Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Shazam?

CINEMA BLEND notes:

 Billy Batson, who with one simple word can turn into the superhero Shazam, formerly referred to as Captain Marvel, an adult hero with powers ranging from super strength and flight to various forms of magic. For kids who pretend to be superheroes on the playground and around their house, being able to turn into one instantly is the ultimate wish fulfillment! Okay, let’s be real, a lot of us who are adults would love this opportunity as well.


I loved SHAZAM.

I used to watch the live action show all the time.

And I had a hard cover book of the original comic books with Billy and Mary Marvel, etc.

And a part of me is excited by the movie.

But another part of me is: Another superhero movie?

And 2019?

By then we'll probably be so sick of them.

Maybe they should have gone for a TV series instead.

Going out with C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

 
Tuesday, January 26, 2016. Chaos and violence continue,  the spin continues, US troops keep returning to Iraq, Hillary Clinton says her vote for the Iraq War was a mistake because of Bully Boy Bush, and much more.



Oh, how the whores lie.

I don't just mean the Bully Boy Bush whores.

But I do remember a woman practically wetting herself while he was speaking on television and basically declaring him god.  I thought those Bush zombies were the worst the United States would ever see.

But they had nothing on the Cult of St. Barack.

And today I just don't have the stomach for either of these camps and their never ending lies and endless squabbles as they insist the other one is responsible for what's wrong in Iraq.

There's more than enough blame to go around.

NEWSHOUNDS was always a partisan front pretending to be about ethics and issues. The last eight years have not been easy on them.

Because War Criminal _____ has returned to the public eye in a desperate bid for sordid coin, NEWSHOUNDS is suddenly interested in Iraq.

Or 'interested' in Iraq.

They don't give a damn about Iraq.

Partisan whores on either side never gave a damn about Iraq.


NEWSHOUNDS slams the ridiculous Sean Hannity (he's as ridiculous as NEWSHOUNDS itself) for blaming Iraq's problems on Barack Obama:

Whatever that job was supposed to be after more than eight years of war. 
More than 8 years?

They're ending the Iraq War in 2011.
How nice for them.
In the real world, of course, the Iraq War has not ended.
In the real world, of course, Barack's drawdown (there was no withdrawal) was followed by publicly sending US troops into Iraq.
A process that continues.
 1h1 hour ago
Four years after last homecoming, rocket battalion headed back to
4 retweets6 likes
 
 
 
The Iraq War has not ended.
The US positioned one portion of the Shi'ites in charge.  They remain in Iraq to prop up that government.
That's the reality.
More reality, things are getting worse.
Today, Kristina Wong (THE HILL) reports:
The U.S. is headed toward deeper military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Libya to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), according to President Obama's former national security adviser Tom Donilon.  
"My own judgment is ... we're going to become more deeply involved in both Iraq and Syria going forward here to address the challenge," Donilon said at a Politico event Monday evening. 
Donilon, who served as national security adviser between 2010 and 2013, said U.S. forces are "going to have to become deeply involved" in helping Iraqi security forces retake Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq.
Reality escapes NEWSHOUNDS which whines:

And, of course, nobody pointed out that when Obama left, “Essentially, he implemented the phase-out plan laid out by Bush.”
 

Is that what Barack did?

Because that's not what he led Americans to believe he would do in 2008 while campaigning.

Back then, he was saying the US would be out of Iraq in 16 months of his being sworn in.


(Samantha Power resigned from his campaign after she told the BBC that he did not mean these promises and he'd decide what he'd actually do after he was in the White House.)

When we go around speaking about Iraq, from time to time we'll encounter a Cult of St. Barack-er who will insist to me that Barack had to break his promise because of the Status Of Forces Agreement Bully Boy Bush pushed through in November of 2008.

There are two main problems with that lie.

The first is that Barack (and Joe Biden) had campaigned insisting that any such agreement would have to have the consent of the US Senate -- because it would be a treaty.

When Bully Boy Bush pushed that through -- well after the 2008 presidential election -- Barack could have stuck to his guns (yes, I'm laughing at that notion as well) and Dems in Congress -- who already were on record opposing any agreement that did not have Congressional approval -- would have helped torpedo it.

Barack didn't do that.

Barack embraced that Status Of Forces Agreement.

That means Bully Boy Bush may have birthed the SOFA but Barack happily adopted it.

The second problem is where I usually lose the ability to be nice.

Because we explained the SOFA here and we were right.

All the opinion-ators were wrong.

Various news outlets got it wrong.

Contract law.  Know it or just sit your tired and uninformed ass down.

No one needs your thoughts if you don't know contract law.

Not about what a contract means.

And the idiots who say Barack was bound by it?

I don't have time for their stupidity.

There were out clauses in the contract.

If I was in the mood to still spoon feed The Cult of St. Barack's ignorant and lazy ass, I'd quote from it.

But I just don't care anymore because you cannot teach the willfully stupid.

Barack broke his campaign promise (one of many) and did so to use the SOFA as he excuse if anything went wrong in Iraq.


Of the War Hawk whose wares we're not promoting, NEWSHOUNDS whines:
This is the guy who was part of the de-Baathification that caused so much destabilization in the first place. 
Wait?

Do those idiots and liars at NEWSHOUNDS think de-Ba'athification ended?


It didn't.

It was supposed to.

National reconciliation was put into writing, in the Bully Boy Bush "benchmarks" of 2007.  The November 2006 mid-terms had put Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress.

They had campaigned with promises of accountability and ending the war.

Now, afraid the Dems would pull funding for the Iraq War, the BBB White House came up with a series of benchmarks that the Iraqi government would have to meet to continue to receive US tax dollars and support.

These benchmarks would demonstrate progress in Iraq.

But there was no progress.

And though Nouri al-Maliki signed off on the benchmarks in 2007, he never met them.

Not in 2007.

Not in 2008.

Not in 2009.

Not in 2010.  (Key year that, remember it, we will be coming back to it.)

Not in 2011.

Not in 2012.

Not in 2013.

And not in 2014 (his final year as prime minister).

It wasn't met in 2015 either.

This is why the Islamic State found support or apathy in parts of Iraq and was able to establish a base in the country.

The persecution of the Sunnis led some Sunnis to support anyone who would stand up to this and led others to look the other way.

And Barack's responsible for that.

He's had two terms to do something about that and refused.


As we noted this week at Third in "Editorial: Barack's not even trying"


There is no US diplomacy in Iraq.
Last week, REUTERS reported, "The U.S. government has approved the probable sale to Iraq of smart bombs, AIM-9M Sidewinder missiles and other munitions for use on its fleet of 36 F-16 fighter jets in a deal valued at up to $1.95 billion, the U.S. Defense Department announced on Wednesday."
Barack didn't use Iraq's desire for the deal to force the Iraqi government to work on national reconciliation or on a national guard or on any political solutions.
He's not even trying.
He clearly doesn't even care.
No one, not even Barack, could be that inept.
No one.




Now we said we'd come back to 2010.

We're at that point now.

In 2010, Iraq held elections.

Though the media predicted Nouri al-Maliki would win by a large margin . . .

he lost.


And then he refused to step down.

Iraq's "political stalemate" is the 8 months the country comes to a standstill because he will not step down as prime minister.


Barack Obama, that great defender of freedom and democracy, does what?


Supports the winner and insists Nouri step down?


No.


He had US officials negotiate a contract (The Erbil Agreement) that went around the will of the Iraqi people and gave Nouri al-Maliki a second term.

That's reality.

And what Nouri did in his second term took Iraq even closer to the brink.

That's on Barack.  Bully Boy Bush wasn't in the White House.

There's plenty of blame to place on both men.

Unless you embrace false gods and your false idol (Bush or Barack) is the only thing you hold dear.


Here's some of the violence inflicted upon Iraq today per the US Defense Dept's announcement:


Strikes in Iraq
Attack, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 15 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of the Iraqi government:
-- Near Huwayjah, a strike suppressed an ISIL mortar position.
-- Near Habbaniyah, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed five ISIL mortar systems.
-- Near Kisik, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position.
-- Near Mosul, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and an ISIL weapons storage facility and destroyed four ISIL fighting positions and an ISIL weapons cache.
-- Near Ramadi, nine strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit, denied ISIL access to terrain and destroyed an ISIL staging area, two ISIL tactical vehicles, an ISIL vehicle, an ISIL armored bulldozer and an ISIL fuel tanker.
-- Near Sinjar, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position.

Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is a strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target.

In related news, Dan Lamothe (WASHINGTON POST) reports, "As the U.S. military prepares to expand its operations against the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria, it has altered how and when it discloses sensitive information about when it kills civilians with airstrikes."

The changes will further obscure reality.

Lamothe notes CENTCOM spokesperson Patrick Ryder:

 Ryder added that the process to declassify and redact documents associated with the cases can take months, so it made sense to release the limited information available now separately, and ahead of the documents. But the decision also means the documents will likely only be released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, which have historically taken Central Command many months, and sometimes years, to respond to fully.


I guess you could say CENTCOM is pulling a full-on Hillary.

Hillary Clinton, the anti-transparency candidate.  Her e-mails, that she insisted she wanted the American people to see, are still not fully released.  And her speeches to Wall Street -- the same Wall Street she swears she'll reign in -- are off limits to the public.


Hillary Clinton declared on CNN last night, "I have a much longer history than one vote, which I said was a mistake because of the way that it was done and how the Bush administration handled it."

She said it was a mistake.

But she can't shut her damn mouth, can she?

She's the liar who can't take accountability.

 "I wrecked your car."

 "But if that other car hadn't been on the road . . ."

"I have a much longer history than one vote, which I said was a mistake because of the way that it was done and how the Bush administration handled it."

Her vote was a mistake.

And then she adds "because of the way that it was done and how the Bush administration handled it."

No, you damn liar.

Iraq had no WMDs.

Iraq was not a threat.

These are the lies Hillary embraced with her vote.

And after saying she dealt with her vote in her last ghost written book -- no, she didn't deal with it -- she now wants to prove that she's still a liar.

"I have a much longer history than one vote, which I said was a mistake because of the way that it was done and how the Bush administration handled it."

The Iraq War was wrong.

No matter how it had been executed, it would have remained wrong.

It was built on lies.

Stop blaming everyone else for your poor judgment, take accountability.


Jeff Stein (VOX) reports:

 Bernie Sanders went after Hillary Clinton's record on Iraq at a CNN town hall event Monday night, attacking Clinton's vote to invade more aggressively than in previous debates.
"I have tried — as I hope you all know — not to run a negative campaign ... to keep this discussion on a high level where we debate the issues facing this country," Sanders said, standing up from his chair at the forum, held in Iowa a week before primary voting begins.

""The truth is that the most significant vote and issue regarding foreign policy that we have seen in this country in modern history is the vote on the War in Iraq," Sanders said. "I voted against the War in Iraq ... Hillary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq."
"I said, 'No, I think that war is a dumb idea.'"



Hillary voted for it.  She supported it.


Stephen Zunes (FPIF) points out:

The 2016 Democratic presidential campaign is coming down to a race between Hillary Clinton, who supported the Bush Doctrine and its call for invading countries that are no threat to us regardless of the consequences, and Bernie Sanders, who supported the broad consensus of Middle East scholars and others familiar with the region who recognized that such an invasion would be disastrous.
There’s no question that the United States is long overdue to elect a woman head of state. But electing Hillary Clinton — or anyone else who supported the invasion of Iraq — would be sending a dangerous message that reckless global militarism needn’t prevent someone from becoming president, even as the nominee of the more liberal of the two major parties.

It also raises this ominous scenario: If Clinton were elected president despite having voted to give President Bush the authority, based on false pretenses, to launch a war of aggression — in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, and common sense — what would stop her from demanding that Congress give her the same authority?











kristina wong






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