't until 1985), his trashy ways were already well known. COUNTERPUNCH has republished a 1976 piece by the late Alexander Cockburn.

US political races? So ABC NEWS is the one who let Ronald DeSantis lie this week. Is that the deal? He does a sit down interview with you and you agree to let him lie? From ABC NEWS' report on Linsey Davis' interview with him:

"For example, I served in Iraq back in the day. al-Qaida didn't wear uniforms. You know, the typical Arab male would have had the man dress on. You didn't know if they had a bomb strapped to them or not. They carry around the AK-47s, normal civilians would, so you couldn't even say if they had," he said.

You were a member of JAG. You were a well protected attorney in Iraq.

At least he didn't try to lie again about being a Navy Seal. But he was not in combat. He was not doing deliveries and driving through hazardous roads and regions as part of his job. He was in a comfy well protected office. Green Zone Baby, basically.

"The man dress"? How stupid and insulting is this idiot?

He most likely means the dishdasha. He wants to cite his time in Iraq as experience but he can't even identify a dishdasha or a kandora. He's an idiot. A short, little fat man who wears that lesbian vest everywhere he goes. For someone who hates and persecutes LGBTQ+ people, he sure does like to dress like a lesbian in the 80s -- even that awful hairstyle. I find it hilarious that he calls out drag queens as though he thinks he's the portrait of manly.

Jeffrey St. Clair (COUNTERPUNCH) notes Ronald's new polling problems:

+ New CNN/UNH poll shows DeSantis in freefall in New Hampshire since the last poll in July.

Trump: 39% (+2)
Ramaswamy: 13% (+8)
Haley: 12% (+7)
Christie: 11% (+5)
DeSantis: 10% (-13)
Scott: 5% (-3)
Pence: 2% (+1)
Burgum: 1% (-5)

Several e-mailed the public account regarding the following Tweets from Glenneth Greenwald.

Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

Sep 18

One of the conceits the Dem-loyal left tells itself is that the corporate media is deeply hostile to it, because they're so threatening to establishment interests. Meanwhile, I don't think I've ever seen the NYT lavish a book with more endless praise than Naomi Klein's new one.

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Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

Sep 18

The vast majority of media figures who lucratively branded as radical, disruptive, anti-establishment leftists -- by attaching to the Bernie campaign -- is now indistinguishable from MSNBC liberalism. They don't pretend any more, which I guess is good. They're all in on Biden.

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Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

Sep 18

Also, one day someone will have to explain this to me: Those who cheer the same war policy Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham support are the real left-liberals. Those who oppose the US role in that war are "far-right fascists." These labels are pointless:

I'm dictating this and the Tweets are being pulled from e-mails by the person I'm dictating too. Wasn't planning on addressing this or I would have embedded the Tweets before I got on the tread mill. At any rate . ..

1) Naomi Klein's book. I haven't read the reviews. I did review it here on Saturday "Naomi Klein's DOPPELGANGER" and on Sunday Ava and I did "Books (Ava and C.I.)" (which I think posted Monday at THIRD). I do recommend the book -- Jim asked, after he read my review, besides the punctuation what did I like about it? I don't do puff pieces. It's a good book. It's worth reading. If you're a feminist, you'll be disappointed because you will grasp Anais Nin's importance to Otto Rank (as a patient, as a translator, as a practitioner, as a lover). So if you're mentioning Rank, you really don't know what you're talking about if you're not mentioning Anais. That's especially true if you're writing of doppelgangers, doubles, twins. And Anais Nin's entire output in terms of novels is nothing but the twinning. Freud really doesn't apply to what Naomi Klein's going after. Now most readers won't be feminists and that's going to sail over them. I write from my point of view and if I ever have anything to offer that's the only reason why. So, again, don't do puff pieces -- noted that in Friday's snapshot because people were e-mailing asking me to review the book. I do tear-downs all the time. Didn't do a tear-down on Naomi Klein. If I'd wanted to, I would have. And I've even got a helpful parenthetical in my review referring anyone who wants to do a negative review of the book. And, again, if I wanted to do a tear-down, I could have.

2) Glenneth hates Naomi. He's hated her for some time. This predates his leaving THE INTERCEPT. In fairness to him, she did come down on the wrong side -- ethically and legally -- when THE INTERCEPT refused to run Glenneth's column about the Hunter Biden laptop. She slammed him publicly and shouldn't have. A) One writer to another, she should have stood with him against censorship. If she couldn't do that, the kind thing to have done was to have said nothing in the immediate aftermath. Glenneth was an idiot himself. They violated his contract, so he quit. He should have sued, that's why you have contracts to begin with. (I've sometimes made more money from a project I've signed for then one I've completed.) When I note that's he's not a very smart attorney, that's what I'm talking about.

3) Glenneth's bad mouthed Naomi for over a decade so factor that in to any of his Tweets.

4) Also factor in his stupidity. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW is not taking orders from the editorial board of the newspaper. It and THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE operate with a degree of independence. NYT BOOK REVIEW is -- and always has been -- rather clannish. NYT did not rave over Naomi Klein, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW did. I'd think clarity would be something an 'attorney' would strive for.

5) When he Tweets "The vast majority of media figures who lucratively branded as radical, disruptive, anti-establishment leftists -- by attaching to the Bernie campaign -- is now indistinguishable from MSNBC liberalism." Huh? He's made that a part of the thread with his Naomi Tweet. Is she one of the vast majority . . .? I don't get what he's trying to say or smear her with.

Has she presented herself as a radical? I don't believe she has but I could be wrong. In terms of Canadian activists, she's pretty much in the mainstream. (That's not me sneering at her. I'm not a radical -- I lack the energy.) Did she attach herself to Bernie's campaign? If so, that was wrong. I had originally dictated something on that but we're pulling it because it will be mean towards her and we've said it before so there's no reason to say it again. There may be at another time but certainly no reason to bring it up while responding to Glenneth's nonsense. I wish she were more and I'm probably harder on her for that reason. But, objectively, who she is is largely who she self-presents as and I don't believe she's claimed to be a radical. She's a climate activist mainly. She's also a mother and I found that section of the book to be the most moving.

In terms of her work, she's been far more consistent than Glenneth has. She's also got consistency that he lacks as he tries to grift her and there or play the trickster when he's influencing (or trying to) an election. Like back in 2008.

Glenneth doesn't like women. He's too busy rejecting them and anything feminine so that he can look 'like a man.' Remember, he was closeted to most in college and did everything he could to fit in with straight bullies. He gets his attitude towards women from them. If you went through his Tweets and just compiled statistics, you'd realize how unimportant women are to Glenneth.

As for the third Tweet? Just another example of how the supposed attorney lack clarity. I've been against the proxy war on Ukraine since it started. When CODESTINK wasn't sure where to come down, I'd already made my position clear. WSWS are not "far right fascists" and they're also against the proxy war. There are many more. But Glenneth creates straw men because he's always been afraid of getting his butt kicked by actual men. (Which is why I do believe that flash drive contained Glenneth's browser history.)

The following sites: