Wednesday, May 3, 2017

It's never her fault

Hillary Clinton now part of the resistance? If she means being anti-Trump she has only herself to blame. She needs to look in the mirror.



Agreed.

And, honestly, who would have thought someone as vain as Hillary would need to look in the mirror?

You'd probably have to pull her away from it in most cases.

But it's also true that nothing is ever her fault -- in her mind.

She can't admit mistakes.

She can't apologize and own them.

And she refuses to look at how she failed the Democratic Party and the voters.

Bernie could have been president.

Hillary spoiled that with her cronies in the DNC.

She was a hideous candidate but then, think about it, she's a hideous person.


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


Tuesday, May 3, 2017.  Chaos and violence continue, The Mosul Slog continues, more US military involvement in Iraq has taken place than was previously publicized, and much more.


The offensive enters its final phase as Iraqi forces surround remaining -held neighborhoods



The final phase?


Day 196 of The Mosul Slog.

It started in October of last year.

It was supposed to take a matter of weeks.

It's 196 days later.


federal police units arrive at Musharifa NW city joining the Army 9th Div and Rapid response division.



196 days later.

Over half a year.

And still it continues.


Not much concerns for civilians in Mosul -- even though they're the supposed reason for the action.

But if you were really concerned about civilians, you wouldn't wait over two years to try to liberate the area (Mosul was seized by the Islamic State in June of 2014).


And if you were really concerned about civilians, you wouldn't instruct them to remain in Mosul.


“Life in is indescribable, there is hunger, fear, people have been kidnapped & tortured” Ayman whose wife is a patient 's clinic.




Bombs dropped on Mosul have destroyed it and killed many.


Five Years, Billions of Dollars Needed to Rebuild Mosul-Officials


Those not dead will be left to rebuild.


As we've seen throughout the Iraq War, reconstruction funds don't go where they're needed in most cases but -- on those rare occasions where they do go to the right place -- they are used for cheap, inferior and shoddy buildings.


The Iraq War continues.  As does the US military involvement.

Yet some still pretend Barack ended the war.


James Clark (TASK AND PURPOSE) notes:

Elements of a nine-month Middle East crisis response task force deployment that ended in December were dispatched on “specialized missions in Iraq,” and one such mission, known as Task Force Whiskey, called for a company-size unit of Marines to insert near Erbil — 50 miles southeast of Mosul — according to Military.com’s Hope Hodge Seck, who first reported on this story.
“We were the only one that could respond to it quickly enough to get forces into country, up near Erbil, to conduct that mission,” Lt. Col. John Bossie, the task force operations officer, told Military.com.




Hope Hodge Seck (MILITARY TIMES) reports:


The commander of the crisis response force rotation and its 5th Marine Regiment headquarters element, Col. Kenneth Kassner, declined to go into detail about the precise mission of Task Force Whiskey, but said it was reconnaissance in nature. In total, the tasking lasted 90-100 days, officials said, putting it inside the threshold for temporary troop presence and meaning the Marines did not need to be counted against the U.S. troop force management level, or maximum end strength in the country.
"There were many occasions such as this one: A task would come through [U.S. Central Command] to [Marine Corps Forces Central Command], and as different forces then conducted their own feasibilities of support -- more often than not, it was the special purpose MAGTF, or in concert with our [Marine Expeditionary Unit] colleagues on the ship that were able to respond to these emerging crises now," Kassner said.



Pretending also takes place regarding where ISIS is.

It's not just in Mosul.

It's returned to Anbar, for example.


IS claims that 32 Fed policemen are dead and more that 40 wounded in the outcome of yesterday's suicide Bombing near Ramadi stadium






Meanwhile, AP reports, "An American company that was paid nearly $700 million to secure an Iraqi base for F-16 fighter jets turned a blind eye to alcohol smuggling, theft, security violations, and allegations of sex trafficking -- then terminated investigators who uncovered wrongdoing, an Associated Press investigation has found."




Yesterday, the always ridiculous Christiane Amanpour whored her way through another interview, this time with fellow War Hawk Hillary Clinton.  They talked about women -- or, rather, some women, as the Tweet below notes.


It's International*, with . *Not including women in Iraq, Haiti, Afghanistan, Honduras, Libya, Syria & Yemen.



For those unfamiliar with just how whorish Christiane is, stream THREE KINGS and grasp that Nora Dunn's Adriana Cruz is based on Amanpour.


It's this whorishness that lets her interview Hillary -- someone who should be off limits to Christiane since her weak chinned husband James Rubin is so tight with Hillary and has worked for Hillary.

But if ethics were applied, Christiane would have been drummed out of journalism long ago for her fanciful and fact-free accounts not to mention her 'objective' role in demanding war on Syria for years now.

War Hawk Christiane is one of those War Hawks who uses any lie to pimp war.  (As long as it is waged by one of her personal friends.  She can object when it's headed by someone she dislikes personally.)

Hillary?

She's just a disgusting War Hawk who tries to trade on her gender but did nothing for women around the world -- especially Iraqi women.

From July 9, 2016's "Iraq snapshot:"

---------------------------------------------------------

Trashy Hillary Clinton could pimp Iraq as a business opportunity.



But the alleged 'feminist' couldn't and wouldn't do a damn thing for Iraqi women.


This is most obvious in the e-mails WikiLeaks published this week.



Melanne Verveer e-mails Hillary on December 11, 2011:

We attempted to raise the issue of women's participation in the Iraq government, in their economy and more broadly when Biden was just in Baghdad.  Jeff Feltman was trying to get it into the conversations there.
You will recall the comments of the Iraqi who participated in the NGO meeting with you in Doha about how the door has been closed to women in the government.  We have had many discussions with impressive Iraqi women over the last couple years, and to a person they describe their fate as worse now than years ago.  Yet without them it will be even harder for Iraq to move forward.  To that end, we have been working with post on a action plan along the lines of the National Action Plan on women, peace and security, you will launch next week.
I hope you will find a way to raise the "women's issue" in your discussion tom'w.

And what does the 'great feminist' of all time, the woman with the highest cabinet position in the administration respond:

I raised women's issue w Maliki and Zebari.  Can't say either of them seemed interested.  But, we'll keep trying -- as always!


What a brave feminist Hillary I'm It For Myself Clinton is.

Verveer, at the time she e-mailed Hillary, was the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues.  She had previously, in the 90s, served as First Lady Hillary's Chief of staff, and, in 2001, she and Hillary created the Vital Voices Global Parternship.


Hillary never used her platform as Secretary of State to publicly encourage Nouri al-Maliki or Hoshyar Zebari (her Iraqi equivalent at the time, Foreign Minister).  Nor did she use her platform to publicly shame either man.


She did, however, use her platform to repeatedly praise Zebari -- a man whose actions never warranted much praise at all.


Well, Verveer mentions an upcoming event, right?


To that end, we have been working with post on a action plan along the lines of the National Action Plan on women, peace and security, you will launch next week.


That's a reference to Hillary's December 19, 2011 speech entitled "Remarks on Women, Peace, and Security."

In that speech, she name checks Ireland, Liberia, Egypt, Senegal, Darfur, Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Chile, Kosovo, Yemen and Nepal.

But she never mentions Iraq.

In her approximately 4,500 word speech, she never once mentions Iraq.

Helping the women of Iraq didn't, she believed, help her.


And like so many faux feminists, What's In It For Me Hillary has always defined her own self-interest as feminism.


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    Tuesday, May 2, 2017

    Truly independent?

    Support for this.


    Support 's project to build a truly left-wing think tank that isn't beholden to big donors. We need this



    I'd love to see a truly independent think tank on the left.

    We don't have that.

    We have Dem controlled ones.

    We have ISO-ers controlling some and that just means that they offer weak criticism of Dems and spend all their time trashing Republicans.

    These aren't think tanks.

    They are get-out-the-vote operations.

    As a Green, I grew up with few illusions.


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


    Tuesday, May 2, 2017.  Chaos and violence continue, The Mosul Slog continues, and much more.




    BREAKING: 10 Iraqi soldiers killed in ISIS attack


    The bombing above was in Anbar Province.  2 suicide bombers in Salah ad-Din Province today took their own lives and the lives of 2 police officers.


    IS attack 'kills 32 near Syria refugee camp on Iraq border'


    And ALSUMARIA reports bombings near the orchards of Abu Saida claimed the life of 1 farmer and left another injured,





    Oh, the rain never comes
    Count my blessings on my thumbs
    And the dogs just want to sleep in the
    Sun all day

    You know I'll miss you
    And thus it begins
    But I'll release you
    And thus it continues
    Someday we'll be happy again

    There's no way a country like that could die
    Told me that they drift away
    But that's a lie

    -- "J For Jules," written by Aimee Mann, first appears on 'Til Tuesday's EVERYTHING'S DIFFERENT NOW


    FYI, Aimee's new album is MENTAL ILLNESS and it's one of the year's finest.


    It's day 195 of The Mosul Slog.

    And how's that going?


    Remember when it started in October and was supposed to be over by the end of October?

    It's still going.

    Now the Iraqi government is saying it will be finished by the end of this month.

    195 days of brutal attacks on a densely populated city.

    AP reports civilians explain they are trapped and the city destroyed:


    Instead, they described a horrifying battlefield where airstrikes and artillery pound neighborhoods relentlessly, trying to root out IS militants, leveling hundreds of buildings, many with civilians inside, despite the constant flight of surveillance drones overhead. Displaced families scurry from house to house, most of them driven out of their homes in other neighborhoods by IS militants, who herd residents at gunpoint out of districts about to fall to Iraqi forces and push them into IS-held areas.
    Their accounts underscore how increased use of bombardment has made the fight for Mosul’s western sector, which began in mid-February, dramatically more destructive than its eastern half.
    More than 1,590 residential buildings have been destroyed in western Mosul, based on analysis of satellite imagery and information from local researchers, the U.N. said last week. Airstrikes killed 1,117 people in western Mosul in March and April alone, according to Iraq Body Count, an independent group that documents casualties in the war, cross-checking media reports with information from hospitals, officials and other sources.

    In comparison, an estimated 1,600 civilians were killed or wounded from all causes during the 100-day campaign to recapture Mosul’s less densely populated eastern half, which ended in mid-January.



    This description jibs with the warning Vie PresidentOsama al-Nujaifi voiced at the start of the week.  NRT reports:

    Iraqi Vice President Osama al-Nujaifi said the humanitarian situation in Mosul has reached a “catastrophic point” as Iraqi forces engage in clashes with Islamic State (ISIS) militants in western Mosul.
    "The situation is catastrophic amid famine and lack of food and medicine, which make the city live an unbearable situation," al-Nujaifi told a party meeting late Sunday (April 30).
    Some 400,000 civilians remain trapped inside the densely-populated Old City where street battles have raged for weeks.
    The Iraqi VP said hundreds of thousands of families have heeded government calls to stay at their homes because militants may use civilians as human shields.




    On ' Lies about civilian casualties in and ' Full debate➡



    Molly Hennessy-Fiske and W.J. Hennigan (LOS ANGLES TIMES) report on the US military's assessment of their own counting/reporting.  The US military is having difficulty counting civilians because they're apparently not the ones (the US military) calling in strikes.

    So in a country rife with sectarian divisions, with a Shi'ite dominated military attacking a Sunni town, the air strikes are being called in by the Iraqi military.

    In what world does that make sense?




    Saturday brought news of another US military death in Iraq.  Sunday, the fallen was identified as 1st Lt Weston C. Lee.  Norm Cannada (GAINESVILLE TIMES) reports on the reaction on campus at the University of North Georgia:


    Laurie Davis, manager of the UNG Bookstore on the Dahlonega campus, called Lee “a very genuine person.”
    “You knew you could trust him that he would do what he said he would do,” Davis said. “One thing that really came across was his love for his country, love for God and for family. It showed in everything he did. I was amazed at his insight. He was wise beyond his years.”
    Rafael Hernandez, a senior at UNG, worked with Lee in the bookstore and was a teammate with him for a semester in the rugby club.
    “He was always happy,” Hernandez said. “He was pretty caring about how the other person was feeling. He was someone you would look up to. I think the only thing he really feared was God himself.”

    Hernandez called Lee a “good teammate” and “a force to be reckoned with” in rugby.



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