kpete
kpete's JournalLiz Cheney-Mostly-'She Miscalculated The ° Her Father's Popularity Was Transferable To Her Own Race'
Cheney's Miscalculation
The New York Times notes that while Liz Cheney cited "serious health issues" in her family as the reason for dropping her Senate race, her problems were much larger.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/politics/liz-cheney-to-quit-wyoming-senate-race.html?ref=politics&_r=1&
Amen Brother - Vietnam Vet. Goes After Duck Dynasty Products, VA Canteen Complies
Duck Dynasty products under fire at VA medical center
AMEN Brother, AMEN!!!
Not only the racism, homophobic bigotry and seemingly pedophilic comments but total intolerance, in the name of their lord, but the Robertson family are in that great upper tier in income, with the grifting, A&E executives and investors as well, who have reaped profit from these current wars from huge tax cuts to possible investing in the defense industries, they also selling their wares at Military and VA facilities, and haven't paid a dime for nor in fully funding the VA and all it's charged to do in the peoples served responsibility!!
7 January 2013 - A Vietnam veteran has taken aim at Duck Dynasty products on sale at a Veterans Affairs Medical Center store in Albuquerque, and it looks like all the items in his cross hairs will be removed from the canteen’s shelves.
Robert Anderson is one of many people upset over a magazine interview in which Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson made comments they found racist and homophobic. In the January issue of GQ, the 67-year-old TV patriarch calls homosexuality a sin, comparing it with bestiality. Robertson, who is white, also claims that African-Americans he knew during the Jim Crow era in the South “were happy.”
On Dec. 27, Anderson – who served in the Air Force in Vietnam in the 1960s – wrote to the canteen that he was “greatly offend(ed) that the Veterans Administration Patriot Store would sell items promoting an entertainment group that clearly stands for racism and bigotry.
“The reactionary views incorporated into the Duck Dynasty group are contrary to the policies and mission of the VA medical system to not discriminate among veterans based on race or gender,” he continued. “Please remove these ugly divisive items immediately.”
MORE:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/07/1267775/-Brother-Vietnam-Vet-Goes-After-Duck-Dynasty-Products-VA-Canteen-Complies#http://woundedtimes.blogspot.com/2014/01/vietnam-veteran-gets-va-to-pull-duck.html
http://www.abqjournal.com/332212/news/duck-dynasty-products-under-fire-at-va-medical-center.html
This is two guys -- TWO FREAKING GUYS!--Two Unaccountable Guys, All The Power - By Charles P. Pierce
JAN 6, 2014
Two Unaccountable Guys, All The Power
By Charles P. Pierce at 12:15pm
Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Accompaniment To This Post)
Some days, you read something and you think to yourself, you know, there's the Pacific Ocean right over there, I could start walking and keep going because what in the name of god is the point any more?
This is two guys -- TWO FREAKING GUYS! -- and they have more power within the American political system than a million earnest volunteers knocking on doors. They have more influence than millions of people writing letters to the editors, protesting outside school boards, or organizing online. This is two guys -- TWO FREAKING GUYS! -- whose politics were formed on what was still considered the Republican fringe in the 1950s and 1960s, and they have more power within the American political system than what's left of the entire infrastructure of organized labor.
Two freaking guys.
Amazing.
Two freaking unaccountable guys.
...........
WAY MORE HERE: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/koch-brothers-political-network-010614
Pope Francis: Pedophile Priests Are “Monsters”
Pope Francis: Pedophile Priests Are “Monsters”
Pope Francis wasted no time kicking off the New Year by labeling priestly pedophiles as “little monsters” according to a just released report of a meeting held in November.
Sex abuse scandals have plagued the Catholic Church for decades (centuries?) and the lack of action on the part of church officials has been a source of anger across the world. Rather than immediately handing known pedophiles over to the police, the “little monsters” were simply shuffled off to a new city or even country. There, they would continue to abuse children. It has been suggested that one of the reasons the Catholic Church has so many degenerates in it is because it shields, even enables, predators.
Because of this, the reputation of the Church has been seriously damaged over the years and the Pope has taken great strides to repair it. Pope Francis has already shaken the comfortable world of the religious right by openly condemning the pursuit of wealth and the harassment of homosexuals. He’s also taken on financial corruption. If he is serious about fixing the Church’s sexual abuse problem and not just fixing its public relations problem, Pope Francis may go down in history as the man who restored the Church’s moral clarity.
more: (incl some ?s re the term "little monsters"
:
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/01/05/pope-francis-pedophile-priests-monsters/
hmmmm? Mission creep -The FBI used to advertise its primary mission as "law enforcement." No longer
The FBI's creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring "law enforcement" as its "primary function," as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists "national security" as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001, which some have criticized for de-prioritizing law enforcement activities. Regardless, with the 9/11 attacks more than a decade in the past, the timing of the edits is baffling some FBI-watchers. - See more at: http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/05/fbi_drops_law_enforcement_as_primary_mission#sthash.wXyNwc7W.G9GEPvZf.dpufhttp://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/05/fbi_drops_law_enforcement_as_primary_mission#sthash.wXyNwc7W.G9GEPvZf.dpbs
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2014/01/mission-creep.html
Candy Crowley Asks Scott Walker: "Why Would Anyone Who Is Unemployed - Become A Republican?"
Crowley asked Walker about the GOP’s positions on both minimum wage and unemployment benefits. Taking on the persona of an American who takes advantage of these programs, Crowley asked, “Why would I become a Republican?”
“How do you message that in any way to reach out to those who are disinclined to sign up for the Republican Party?” she asked.
“Because, in the end, what people want is freedom and opportunity,” Walker replied. “You don’t get that through the mighty hand of the government.”
“That’s not an uncommon argument for many Republicans,” Crowley followed up. “What makes this expand the Republican Party which desperately needs to bring in something other than what’s really been a shirking base in your party? How do you re-sell that message?”
VIDEO & MORE:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/candy-crowley-to-scott-walker-if-gop-opposes-benefits-why-would-unemployed-%E2%80%98become-a-republican%E2%80%99/
There is a real price for gas, but it's not just by the gallon.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/06/1267594/-The-real-price-of-gas
Circle the wagons, protect the powerful, attack the journalists
Exclusive Preview: excerpt from Rick Perlstein's new book (on how the Village reacted to the CIA revelations back in the 70s)by digby
............
--- Rick Perlstein's awesome new history of the 1970s (which is going to knock your socks off when it's published later this year.) And he generously gave me permission to publish the very first excerpt of the book here, which I think will give you a little sense of just how entrenched these Villager attitudes really are.
Let's take a trip back in time to 1976 to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Congressman Otis Pike, which held investigations parallel to the Church Committee in the Senate:
And something about all this seemed to spook cowed congressmen—who soon were voting to neuter themselves.
The House Rules Committee approved a measure by nine votes to seven to suppress publication report unless President Ford approved its contents. The full House debated whether to accept or reject the recommendation. Those against argued that the "classification" system itself violated the canons of checks and balances that were supposed to be the foundation of the republic. A moderate Republican from Colorado pointed out that the executive branch was desperate to serve as judge and jury in the very case for which it was plaintiff: that the report definitively established that the CIA had committed "despicable, detestable acts," but that "we are being castigated by those who perpetrate the acts and classify them." Pike made a demystifying point: that each of these things called "secrets," and hemmed around with such sacralizing foofaraw, talked of as if they were blatant instructions to our enemies on how to defeat us, "is a fact or opinion to which some bureaucrat has applied a rubber stamp." A Democrat from suburban Chicago drove home the bottom line: "If we are not a coequal branch of this government, if we are not equal to the President and the Supreme Court, then let the CIA write this report; let the President write this report; and we ought to fold our tent and go home."
To no avail. On January 29, the full House voted by two to one, led by conservatives, to suppress the very report it had authorized a year of work and several hundred thousand dollars to produce.
It all was too much for Daniel Schorr. He took his copy to his bosses at CBS: "We owe it to history to publish it," he said. They disagreed. He went to a nonprofit organization called the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to see if they could find a publishing house that might be interested, with the proceeds perhaps going to their group. They could not. Finally the alternative weekly the Village Voice agreed to publish it, in a massive special issue, and since the Reporters Committee now controlled the document, the Voice made a contribution to the group. This set off a fierce backlash among the polite guardians of journalistic decorum; the New York Times editorialized that by "making the report available for cash" Daniel Schorr was guilty of "selling secrets." On ABC, anchor Sam Donaldson said, "There are those that argue that in an open society like ours nothing should be concealed from the public. Depending on who espouses it, that position is either cynical, or naive." He said "mature and rational citizens" understood this—but not, apparently, Daniel Schorr. Nor his bosses at CBS News, who suspended him, though local affiliates begged CBS brass to fire him.
The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into who leaked the document to Schorr, who never told coughed up his source; they ended up spending $350,000, interviewing 400 witnesses, coming up with, yes, one leaker, Congressman Les Aspin (D-Wisconsin)—but he had leaked it to the CIA, as a political favor.
............
Then, as now, you had alleged journalists proclaiming that "mature and rational" citizens such as themselves understand that the government must keep its illegal activity secret from them. For our own good, of course. One cannot help but wonder if journalists who are currently clutching their expensive pearls over the propriety of the mainstream press publishing the Snowden documents would look back at this episode from history and think we all would have been better off if Daniel Schorr had been a good little boy and the Pike Report had been successfully repressed?
...............
.....the instinct among the Villagers does not change: circle the wagons, protect the powerful, attack the journalists who are doing the job they are supposed to do. That's how they roll.
MORE:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/exclusive-preview-rick-perlsteins-new.html
Daily Caller Cites 24-Year-Old Fake Princeton Newspaper to Attack the NYT's Benghazi Reporter
How did this sourcing make it into the original story? Tim Cavanaugh, the Daily Caller's executive editor, explains:
Indeed, the first embarrassing fact in the story was true. As was the second: Kirkpatrick did participate in an annual Princeton tradition of running nude through campus when the first snow of the year fell. It was an all-genders stunt that wouldn't be banned for another decade. Silly, maybe, but socially accepted at the time.
So ... what do college stunts during the George H.W. Bush administration says about Kirkpatrick's journalism now? Johnson suggests that it proves Kirkpatrick was a "prominent campus progressive and activist," and only later struck a pose as a moderate. And Johnson's standard for "proof" is quite high, if we're to read his correction on the "Playgirl" stuff:
"Appears"? "Not able to confirm?" It was a parody newspaper that ran a story about Elvis appearing on campus.
The Rest:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/01/06/daily_caller_cites_24_year_old_fake_princeton_newspaper_to_attack_the_nyt.html
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