A continuation of events surrounding the drug war and related social issues of Baja California and Mexico. Keeping an eye on Seig Heil Trump. We are still trying to restore all blogs from 2006 which were hacked by Linton Robinson and his team, famous for supporting the Baja Trump Towers on one of his real estate sites. Highlights of Paris-Simone's favorite music !!
I've been trying to get a zillion things done around here while my knees are still working - next week I get cortisone shots in them so that should keep me not exactly jumping but just going for another six months. But, like the rest of you we've been watching and reading the Mueller Report fallout. I don't know how many people who have asked me, "...what do you think...what's going to happen?" I don't know is what I've been answering, but I smell a cover up. I can say that the Mexican coverage has been next to zero on this unfolding drama, with the exception of the billions Trump lost.
Last night we watched the PBS News Hour, then later on I surfed around (I wish I mean really surf) and found more information. I thought this was a super explanatory interview - it only takes 10 minutes to listen to, you might want to give it a shot, hit the off button after or you'll go into weather reports:
So, for the moment I guess the only good news is that McDonald's is going to start selling Veggie-Burgers...maybe , I mean is the soy non-GMO ? Locally, the drug war continues as usual. Two weeks ago, AMLO announced that the violence in Tijuana was out of control, yet just a couple of days ago he said the rate had been lowered. I'll be back with the figures.
I've been trying to get a zillion things done around here while my knees are still working - next week I get cortisone shots in them so that should keep me not exactly jumping but just going for another six months. But, like the rest of you we've been watching and reading the Mueller Report fallout. I don't know how many people who have asked me, "...what do you think...what's going to happen?" I don't know is what I've been answering, but I smell a cover up. I can say that the Mexican coverage has been next to zero on this unfolding drama, with the exception of the billions Trump lost.
Last night we watched the PBS News Hour, then later on I surfed around (I wish I mean really surf) and found more information. I thought this was a super explanatory interview - it only takes 10 minutes to listen to, you might want to give it a shot, hit the off button after or you'll go into weather reports:
So, for the moment I guess the only good news is that McDonald's is going to start selling Veggie-Burgers...maybe , I mean is the soy non-GMO ? Locally, the drug war continues as usual. Two weeks ago, AMLO announced that the violence in Tijuana was out of control, yet just a couple of days ago he said the rate had been lowered. I'll be back with the figures.
Howdy, just checking in. I could not figure out why the blog wasn't coming up plus I could not get the Webmaster tools to do anything, I was slightly freaked. Going through tons of email there was a notice from Google that my domain had expired. doh me.
Meanwhile, yes I did...working in my limited little garden my other knee popped but I managed to get in some seeds which are already coming up and some bulbs. I was just so happy to be out there having been confined by the compression wrap for nearly 15 weeks. So anyway, complete pain, I could not walk. Back on the turmeric.
On Tuesday we went up to Sorrento Mesa to have the next photodynamic done to my legs which really was a snap. While we were there I hobbled over to SRS Urgent care to have the other knee xrayed. The doctor I saw did some voodoo to my leg and told me to get back out in the water (but I can't here it is contaminated) This morning I can actually walk; so unsure if I will need a cortisone shot in that knee in May.
I promise to be back here on Friday with more local reports, and of course updates on the maniac Trump. If you were around more than a decade ago, you know how popular Mana was. I first saw them in Mexico City in the early '80's and have been a fan ever since. At any rate, Fher & Mana have come out against the Mayan Train Disaster along with the Zapatistas, the EZLN and the Indigenous people of that area, although no one seems to be paying any attention to any of them - in fact, many the jovenes are putting down Mana & Fher as being old washed up has beens.
Apparently they will be on tour, hitting Los Angeles y una noche en San Diego and of course both Paris & Daca Bob want to go.
~ From The Chiapas Support Committee: (with tons more on the sidebar)
Howdy, just checking in. I could not figure out why the blog wasn't coming up plus I could not get the Webmaster tools to do anything, I was slightly freaked. Going through tons of email there was a notice from Google that my domain had expired. doh me.
Meanwhile, yes I did...working in my limited little garden my other knee popped but I managed to get in some seeds which are already coming up and some bulbs. I was just so happy to be out there having been confined by the compression wrap for nearly 15 weeks. So anyway, complete pain, I could not walk. Back on the turmeric.
On Tuesday we went up to Sorrento Mesa to have the next photodynamic done to my legs which really was a snap. While we were there I hobbled over to SRS Urgent care to have the other knee xrayed. The doctor I saw did some voodoo to my leg and told me to get back out in the water (but I can't here it is contaminated) This morning I can actually walk; so unsure if I will need a cortisone shot in that knee in May.
I promise to be back here on Friday with more local reports, and of course updates on the maniac Trump. If you were around more than a decade ago, you know how popular Mana was. I first saw them in Mexico City in the early '80's and have been a fan ever since. At any rate, Fher & Mana have come out against the Mayan Train Disaster along with the Zapatistas, the EZLN and the Indigenous people of that area, although no one seems to be paying any attention to any of them - in fact, many the jovenes are putting down Mana & Fher as being old washed up has beens.
Apparently they will be on tour, hitting Los Angeles y una noche en San Diego and of course both Paris & Daca Bob want to go.
~ From The Chiapas Support Committee: (with tons more on the sidebar)
Despite the latest report from Telesur on the violence in Mexico, at least our current YTD non ending wave of violence and over 570 executions in Baja California pales in comparison to what is happening in the United States.
~ The Purge In Progress and Immigration:
A look back over the past few days with details and the best interviews:
Bad idea to stop the flow of people and goods to the EU: Ebrard
"Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE), announced on Wednesday that Mexico will seek to establish communication with the new authorities of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS, for its acronym in English).
This with the aim of letting them know that "curbing the flow of people and goods on the northern border is a very bad idea," the Mexican foreign minister wrote in his Twitter account. Ebrard Casaubón explained that this measure creates costs for the circuits of value between both nations. "Stopping the flow of people and goods on the northern border is a very bad idea: it is creating costs for the value circuits of both Mexico and the United States. Today we will establish communication with the new DHS authorities in that country to let them know. "He tweeted. The federal official is in Baja California, in the Ordinary General Assembly and Quarterly Meeting of the National Council of the Maquiladora and Export Manufacturing Industry (Index), to review the situation in the northern border and look for solutions that facilitate the normalization of the economic flow and of mobility in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Laredo and other points." -With Notimex information.
~~~~~
Well he's right, it is a bad idea. Currently trucks with merchandise are stuck waiting anywhere between 4 to 10 hours at Otay POE plus two lanes have been closed. But more importantly, although the intention was terrific ( gracias Jefe) look who he and the Mexican government have to deal with:
"Stephen Miller is personally responsible for the most xenophobic policies of the most xenophobic presidency in modern American history. The senior White House adviser authored the travel ban that denied a wide variety of American Muslims the right to be visited by their overseas relatives. He implored the president to adopt a policy of family separation at the southern border, arguing that Central American families would be less likely to seek asylum in the United States if the U.S. government gained a reputation for subjecting their children to psychological torment. The public hated this policy, and the judiciary struck it down. Meanwhile, the Trump administration proved itself incapable of competently administering the program: the U.S. government ended up losing track of thousands of migrant children and allowing others to be legally adopted by U.S. citizens without their birth parents’ consent.
And yet Stephen Miller believes that the family separation policy was a success. In his view, having the U.S. government permanently break up a few hundred Central American families is an acceptable price to pay for discouraging such people from exercising their legal right to seek asylum in the United States. Therefore, Miller is advising the president to adopt “a modified version of the family separation policy known as ‘binary choice.’” As the New York Timesexplains:
Under a binary choice policy, which is highly controversial, migrant parents would be given a choice of whether to voluntarily allow their children to be separated from them, or to waive their child’s humanitarian protections so the family can be detained together, indefinitely, in jail-like conditions.
In response to this and other reports of Miller’s growing influence in the White House, Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar tweeted Monday, “Stephen Miller is a white nationalist. The fact that he still has influence on policy and political appointments is an outrage.”
Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not it is worth maintaining a semantic distinction between individuals who openly identify as white nationalists and those whose words and deeds betray an ideological commitment to maintaining the United States as a majority-white nation. But it is impossible to understand the Trump administration’s immigration policies without stipulating that it subscribes to a “soft-core” or reformist version of white nationalism.
We can’t look into Stephen Miller’s heart, or search X-rays of his body for signs of “racist bones.” But we do know that he has tried to ban Chinese students from American universities and pushed for the deportation of Vietnamese refugees who have been in the United States for decades — a policy with no national-security, economic, or assimilationist rationale. We also know that Miller reportedly told a colleague, “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil”; and a middle-school classmate, that they couldn’t be friends anymore because of the classmate’s “Latino heritage.” And we know that he wrote in his high-school yearbook, quoting Teddy Roosevelt, “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”
Given all this, it seems both fair to describe Miller as a white nationalist and nearly impossible to ascribe a non-racist motivation to his political behavior.
But Republicans think otherwise. In their view, we must always strive to interpret the motivations of our political adversaries with maximum generosity — and resist the temptation to brand them as bigots unless there is indisputable, documentary evidence to substantiate such a charge.
Which is why they’re branding Ilhan Omar’s criticism of Miller as anti-Semitic.
“During my time in Congress before @IlhanOmar got here, I didn’t once witness another Member target Jewish people like this with the name calling & other personal attacks,” Jewish Republican congressman Lee Zeldin tweeted. “In 2019 though, for @IlhanOmar, this is just called Monday.”
President Trump echoed Zeldin’s sentiments Tuesday morning:
It is true that Stephen Miller is Jewish, and that white nationalists have historically targeted Jews for persecution. But this does not mean that Miller cannot be a white nationalist. There was a time in the U.S. when white supremacists were virulently anti-Catholic, and considered the Irish to be a subhuman race. That has not made it impossible for an Irish Catholic like Steve Bannon to openly endorse white-nationalist novels and thinkers. “White people” is not a coherent biological or ethnic category. It is a social caste with semi-porous borders. And by all appearances, Miller identifies with that caste. More to the point, there is no evidence whatsoever that Omar directed her criticism toward Miller because of his Jewish heritage and not because of his (undisputed) status as the White House’s most influential and hardline immigration adviser.
But the GOP’s decision to brand Omar’s comments as anti-Semitic is something much worse than unfair or unsupportable. It is confirmation that the party sees anti-Semitism less as a scourge to be combatted than as a political cudgel to be exploited.
Last fall, Stephen Miller encouraged the president to focus his midterm message on the threat posed by a caravan of Central American migrants. Trump proceeded to tell supporters that this caravan was an “invasion,” that “the Democrats had something to do with it,” and that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the Jewish billionaire George Soros was financing this “invasion” in an attempt to rig the midterm elections.
Lee Zeldin did not object to these remarks. In his view, it was not anti-Semitic (or even irresponsible) for the president to suggest that a wealthy Jew was orchestrating an invasion of the United States, using nonwhite immigrants as his shock troops — even though the president was saying such things just days after a neo-Nazi had murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue because he believed that Jews were orchestrating an invasion of the United States, using nonwhite immigrants as their shock troops. Instead, Zeldin chose to demonstrate his solidarity with American Jews last fall by inviting Steve Bannon to headline one of his campaign events.
It is worth noting that even if Trump’s revanchist nativism didn’t contain traces of anti-Semitism, it would remain a form of politics that endangers Diaspora Jews. Jewish reactionaries like Stephen Miller might be able to assimilate to the form of Americanism that Trump champions. But the vast majority of American Jews are liberal, cosmopolitan, and secularist. Which is to say: They are the “globalist” villains in Trumpism’s Manichaean fable of American decline.
And even if Trump’s politics did not endanger Jews, anyone who has ever uttered “never again” in earnest would still be obliged to oppose him. If you are a Jew who has “zero tolerance” for anti-Semitism — but infinite tolerance for a president who describes immigrants as an “infestation,” and directs extrajudicial cruelty at their children — then you aren’t so different from the Nazis’ apologists. You share their conviction that some populations are entitled to basic rights, while others are not.
You just believe the führer should have included your people among the chosen."
~~~~~
courtesy Counterpunch
~ The Arrest Of Julian Assange
Everyone is covering this, don't miss the Daniel Ellsberg interview from earlier today on the Real News Network, at the end there is a link to Gore Vidal. I asked Mike tonight if he thought Americans were freaking out over recent Trump developments and now this arrest and he said, "people are complacent." I hope he is wrong.
"The American war against Iraq was among the more idiotic and gratuitous slaughters in human history. It was premised on lies, prosecuted by criminals and fools, outsourced to professional murderers and it isn’t over. In addition to those murdered directly and indirectly in the war, several million refugees were scattered across the Middle East, including over a million into Syria. ISIS grew from the ranks of the disbanded Iraqi army. This fiasco appeared as it was to all the world, the gasp of a dying empire sunk under the weight of its ignorance and arrogance.
Late in the war Julian Assange and his colleagues at Wikileaks published documents and videos allegedly leaked by Chelsea Manning that brought the gratuitous nature of American violence home for all to see. The most damning was this videothat shows American soldiers carefully and methodically slaughtering civilians, including Reuters staffers, outside of any determinable theater of war. The label ‘collateral murders’ was attached to the video, but those murdered were targeted— they weren’t ancillary to otherwise justifiable murders.
Julian Assange has reportedly been charged by an American Grand Jury for his role in publishing this leaked video, among others. He will apparently be extradited to the U.S. where he is expected to stand trial for doing what reporters do— publishing true information in the public interest. The New York Times and other newspapers also published the leaked documents, but have as yet not been charged. This legal maneuvering appears to be a politically motivated vendetta against Julian Assange for embarrassing the War Criminals behind the Iraq war.
National Democrats and the liberal press have spent the last 2.5 years demonizing Mr. Assange for his role in publishing leaked DNC emails in the run up to the 2016 Presidential race. As with the government’s case against him, the content of the leaked videos and documents is not in dispute. They are what they are purported to be. American soldiers did murder civilians and Reuters staffers who posed no immediate threat to them. Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff did screw Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic nomination and she did give contradictory information about her political positions depending on what she thought her audience wanted to hear.
Mr. Assange’s accusers are largely those responsible for the imperial decline that his reporting has illuminated. The leading Republicans and Democrats behind the Iraq war should have been charged with War Crimes. There is no statute of limitations on War Crimes. The national security officials among Mr. Assange’s accusers illegally spied on Americans and lied about doing so under oath to congress. The CIA illegally spied on the congressional committee charged with investigating illegal torture in the Iraq War after illegally destroying videotape evidence of its crimes. What is Julian Assange being charged with again?
What Mr. Assange did is expose the crimes of the rich and powerful. Arguments over his methods conflate process errors with the gratuitous murder of civilians. If these murdered civilians had been well-to-do white Americans and staffers at the New York Times, where might ‘process’ fit into the utterly predictable (and justifiable) calls to give those charged fair trials and prison sentences if convicted. Through what lens are the crimes exposed by Mr. Assange and Wikileaks not crimes? As with everything about a gratuitous war in which a million or more civilians are killed, why aren’t its architects and chief instigators in the dock at The Hague pleading for their lives?
While the political pump has been primed in the U.S. by war-state Democrats and war-state liberals to go after Julian Assange without legal restraint, he is lauded by much of the world for bringing the crimes of the American elite into public view. What will be illuminated by prosecuting Mr. Assange is the crimes of the elite and their use of power and office to cover up their crimes. While most Americans haven’t seen the video (link above) of American soldiers murdering civilians and press staffers, the publicity of a trial will certainly stir public interest.
Much as the Iraq War was a late gasp of an empire in decline, the prosecution of Julian Assange is the desperate act of a political establishment that is losing its grip on power. Mr. Assange is but a messenger. This establishment is the agent of its own demise. And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of people. Free Julian Assange and All Political Prisoners. All Power to the People!"
Despite the latest report from Telesur on the violence in Mexico, at least our current YTD non ending wave of violence and over 570 executions in Baja California pales in comparison to what is happening in the United States.
~ The Purge In Progress and Immigration:
A look back over the past few days with details and the best interviews:
Bad idea to stop the flow of people and goods to the EU: Ebrard
"Marcelo
Ebrard Casaubón, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE),
announced on Wednesday that Mexico will seek to establish communication
with the new authorities of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS,
for its acronym in English).
This with the aim of letting them know that "curbing the flow of people
and goods on the northern border is a very bad idea," the Mexican
foreign minister wrote in his Twitter account. Ebrard Casaubón explained that this measure creates costs for the circuits of value between both nations.
"Stopping the flow of people and goods on the northern border is a very
bad idea: it is creating costs for the value circuits of both Mexico
and the United States. Today we will establish communication with the
new DHS authorities in that country to let them know. "He tweeted.
The federal official is in Baja California, in the Ordinary General
Assembly and Quarterly Meeting of the National Council of the
Maquiladora and Export Manufacturing Industry (Index), to review the
situation in the northern border and look for solutions that facilitate
the normalization of the economic flow and of mobility in Tijuana,
Ciudad Juárez, Laredo and other points." -With Notimex information.
~~~~~
Well he's right, it is a bad idea. Currently trucks with merchandise are stuck waiting anywhere between 4 to 10 hours at Otay POE plus two lanes have been closed. But more importantly, although the intention was terrific ( gracias Jefe) look who he and the Mexican government have to deal with:
"Stephen
Miller is personally responsible for the most xenophobic policies of
the most xenophobic presidency in modern American history. The senior
White House adviser authored the travel ban
that denied a wide variety of American Muslims the right to be visited
by their overseas relatives. He implored the president to adopt a policy of family separation
at the southern border, arguing that Central American families would be
less likely to seek asylum in the United States if the U.S. government
gained a reputation for subjecting their children to psychological
torment. The public hated this policy, and the judiciary struck it down.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration proved itself incapable of
competently administering the program: the U.S. government ended up losing track of thousands of migrant children and allowing others to be legally adopted by U.S. citizens without their birth parents’ consent.
And
yet Stephen Miller believes that the family separation policy was a
success. In his view, having the U.S. government permanently break up a
few hundred Central American families is an acceptable price to pay for
discouraging such people from exercising their legal right to
seek asylum in the United States. Therefore, Miller is advising the
president to adopt “a modified version of the family separation policy
known as ‘binary choice.’” As the New York Timesexplains:
Under
a binary choice policy, which is highly controversial, migrant parents
would be given a choice of whether to voluntarily allow their children
to be separated from them, or to waive their child’s humanitarian
protections so the family can be detained together, indefinitely, in
jail-like conditions.
In response to this and other reports of Miller’s growing influence in the White House, Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar tweeted
Monday, “Stephen Miller is a white nationalist. The fact that he still
has influence on policy and political appointments is an outrage.”
Reasonable
people can disagree about whether or not it is worth maintaining a
semantic distinction between individuals who openly identify as white
nationalists and those whose words and deeds betray an ideological
commitment to maintaining the United States as a majority-white nation.
But it is impossible to understand the Trump administration’s
immigration policies without stipulating that it subscribes to a “soft-core” or reformist version of white nationalism.
We can’t look into Stephen Miller’s heart, or search X-rays of his body for signs of “racist bones.” But we do know that he has tried to ban Chinese students from American universities and pushed for the deportation of Vietnamese refugees who have been in the United States for decades — a policy with no national-security, economic, or assimilationist rationale. We also know that Miller reportedly
told a colleague, “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever
again touched American soil”; and a middle-school classmate, that they
couldn’t be friends anymore because of the classmate’s “Latino
heritage.” And we know that he wrote in his high-school yearbook, quoting Teddy Roosevelt,
“There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room
here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans
and nothing else.”
Given
all this, it seems both fair to describe Miller as a white nationalist
and nearly impossible to ascribe a non-racist motivation to his
political behavior.
But
Republicans think otherwise. In their view, we must always strive to
interpret the motivations of our political adversaries with maximum
generosity — and resist the temptation to brand them as bigots unless
there is indisputable, documentary evidence to substantiate such a
charge.
Which is why they’re branding Ilhan Omar’s criticism of Miller as anti-Semitic.
“During
my time in Congress before @IlhanOmar got here, I didn’t once witness
another Member target Jewish people like this with the name calling
& other personal attacks,” Jewish Republican congressman Lee Zeldin tweeted. “In 2019 though, for @IlhanOmar, this is just called Monday.”
President Trump echoed Zeldin’s sentiments Tuesday morning:
It
is true that Stephen Miller is Jewish, and that white nationalists have
historically targeted Jews for persecution. But this does not mean that
Miller cannot be a white nationalist. There was a time in the U.S. when
white supremacists were virulently anti-Catholic, and considered the
Irish to be a subhuman race. That has not made it impossible for an
Irish Catholic like Steve Bannon to openly endorse white-nationalist novels and thinkers.
“White people” is not a coherent biological or ethnic category. It is a
social caste with semi-porous borders. And by all appearances, Miller
identifies with that caste. More to the point, there is no evidence
whatsoever that Omar directed her criticism toward Miller because of his
Jewish heritage and not because of his (undisputed) status as the White
House’s most influential and hardline immigration adviser.
But
the GOP’s decision to brand Omar’s comments as anti-Semitic is
something much worse than unfair or unsupportable. It is confirmation
that the party sees anti-Semitism less as a scourge to be combatted than as a political cudgel to be exploited.
Last
fall, Stephen Miller encouraged the president to focus his midterm
message on the threat posed by a caravan of Central American migrants.
Trump proceeded to tell supporters that this caravan was an “invasion,” that “the Democrats had something to do with it,” and that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the Jewish billionaire George Soros was financing this “invasion” in an attempt to rig the midterm elections.
Lee Zeldin did not object to these remarks. In his view, it was not anti-Semitic (or even irresponsible)
for the president to suggest that a wealthy Jew was orchestrating an
invasion of the United States, using nonwhite immigrants as his shock
troops — even though the president was saying such things just days after a neo-Nazi had murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue
because he believed that Jews were orchestrating an invasion of the
United States, using nonwhite immigrants as their shock troops. Instead,
Zeldin chose to demonstrate his solidarity with American Jews last fall
by inviting Steve Bannon to headline one of his campaign events.
It is worth noting that even if Trump’s revanchist nativism didn’t
contain traces of anti-Semitism, it would remain a form of politics
that endangers Diaspora Jews. Jewish reactionaries like Stephen Miller
might be able to assimilate to the form of Americanism that Trump
champions. But the vast majority of American Jews are liberal,
cosmopolitan, and secularist. Which is to say: They are the “globalist”
villains in Trumpism’s Manichaean fable of American decline.
And even if Trump’s politics did not
endanger Jews, anyone who has ever uttered “never again” in earnest
would still be obliged to oppose him. If you are a Jew who has “zero
tolerance” for anti-Semitism — but infinite tolerance for a president
who describes immigrants as an “infestation,” and directs extrajudicial
cruelty at their children — then you aren’t so different from the Nazis’
apologists. You share their conviction that some populations are
entitled to basic rights, while others are not.
You just believe the führer should have included your people among the chosen."
~~~~~
courtesy Counterpunch
~ The Arrest Of Julian Assange
Everyone is covering this, don't miss the Daniel Ellsberg interview from earlier today on the Real News Network, at the end there is a link to Gore Vidal. I asked Mike tonight if he thought Americans were freaking out over recent Trump developments and now this arrest and he said, "people are complacent." I hope he is wrong.
"The American war against Iraq was among the more idiotic and
gratuitous slaughters in human history. It was premised on lies,
prosecuted by criminals and fools, outsourced to professional murderers
and it isn’t over. In addition to those murdered directly and indirectly
in the war, several million refugees were scattered across the Middle
East, including over a million into Syria. ISIS grew from the ranks of
the disbanded Iraqi army. This fiasco appeared as it was to all the
world, the gasp of a dying empire sunk under the weight of its ignorance
and arrogance.
Late in the war Julian Assange and his colleagues at Wikileaks
published documents and videos allegedly leaked by Chelsea Manning that
brought the gratuitous nature of American violence home for all to see.
The most damning was this videothat
shows American soldiers carefully and methodically slaughtering
civilians, including Reuters staffers, outside of any determinable
theater of war. The label ‘collateral murders’ was attached to the
video, but those murdered were targeted— they weren’t ancillary to
otherwise justifiable murders.
Julian Assange has reportedly been charged by an American Grand Jury
for his role in publishing this leaked video, among others. He will
apparently be extradited to the U.S. where he is expected to stand trial
for doing what reporters do— publishing true information in the public
interest. The New York Times and other newspapers also published the
leaked documents, but have as yet not been charged. This legal
maneuvering appears to be a politically motivated vendetta against
Julian Assange for embarrassing the War Criminals behind the Iraq war.
National Democrats and the liberal press have spent the last 2.5
years demonizing Mr. Assange for his role in publishing leaked DNC
emails in the run up to the 2016 Presidential race. As with the
government’s case against him, the content of the leaked videos and
documents is not in dispute. They are what they are purported to be.
American soldiers did murder civilians and Reuters staffers who posed no
immediate threat to them. Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff did screw
Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic nomination and she did give
contradictory information about her political positions depending on
what she thought her audience wanted to hear.
Mr. Assange’s accusers are largely those responsible for the imperial
decline that his reporting has illuminated. The leading Republicans and
Democrats behind the Iraq war should have been charged with War Crimes.
There is no statute of limitations on War Crimes. The national security
officials among Mr. Assange’s accusers illegally spied on Americans and
lied about doing so under oath to congress. The CIA illegally spied on
the congressional committee charged with investigating illegal torture
in the Iraq War after illegally destroying videotape evidence of its
crimes. What is Julian Assange being charged with again?
What Mr. Assange did is expose the crimes of the rich and powerful.
Arguments over his methods conflate process errors with the gratuitous
murder of civilians. If these murdered civilians had been well-to-do
white Americans and staffers at the New York Times, where might
‘process’ fit into the utterly predictable (and justifiable) calls to
give those charged fair trials and prison sentences if convicted.
Through what lens are the crimes exposed by Mr. Assange and Wikileaks
not crimes? As with everything about a gratuitous war in which a million
or more civilians are killed, why aren’t its architects and chief
instigators in the dock at The Hague pleading for their lives?
While the political pump has been primed in the U.S. by war-state
Democrats and war-state liberals to go after Julian Assange without
legal restraint, he is lauded by much of the world for bringing the
crimes of the American elite into public view. What will be illuminated
by prosecuting Mr. Assange is the crimes of the elite and their use of
power and office to cover up their crimes. While most Americans haven’t
seen the video (link above) of American soldiers murdering civilians and
press staffers, the publicity of a trial will certainly stir public
interest.
Much as the Iraq War was a late gasp of an empire in decline, the
prosecution of Julian Assange is the desperate act of a political
establishment that is losing its grip on power. Mr. Assange is but a
messenger. This establishment is the agent of its own demise. And it
couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of people. Free Julian Assange
and All Political Prisoners. All Power to the People!"
A warning that this will be a work in progress because I am completely limited on time. Okay so here's my excuse: I have a small window of opportunity to accomplish things around the house and outside since the wound clinic released me. In two more weeks I go back to have the laser treatments (photodynamic therapy) on my legs which will really knock me for a loop. So, until then I am free, but everything is a disaster around here.
- The best news is that subpoenas may be going out to release the Mueller Report, because we all know the Barr Report was bullshit:
You've probably already seen this, I posted it right after the Barr bombshell over on another site and I didn't even get a point for it due to a rampage of Trump psychos.
~~~~~
- Trump's threat to close the Mexico-U.S. border was more bluster and bluff from the billowing orange balloon which actually scared a lot of people down here. Yesterday we were up in San Diego (no I didn't win the lottery and buy the Warner Springs Adobe Fixer, sigh) and two amigas of mine who are Mexican citizens approached me at a store and were stressed that the border would actually close. These gals live in Tijuana and commute to work in San Diego everyday and indicated that their friends were also worried sick. One of their friends they told me leaves TIJ early in the morning while the rest of us are sleeping in, uses the pedestrian crossing sometimes having to wait forever in line then on the US side catches a bus to go to work and repeats the process at the end of the day. How many of us could do that? This is what Trump does, he scares people.
But now, the new threat is that he is giving Mexico one years time to stop the flow the drugs into the US or he will close the border. Does this mean he is willing to legalize the drugs and set up treatment facilities for addictions? No, it means he is a moron.
~ And how about Chicago , wow what a difference a day makes ! A Landslide ! Does anyone remember Mayor Daley and the '68 DNC Convention ? Mike does, he was there. Congratulations to Chicago, way to go !
I'll be back and forth and in and out with the local events of the drug war over the next few days, I hope I don't sprain anything, completely out of shape after these weeks which turned into months. And, I finally found the acai ice cream at Sprouts but it costs an arm and a leg. Paris says WOOF !
