Congratulations, House Republicans!

Why was there no Democratic outrage?

Shep Smith: The Same People Who Were Wrong About Iraq Now Want Us To Go Back (VIDEO)



Tom Kludt – June 13, 2014, 4:07 PM EDT

Fox News anchor Shepard Smith provided some useful history on Friday about many of the same people who are now pressuring the Obama administration to take military action in Iraq, where Islamic militants have overrun two cities in recent days as they march toward Baghdad.

Smith kicked off his afternoon broadcast with a recap of the deteriorating security situation in Iraq before he offered a barely veiled commentary on the debate playing out here in the United States.

"Are we about to be drawn back into a conflict in Iraq?" Smith asked. "The same people who 12 years ago told us this will be quick, this will be easy, this will be inexpensive, they will see us as liberators, it's the right thing to do, are now telling us: It's the right thing to do. What's the endgame? Who's thought this through?"

Later in the broadcast, Smith, who's earned a reputation for occasionally bucking his employer's conservative orthodoxy, told fellow Fox News host Chris Wallace he still hasn't forgotten "being bamboozled" by the Bush administration before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

"Well, I remember it. I think it would be wrong for us to just sit around and listen and not ask big questions," Smith said.

At the end of his interview with Wallace, Smith said he believes the media "will operate differently this time than it did the last time."

"I hope we do, hope we do," Smith said. "I hope we ask lots of questions."

President Obama on Friday did not rule out some kind of U.S. military action in Iraq, but he said there will be no American ground troops deployed there.

Killary wants us to go back?

Really? The guilt shows more each day.
http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2014/06/surprised-irs-claims-to-have-lost-over.html?utm_source=co2hog

Off with their heads! Eric Cantor, the Tea Party guillotine, and the certainty of conservative sell-out

Cantor's just the latest: From Reagan to Rove, the GOP's driven ever-rightward by clash of idealism and betrayal

THOMAS FRANK

“We got what we had coming,” wrote Rep. Eric Cantor in his book “Young Guns” in 2010. He was referring to the drubbing his party took in the 2006 Congressional elections.

Back in 1994, he reminded readers, his fellow Republicans had taken control of Congress on a platform of high idealism. Once in power, however, “too often they left these principles behind.” The Republicans in that Congress, Cantor continued, “became what they had campaigned against: arrogant and out of touch. There were important exceptions, but the GOP legislative agenda became primarily about Republican members themselves, not the greater cause.”

These Republican backsliders abandoned their free-market ideology for an orgy of earmark spending, Cantor charged, and as a result they were rightfully punished at the polls. “The fact is,” the high-minded young gun declared, “we had our chance, and we blew it.”

Given what happened to Cantor himself last week — shot down in a Republican primary by an even younger gun promising an even more zealous dedication to free-market ideals — these passages seem highly ironic and more than a little bit prophetic.

In truth, however, both Cantor’s attitude circa 2010 and his sudden downfall last week were part of a long-running and basically unchanging Republican melodrama. The clash of idealism and sellout are how conservatives always perceive their movement, and what happened to Eric Cantor is a slightly more spectacular version of what often happens to GOP brass. That right-wing leaders are seduced by Washington D.C., and that they will inevitably betray the market-minded rank-and-file, are fixed ideas in the Republican mind, certainties as definite as are its convictions that tax cuts will cure any economic problem and that liberals are soft on whoever the national enemy happens to be.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/15/off_with_their_heads_eric_cantor_the_tea_party_guillotine_and_the_certainty_of_conservative_sell_out/
1

Oh Oh!!



http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/06/14/busted-media-fails-mention-vegas-shooters-involvement-occupy-movement/

GOP Senator Calls Veteran’s Care ‘Entitlement’ We ‘Can’t Afford’

The next time any Republican accuses President Obama or the Democrats of not supporting our veterans, please point them in the direction of Republican senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama who, along with only two other Senators – both Republican – voted against the bi-partisan veterans bill which aimed to ease the healthcare delays for veterans by giving them more access to private care and allowing the Department of Veterans Affairs the funds to open more clinics and hire more medical staff. It passed the House of Representatives unanimously.

But Sessions wasn’t feeling that bi-partisan “support the troops” facade that the GOP loves to paint:
“I feel strongly we’ve got to do the right thing for our veterans. But I don’t think we should create a blank check, an unlimited entitlement program, now.”
This, coming from the party who charged America 24 billion dollars for an immigrant to read Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor.

And does Sessions really see this as an entitlement? After you and your entire party blasted President Obama and Veteran’s Affairs secretary Shinseki for being incompetent, you call this an entitlement? I would think our veterans receiving the healthcare they deserve, and not being placed on a 2+ month waiting list would be a priority, not an entitlement. However, it should be noted that “entitlement” (something you are entitled to) has taken on a different and very negative meaning in recent years because Republicans would like to demonize anyone, including veterans, who receive monetary benefits.

The bill would require an emergency supplemental appropriation mainly for the opening of the 26 clinics.

Sessions served in the Army reserve from 1973-1986. He is now a United States Senator, and has been one since 1997. He has his healthcare, and quite a good plan. He doesn’t have to wait 2+ months to see a doctor. He can see one right in the Capitol building if he really wanted to. If anything, Sessions is the one taking the entitlement.

Hey Senator Chickenhawk, those veterans offered you a blank check with their lives. Cut some funding in corporate subsidies them maybe you can talk about “entitlements.” Soldiers are Probably Slightly Less Boring Than Working at election time when Republicans need votes. Between elections, not so much. With that in mind, I guess someone forgot to tell Sessions that there’s an election this year. Maybe he’s not up until 2016?

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/06/14/veterans-entitlement/

The Las Vegas White Supremacist Mass Shooters Are Really Liberals! How Many Ways Will the Right-Wing Media Spin This Tragedy?


What shall we do with the white people...again?

I ask that question when white men commit mass shootings. I ask that question when Right-wing domestic terrorists kill innocent people. It is unfortunate, that in the aftermath of Sunday morning's murder spree by two white supremacists in Las Vegas, I am forced, once more, to ask said question.

Mass shootings by white men, as well as Right-wing domestic terrorism, have become events akin to those in the classic comedy Groundhog Day.

Unfortunately, there is nothing humorous of funny about how white Right-wing domestic terrorists have shot up Jewish community centers, planted bombs, seen a spike in their numbers since the election of Barack Obama, are coddled and encouraged by the Fox News echo chamber and the Republican Party, and now--with Tea Party regalia, Nazi bonafides, yelling "this is a revolution!"--they kill three people during a brazen daylight attack on Sunday in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Las Vegas shooters were so contemptible that even the racist welfare king Cliven Bundy, and his band of anti-Obama brigands, apparently felt that they were too "radical" for their low tastes.

The Right-wing echo chamber helped to spawn the mass shooters named "Jared" and "Amanda".

Birtherism, an embrace of the neo-confederacy, a worshipful attitude towards the Confederate flag (i.e. "the American Swastika") and the CSA, along with an open embrace of anti-black affect and white racial resentment in a concerted effort to delegitimate the United States' first black president, are the "polite" face of American white supremacy in the first decades of the 21st century.

The Republican Party is a white identity organization.

Complementing this claim, social scientists have highlighted how the Tea Party, a herrenvolk organization motivated by white racism under the guise of "taking our country back"--which begs the question "from who?"--creates a sense of white racialized self-interest among its members. Moreover, Tea Party organizations are a way for "old school" white supremacists to recruit new members from the angry white men (and women) who constitute the more extreme elements in the Republican Party.

The Las Vegas murder spree is a clear act of domestic terrorism by members of the White Right.

Of course, the Right-wing media and its acolytes will find a way to spin and distort the facts.

"Jared" and "Amanda" placed the Gadsden flag, what is now a Tea Party icon, on the body of one of their victims; the shooters yelled "this is a revolution!" while committing murder, a seditious slogan that echoes within the Right-wing echo chamber; Nazi paraphernalia was found in their home; and the Las Vegas shooters sought out a natural alliance with Cliven Bundy and his thugs.

The Right-wing media machine will re-frame the Las Vegas shooting spree in keeping with the principles outlined by Joseph Goebbels and his genius insights about how to manipulate the mass public.

The Fox News echo chamber will chose to either:

1) ignore the events in Las Vegas;
2) highlight those tragic events as an example for why concealed carry gun laws should be the rule of the land;
3) offer the default answer: this is all somehow Barack Obama's fault;
4) advance a lazy, intellectually bankrupt, and morally empty deflection: black people in Chicago shoot each other all the time!;
5) argue that these people are "sick" and "crazy", so why are we even talking about their politics?;
6) lie and commit an intellectually rapacious and craven assault on the historical record by suggesting that white supremacist Nazis are in fact really "liberals".

The most fringe elements of the Right-wing media machine and its base will default to a standard script wherein the white supremacist Las Vegas murder spree is presented as a "false flag operation", one conducted by "liberals" to discredit conservatives with the goal of undermining "gun rights".

When Richard Hofstadter's timeless and brilliant work on "the paranoid style" in American politics is mated with Right-wing bigotry and "conspiranoid" delusions, no ready antidote is available.

Racism and conservatism are the same thing in the post civil rights era. They are the beast with two backs: the American people will need more than a garden hose to stop their deranged coupling.

Alas, all that reasonable folks who care about the Common Good can ask is, once more, what shall we do with the white people? And when will there be a "national conversation" about white people, guns, mass violence, and Right-wing domestic terrorism.

I know that the answer is "never". The humanistic and patriotic concerns driving the question remain nonetheless.

Nice Try, Right-Wingers, But There's No Way to Spin Vegas Shooters as Lefty Radicals


Smoking pot did not make Jerad Miller a liberal. Nor did it make him violent.

Jerad Miller
Photo Credit: via youtube
June 13, 2014 |


If there’s one thing you’d think we could all agree on, it’d be that a crazed gun nut who moved to Nevada to join the stand-off at Bundy ranch and wrote screeds on the internet blaming the government for every problem in his life could be identified as a man of the right. But according to Cliff Kincaid of the right-wing dinosaur media watchdog, the ironically named Accuracy in Media, the Las Vegas shooters, Jerad Miller and his wife Amanda were somehow left-wing radicals who shot police officers as some sort of a protest against marijuana prohibition.

Kincaid’s piece is in response to an article by Jon Avlon in the Daily Beast in which Avlon lays out all the ways in which the Millers were influenced by far right militia and white supremacy rhetoric. The list is substantial. But Kincaid notices something amiss. You see, Avlon fails to note that Miller was a pot smoker who was also angry at the government for jailing him on drug charges. And that’s true, at least in part. Miller’s hatred for government was informed by his brush with the law on drug charges. But Kincaid then fails to note that what seemed to really bother him about that was the fact that his felony conviction made it impossible for him to legally own guns.

But let’s examine the rhetoric he used to convey his “philosophy” (if you could call it that):

I will be supporting Clive Bundy and his family from Federal Government slaughter. This is the next Waco! His ranch is under siege right now! The federal gov is stealing his cattle! Arresting his family and beating on them! We must do something, I will be doing something.

If Bundy and his pals in the militia were out there in the Nevada desert fighting off the BLM over marijuana, it’s quite a scoop. Those are all the usual right wing talking points about the stand-off. In the LA Times, Amanda Miller’s father characterized Miller by saying “he was was into all this Patriot Nation and conspiracy theory stuff” which is not normally how one would describe marijuana legalization activism.
Kincaid hones in on Miller’s affinity for Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist, who also, as it happens, rails against the drug war. In Kincaid’s mind that closes the case, however he seems not to know that Alex Jones calls himself a libertarian and a conservative whose anti-government beliefs are so extreme that he believes both 9/11 and Oklahoma City are government conspiracies as was the Newtown massacre. His most famous public appearance was on CNN in defense of gun rights:

“I’m here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms! Doesn’t matter how many lemmings you get out there on the street, begging for ‘em to have their guns taken. We will not relinquish them. Do you understand?! That’s why you’re going to fail, and the establishment knows, no matter how much propaganda, the republic will rise again!”

So yes, it’s possible that the combination of far right rhetoric along with a libertarian desire to end the drug war attracted Miller to Jones, but it’s pretty clear that it was the guns that bound them to each other most strongly.

Kincaid proves, if nothing else has, that he is seriously out of touch with his own movement:

The paper said that Garry Frick, the owner of a bookstore, got caught in a short but dramatic debate with Jerad Miller, in which the pothead “covered everything from Bundy to the Declaration of Independence to the morality of pornography, guns and drugs in a span of less than 15 minutes. He kept misquoting things and incorrectly using words, Frick said, all the while sounding very sure of himself.”

It sounds like marijuana took its psychological toll on him.

If “misquoting things and incorrectly using words all the while sounding very sure of himself” is a sign of marijuana induced psychological problems, the entire right wing of this country is a very dedicated bunch of potheads.

The fact is that marijuana is actually known to have a sedative effect and calm violent tendencies rather than exacerbate them. A recent study by the University of Texas showed that marijuana use in itself not only doesn’t contribute to violent crime, it may reduce it:

It actually may be related to reductions in certain types of crime, said Dr. Robert Morris, associate professor of criminology and lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“We’re cautious about saying, ‘Medical marijuana laws definitely reduce homicide.’ That’s not what we’re saying,” Morris said. “The main finding is that we found no increase in crime rates resulting from medical marijuana legalization. In fact, we found some evidence of decreasing rates of some types of violent crime, namely homicide and assault.”

One could also just ask the tens of millions of people who have smoked pot whether or not it made them feel like going on a murderous rampage or whether or not it made them go on a refrigerator rampage.

On the other hand we have ample evidence that this fetish for guns in our culture is killing people in large numbers. This survey from the Harvard School of public health shows:

Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.

Let’s put it this way: even if Jerad Miller and his wife really were very, very, very angry about the prohibition against marijuana in America, and even if getting high made them aggressive in some abnormal way, if they didn’t also have a stash of weapons these two pot heads would probably be knee deep in a pile of empty Cheetos bags yelling at the TV today instead of lying dead alongside their victims.

Heather Digby Parton is a writer also well-known as "Digby." Her political and cultural observations can be found at www.digbysblog.blogspot.com.

The Right-Wing Media Is a Trough Urinal: 'Accuracy in Media' Says Las Vegas Shooters Were Really 'Left-Wing Liberals'

Earlier this week, I outlined how the Right-wing media will use Goebbels' principles to lie about and obfuscate the basic facts regarding the Las Vegas white supremacist shooters. Right-wing media "watchdog" and "advocacy" group Accuracy in Media took the bone dangled in front of them: apparently, Jerad and Amanda Miller are actually "Left-wing" "liberals" because they support the legalization of marijuana, and any effort to connect them to movement conservatism is a ploy and trick by the "liberal media." Cliff Kincaid offers up the following Right-wing comedy-propaganda:

John Avlon’s dishonest column on the cop-killers in Las Vegas should be studied by journalism students as an example of how to exploit a tragedy for political purposes. It is a shame he gets on CNN as an “analyst,” which gives him undeserved authority and prestige, when he deliberately confuses and misleads people. In this case, he tried to blame conservatives for the murders of two policemen. His Daily Beast column carried two titles, one of them being, “The Bonnie and Clyde of Ultra-Right Hate.” He said Jerad and Amanda Miller killed two metro cops while shouting, “This is a revolution!,” and then they “flung the Tea Party’s favorite coiled snake Gadsden flag and a swastika on the still-warm corpses and then moved to a nearby Walmart to murder a shopper before turning the guns on themselves.”

The reference to the Gadsden flag being “the Tea Party’s favorite” was an obvious effort to link the Tea Party to the murders. The flag dates back to the American Revolution and is used by various groups and people to protest Big Government. Miller’s notion of “Big Government” was a government that interfered with his marijuana smoking. A simple search of stories about his background revealed a series of confrontations with law enforcement over his drug habits.

Avlon wrote that Miller’s Facebook pages “detail a descent into a murderous rage, railing against a tyrannical government and parroting talking points from fright-wing radio hosts such as Alex Jones and militia movement groups such as the Three Percenters while ‘liking’ the pages of conservative activist groups ranging from the Heritage Foundation to Freedom Works and the NRA. Miller’s profile picture was a skull wearing an American flag bandana against a backdrop of crossed knives over the word ‘Patriot.’”

To lie so consistently and so brazenly takes a remarkable amount of discipline. I commend Cliff Kincaid for his efforts. Once again, groups such as Accuracy in Media demonstrate that the Right-wing echo chamber is akin to a trough urinal where a bunch of men with small penises are complementing each other on their "huge" lingams while mixing the streams of their pee together.

The Right-wing media is following a script designed to satisfy and make comfortable its authoritarian viewers. As such, the Right-wing echo chamber attracts ignorant people whose ignorance is in turn amplified and reinforced by the "news" sources they watch, read, and listen to. Goebbels is smiling. He wrote the playbook. It is hiding in plain sight for anyone who chooses to read it.

The only discipline the Obama administration has. And the right wing doesn't need to lie. The fact that the left has to compare them to a group of men with small penises tells anyone what the lefts mindset is.

All the things they (the left) condemn are exactly the things that they do. It becomes more obvious everyday who is, and has been, lying.

Let's see, if I remember correctly Romney was accused of bullying a homosexual when he was a teen. So looking at Hillary as a young adult seems fair.

Did you know that Laura Bush killed her high school sweetheart after he dumped her?

I know she was in an accident where someone died. I also know she does not want to be president.

Special Report: G.W. Bush's 103.6 million missing email messages and the IT archiving challenge

Summary: In Part 2 of our 4-part Special Report, our resident presidential scholar David Gewirtz (who wrote the book on White House email) explores why a large part of the story will always be missing from the record books.
David Gewirtz

By David Gewirtz for ZDNet Government | April 15, 2013 -- 11:14 GMT (04:14 PDT)
Follow @DavidGewirtz

In honor of the Presidential Center dedication, ZDNet Government is proud to present Part 2 of our exclusive, 4-part in-depth special report on the George W. Bush Presidential Center and the 200 million email archive project.
The conflict between IT challenge and archiving challenge

I was recently asked in a radio interview about whether or not the 200 million message email trove being archived is really that large. That number can be interpreted in different ways. To archivists, 200 million messages is a tremendous number of documents. To most IT professionals, that's a drop in the bucket for a medium-sized enterprise.
In-depth analysis

Part 1: G.W. Bush Presidential Center to release 200 million White House emails to archivists
Part 2: G.W. Bush's 103.6 million missing email messages and the IT archiving challenge (this article)
Part 3: Innovative application of modern analytics techniques to presidential email
Part 4: How managing presidential email is managing a president's legacy
David's book, Where Have All The Emails Gone? (free PDF download)
USSPI presidential email research library

There are about 200 million messages that the archivists are dealing with, which is roughly 80 terabytes. That's not a small amount of data. But when you consider that most IT operations dealing with anything resembling Big Data are looking in the multi-petabyte quantities, it's far from unmanageable.

It's just not really that many bits and bytes. You could actually load all of these messages into RAM and process them in real-time using something like SAP's HANA product. So, from a technical point of view, the Bush message archive isn't exactly a large data structure.

But, from an archivist's point of view, it's huge because the archivists want to go through every single message and redact anything that is still considered a national security issue or a thorny political issue.

Think about 200 million messages. If you don't explore solving the problem using machine-based analysis, but instead expect individual humans in the National Archives and Records Agency to look at every single email message, it could be the end of time before they finish their work.

From a technical point of view, managing White House email is really a pretty simple thing. But, from a policy point of view, it's a very difficult thing. In my book and the various speeches I've given on this topic in D.C., I've always made it clear that archiving is a technical process, where retrieving what's been archived is a policy process.

In other words, it's up to us techies to make sure the data can be saved. But whether or not anyone gets to see that saved data has to be determined by laws, judges, and — courtesy of the Presidential Records Act — current and former presidents and vice presidents.

Quite obviously, not all email data is constrained by national security. Much of the data stored is also political in nature. That information may be suitable for safe public viewing from a national security perspective, but politically charged all the same.

That's where the push and pull has come from with White House email — because of that difference. Of course, the weird thing is that most recent White House generations have claimed that solving the archiving challenge is a technical problem. Clearly that's not the case.

From an IT geek perspective, email archiving is an activity that we do across enterprises every day. But from a "What do we want to show? How do we want to show it? How do we want to control our messaging?" perspective, it's a much bigger problem.
But wait, there's more

Even though the collection of 200 million email messages being archived is a boon for historians, it's far from the whole story.

Because I did so much research into the Bush administration email operation, I'm very well aware that those 200 million messages only represent a portion of the email traffic that went on during the Bush White House. The messages being discussed are only the official emails that went through the EOP (Executive Office of the President) email channels.

President Bush's team operated another email operation, based around the GWB43.com domain name. This operation wasn't run by the White House. Instead, it was run by an ISP located down in Chattanooga, Tennessee. While some conspiracy theorists might think that using GWB43 was a way for the Bushies to get around email requirements, the opposite was actually the truth.

There's a 1939 law, called the Hatch Act, that governs how White House email works. Yep, a law enacted way before anyone even knew of email controls email in the most important office of the land.

In any case, the Hatch Act restricts government officials from using government resources to conduct political activities. This means any sort of communication about politics, campaigns, political strategy, and so on could not be conducted through official White House channels and were required — by law — to run through outside services, like our friends in Chattanooga.

Because of this, using what then Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino called "an abundance of caution," any email message, official or not, that might have had a political tinge, was not routed through the EOP email servers, but instead was routed through GWB43.

None of these official emails, the ones that also contained political information, are available for archiving. In Where Have All The Emails Gone, I estimated that 103.6 million messages ran over the open Internet, through GWB43.com. None of these will be turned over to the archivists.

That means that the historical record being turned over to the archivists is missing a full third of the story.

I've always wanted to ensure that this very large (and completely undocumented collection of political messages) are also made available to the public, but they may well be lost to time.

Adding to the problem is the fact that many White House staffers had multiple email accounts. For example, then Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove had a GWB43.com account, which was the domain used for the political arm of the White House operations. He also had an AOL account.

He would use each of those for different things. As you might imagine, most individuals had their own personal accounts, accounts for their work as political operators, and accounts for their work as public servants.

But let's just forget those hundred million or so political messages. Everyone else certainly has. Let's instead focus on what's involved in processing the 200 million messages that the Bush Presidential Center is willing to make available.

Next week in Part 3 of our Special Report: Hand-processing 200 million emails and how modern analytics techniques could provide innovative new applications for presidential email.

Topics: Government, Storage
David Gewirtz
About David Gewirtz

David Gewirtz, Distinguished Lecturer at CBS Interactive, is an author, U.S. policy advisor, and computer scientist. He is featured in the History Channel special The President's Book of Secrets and is a member of the National Press Club.

WSJ is the WALL STREET JOURNAL. A CONSERVATIVE GOP NEWSPAPER!!!!!!!

WHY do you insist on picking on the nicest ones here. Slam me, I don't care, I might even deserve it. But to pick on glitter or rex? Don't be a bully.