News Items

Questioning Hillary’s Health is Not Conspiracy Theory

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Ever since alternative media sources made Hillary Clinton’s health a legitimate campaign issue, much of the mainstream media has been comically and instinctively rallying around her, smugly proclaiming that anyone who questions Her Highness’ physical or mental fitness for office to be a deranged rightwing conspiracy theorist.

What’s so amusing about the tactics of these self-important pundits is their willingness to do the exact same thing they demonize “fringe bloggers” of doing: playing doctor. Most of those rushing out to confidently ensure the public that everything is just fine and dandy with Hillary Clinton’s health lack any medical credentials. They’re just journalists and pundits who have decided Hillary is fine based on a two-page letter from internist Dr. Lisa Bardack. Does writing for the Washington Post or CNN make them the authority on Hillary Clinton’s health? Of course not.

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U.S. Government Reaffirms Total Support for Saudi War Crimes in Yemen

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Samuel Oakford just penned a powerful and important Op-Ed in the New York Times titled, Saudi Arabia Kills Civilians, the U.S. Looks the Other Way.

Here are a few key excerpts:

In the span of four days earlier this month, the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in Yemen bombed a Doctors Without Borders-supported hospital, killing 19 people; a school, where 10 children, some as young as 8, died; and a vital bridge over which United Nations food supplies traveled, punishing millions.

In a war that has seen reports of human rights violations committed by every side, these three attacks stand out. But the Obama administration says these strikes, like previous ones that killed thousands of civilians since last March, will have no effect on the American support that is crucial for Saudi Arabia’s air war.

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Obamacare is Rapidly Becoming the Poster Child for American Inequality

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An architect of the federal healthcare law said last year that a “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” helped Congress approve ObamaCare.

He suggested that many lawmakers and voters didn’t know what was in the law or how its financing worked, and that this helped it win approval. 

– From the post: Video of the Day – Obamacare Architect Credits “Lack of Transparency” and “Stupidity of the American People” for Passage of Healthcare Law

The best thing about Obama (from an oligarch’s perspective), is his uncanny ability to push through upward redistributive wealth policies while still maintaining a phony aura of caring about the little guy amongst so many of his apparently lobotomized supporters.

Countless examples of his shameless plutocrat-pandering have been covered ad nauseam here on these pages, but what’s most embarrassing for the President’s legacy, is the fact that Obamacare itself is rapidly becoming the poster child for the dramatic wealth and income inequality that has so characterized his entire administration.

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FBI Discovered 15,000 Additional Undisclosed Hillary Clinton Emails

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This seems like a pretty big deal.

The Washington Post reports:

The FBI’s year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server uncovered 14,900 emails and documents from her time as secretary of state that had not been disclosed by her attorneys, and a federal judge on Monday pressed the State Department to begin releasing emails sooner than mid-October as it planned.

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Election 2016 – Why Defeating Trump Won’t Make Trump Go Away

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In the wake of Trump’s recent hiring of Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon to campaign CEO, a June article published in Vanity Fair is now receiving a lot of attention.

Here are a few excerpts from the article, Is Donald Trump’s Endgame the Launch of Trump News?

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Yes They Exist – Meet the Democrats for Trump

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We’ve all heard the rumors of lifelong Democrats who support Trump in 2016. It’s time to meet a few of them.

The Washington Post reports:

WEIRTON, W.Va. — The Ohio Valley is filled with registered Democrats, the kind that hung portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy on their living room walls. It is made of coal and steel towns and union workers, and stretches from the Pittsburgh exurbs across West Virginia’s panhandle into Ohio.

But here in Weirton — where Weirton Steel Company employed 12,000 people and now only 900 — many say they will cast their ballots for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They talk about him over beers at local taverns and at church socials. For many of those in the unions, he’s the first Republican for whom they’ll vote — even as national unions, including the United Steelworkers and the AFL-CIO, have endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

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Private Prisons Get the Boot – Good Riddance

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It pleases me that I can finally report some good news on a topic that has been near and dear to me for many years: private prisons.

Today, the Department of Justice announced that it would be phasing out the use of private prisons entirely within the next five years or so. There are many reasons I think private prisons are a very bad idea, and I touched on some of them in 2013’s post, A Deep Look into the Shady World of the Private Prison Industry. Here’s my introduction to that piece:

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New York Congressional Candidate Challenges Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager Paul Singer to a Debate

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This is a pretty genius move by Zephyr Teachout.

First, some background, via the Huffington Post:

In May, billionaire Paul Singer fundamentally changed one of the most interesting political contests of 2016. The vulture fund manager wrote a $500,000 check to a super PAC supporting John Faso, a Republican trying to fill an open congressional seat in New York’s Hudson Valley. Overnight, Faso became a serious contender in a race that had been dominated by progressive Democrat Zephyr Teachout.

Faso had been relying on super PAC funding from another hedge fund billionaire, Robert Mercer, to get through a much tighter primary contest on the Republican side. When Singer signed on in May, Faso had the firepower to challenge Teachout in the general election.

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How Bloomberg Spun its Own Poll Data to Make Hillary Clinton Seem Inevitable

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*2014 Time Magazine Cover

Years ago, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, a Russian friend explained how he got his news. 

“For news about Russia, Radio Liberty,” he said. “For news about America, Soviet newspapers.” He smiled. “Countries lie about themselves, tell truth about others.”

American media consumers are fast approaching the same absurd binary reality. We now have one set of news outlets that gives us the bad news about Democrats, and another set of news outlets bravely dedicated to reporting the whole truth about Republicans.

Like the old adage about quarterbacks – if you think you have two good ones, you probably have none.

– From Matt Taibbi’s excellent article: The Summer of the Shill

A couple of days ago, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson published a very interesting article which examined how Bloomberg News egregiously spun the results of its recent presidential poll.

She notes:

Is Hillary Clinton squashing Donald Trump into oblivion in the polls? Or is her lead over him perilously shrinking? One thing we know is: there are countless ways to spin a poll. Consider the case of selective reporting on the most recent Bloomberg national poll.

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The U.N. and U.S. Embassy Stand Down as American Aid Workers Beaten and Raped in Sudan

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Investigators discovered this month that at least four U.N. peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly paid girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex.

The most recent allegations involve at least four peacekeepers who are accused of paying girls as young as 13 for sex at a camp for the internally displaced next to the international airport in Bangui, the capital. The site, known as M’poko camp, is home to 20,000 people, mostly Christians. It is a vast agglomeration of white tents surrounding old, decaying airplanes, just yards from the airport runway.

The United Nations was also strongly criticized for failing to react to offenses by peacekeepers in the country. As many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomized six boys between the ages of 9 and 15 in 2013 and 2014, before the U.N. mission formally began. The United Nations took no action after learning about the cases until a whistleblower leaked an internal U.N. investigation to French authorities, according to U.N. officials.

– From January’s post: U.N. Peacekeepers Caught Paying 50 Cents for Sex with 13-Year-Old Girls in War Zones

The following excerpts are gut wrenching and absolutely sickening.

The AP reports:

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The soldier pointed his AK-47 at the female aid worker and gave her a choice.

“Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head,” she remembers him saying.

She didn’t really have a choice. By the end of the evening, she had been raped by 15 South Sudanese soldiers.

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