kpete
kpete's Journal
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"Planned Parenthood Videos" Have NOTHING To Do With Planned Parenthood.
http://time.com/4053578/abortion-carly-fiorina-planned-parenthood/?xid=tcoshare
Carly Fiorina was BFFs with the guy who burned the CIA torture tapes
Back in the early 2000s, when she was busy running Hewlett-Packard into the ground, she made enough time to personally divert shipments of servers to the NSA on the request of NSA Director Michael Hayden, she told Isikoff, so that the NSA could start up its warrantless wiretapping scheme. She's also apparently BFFs with Jose Rodriguez (the notorious CIA goon who boasted of destroying the videotapes of the agency's interrogations), personally recommending him to be a CIA spokesman. No word yet if Fiorina would consider Angelo Mozilo for Treasury secretary.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/carly-fiorina-national-security_5609537de4b0768126fe19ca
http://theweek.com/articles/579913/why-republican-party-keeps-lying-about-torture
KRUGMAN: "Don’t cry for Mr. Boehner-Cry for America"
The Blackmail Caucus, a.k.a. the Republican Party
Paul Krugman
SEPT. 28, 2015
John Boehner was a terrible, very bad, no good speaker of the House. Under his leadership, Republicans pursued an unprecedented strategy of scorched-earth obstructionism, which did immense damage to the economy and undermined America’s credibility around the world.
Still, things could have been worse. And under his successor they almost surely will be worse. Bad as Mr. Boehner was, he was just a symptom of the underlying malady, the madness that has consumed his party.
...
All in all, Republicans during the Boehner era fully justified the characterization offered by the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in their book “It’s Even Worse Than You Think.” Yes, the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier” that is “ideologically extreme” and “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.” And Mr. Boehner did nothing to fight these tendencies. On the contrary, he catered to and fed the extremism.
So why is he out? Basically because the obstructionism failed.
...
In other words, despite all Mr. Boehner’s efforts to bring him down, Mr. Obama is looking more and more like a highly successful president. For the base, which has never considered Mr. Obama legitimate — polling suggests that many Republicans believe that he wasn’t even born here — this is a nightmare. And all too many ambitious Republican politicians are willing to tell the base that it’s Mr. Boehner’s fault, that he just didn’t try blackmail hard enough.
..........
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/28/opinion/paul-krugman-the-blackmail-caucus-aka-the-republican-party.html?
"'Let’s work out a plan for grabbing some Middle East oil if we want,' Kissinger said."
How One Man Laid the Groundwork for Today’s Crisis in the Middle Eastthis is just a snippet:
By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that rising oil prices could result in a “highly advantageous mutual bargain” between the United States and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East. Such a “bargain,” as others then began to argue, might solve a number of problems, creating demand for the US dollar, injecting needed money into a flagging defense industry hard hit by the Vietnam wind-down, and using petrodollars to cover mounting trade deficits.
As it happened, petrodollars would prove anything but a quick fix. High energy prices were a drag on the US economy, with inflation and high interest rates remaining a problem for nearly a decade. Nor was petrodollar dependence part of any preconceived Kissingerian “plan.” As with far more of his moves than he or his admirers now care to admit, he more or less stumbled into it. This was why, in periodic frustration, he occasionally daydreamed about simply seizing the oil fields of the Arabian peninsula and doing away with all the developing economic troubles.
“Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?” he wondered in November 1973, fantasizing about which gas-pump country he could knock off. “How about Abu Dhabi?” he later asked. (Imagine what the world would be like today had Kissinger, in the fall of 1973, moved to overthrow the Saudi regime rather than Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.) “Let’s work out a plan for grabbing some Middle East oil if we want,” Kissinger said.
Such scimitar rattling was, however, pure posturing. Not only did Kissinger broker the various deals that got the United States hooked on recycled Saudi petrodollars, he also began to promote the idea of an “oil-floor price” below which the cost per barrel wouldn’t fall. Among other things, this scheme was meant to protect the Saudis (and Iran, until 1979) from a sudden drop in demand and provide US petroleum corporations with guaranteed profit margins.
juicy, juicy article from The Nation (last few paragraphs are a great reminder):
http://www.thenation.com/article/how-one-man-laid-the-groundwork-for-todays-crisis-in-the-middle-east/
Headline of ABC News' piece on Trump's tax plan is debunked by the actual piece.
:large
https://twitter.com/billmon1?original_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.balloon-juice.com%2F&tw_i=523216473083215872&tw_p=tweetembed
?w=655&h=495
Nancy Pelosi calls for investigation into misleading video attacks on Planned Parenthood
TAPPER: On the subject of the Planned Parenthood and the attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, have you seen the videos? Is there not anything on those videos that bothers you at all?
PELOSI: I don't stipulate that these videos are real. And the fact is -- and fact is that the research that is being criticized there is research that has been supported. Now, I haven't seen -- I've seen some news reports of it, but I also know that it's not real and you can create any reality that you want.
TAPPER: So OK. Even if you don't accept the videos on their face --
PELOSI: I think they should be investigated as to how they obtained those and doctored those and then had them be accepted as something that was an indictment against Planned Parenthood because that's not true.
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1509/27/sotu.03.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/28/1425588/-Nancy-Pelosi-calls-for-investigation-into-misleading-video-attacks-on-Planned-Parenthood
