February 28, 2015

A FRIENDSHIP TESTED

Israel remains one of the closest friends of the United States, but its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is causing serious damage to the friendship. The United States is on the verge of a potentially historic landmark in international diplomacy by forging an agreement with Iran to contain its nuclear program, but Netanyahu has responded to an invitation by House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress next week and to attack President Barack Obama’s efforts. An invitation to address Congress is usually offered to statesmen seeking to affirm ties of close friendship. Winston Churchill addressed Congress in stirring terms to cement the alliance of Britain and the United States during World War II. If Obama were to accept the invitation of a dissident party to critique Netanyahu’s policies within the sanctum of the Israeli Knesset, the insult would be plain to see.


All leaders must have the strength and wisdom to resist the destructive tendencies of fanatics within their own camps. Republicans have suffered because moderates have been unable to fend off the irresponsible, anti-government program of Tea Party extremists. Muslim moderates have suffered because extremists have the power to terrorize. In Israel, Netanyahu remains captive of the fanatics of the settler movement who form a part of his ruling coalition, and he clings to extreme views about Israeli security. Israel has every reason to be concerned about its security. The history of the Jewish people demands eternal vigilance in safeguarding, not just the people’s welfare, but their existence. Arab extremism at present appears to be mainly directed at other Arabs and at minorities within the Arab world, but Israel remains a prime target for Hamas, which controls Gaza on Israel’s border and for others within the Middle Eastern cauldron. If ISIS were ever to solidify control of some sort of caliphate, Israel would soon be within its cross hairs.


Iran is also a threat, and Netanyahu is dedicated to the proposition that Iran must never get a nuclear bomb. Obama is dedicated to that proposition, as well. Toward that end, he has applied severe economic sanctions against Iran, which have worked to persuade the government to negotiate seriously about its nuclear program. A breakthrough is said to be imminent. The irony is that a successful agreement with Iran will achieve the goal that Israel is seeking: elimination of a nuclear threat. The difference is that Netanyahu questions whether Obama will be able to get an air-tight deal ensuring that Iran will not be able to develop a bomb in secret. The only alternative is war with Iran to prevent development of a bomb. Giving Obama, our allies and the United Nations a chance to cement a deal to avert a new war and forge a new, lasting peace is worth the risk. If a real nuclear threat develops, the United States will be there for Israel. Preventing that threat is the U.S. aim at the moment.


For the Republicans to enlist Netanyahu in their ongoing anti-Obama campaign is self-defeating and ultimately the opposite of patriotic. Undermining American diplomacy while it is underway is scurrilous. A historic analogy: Richard Nixon’s efforts to undermine President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam peace negotiations as the 1968 election approached. The United States has stood by Israel since its creation and continues to do so. And yet Israel’s own extremist tendencies threaten Israeli democracy and security. Even many Israeli leaders say so, including former security officials with intimate knowledge of the threats Israel faces.







cont'

http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20150228/OPINION04/702289983/0/THISJUSTIN

February 28, 2015

Six Former Colleagues Say Bill O'Reilly LIED ABOUT BEING 'ATTACKED BY PROTESTORS' During LA Riots

ENJOY IT WHILE IT LASTS!...........



Several former colleagues now claim that Bill O'Reilly also lied about his experience covering the Los Angeles riots in 1992. O'Reilly has on occasion referenced an incident when he and his crew had to take cover during his time as a host for "Inside Edition." "They were throwing bricks and stones at us," O'Reilly claimed in a 2006 interview. “Concrete was raining down on us. ... The cops saved our butts that time." But six people who worked alongside the Fox News host in California at the time told the Guardian that they have no recollection of being attacked by protesters. “It didn’t happen,” said Rick Kirkham, the lead reporter on the riots for "Inside Edition." “If it did, how come none of the rest of us remember it?” In addition to Kirkham, crew members Bonnie Strauss, Tony Cox, Theresa McKeown, Bob McCall and Neil Antin also told the Guardian that O'Reilly had exaggerated an altercation that took place with a single person. From the Guardian:



Bob McCall, the sound man at the time, said that he remembers one resident hitting the camera being used to film O'Reilly. “It was one person with one rock,” McCall said. “Nobody was hit.” Other colleagues, like Tonya Freeman, told the newspaper they "don’t recall watching or hearing" the aggressive attacks O'Reilly has described. O'Reilly reiterated the claim on the "Hugh Hewitt Show" last week. "We were attacked, we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us," he said. A Fox News spokesperson issued the following statement to The Huffington Post on Friday:



The new allegations come after several other colleagues and journalists have accused the host in recent days of embellishing his war reporting experience. The controversy began last Thursday, when Mother Jones writers David Corn and Daniel Schulman published a scathing report indicating that O'Reilly had misreported his experience in Argentina during the Falklands War in 1982.






cont'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/27/bill-oreilly-los-angeles-riots-story-guardian_n_6768636.html

February 27, 2015

SMACKDOWN!!- Senator Whitehouse RIPS 'The Senator With The Snowball'

After Senator James Inhofe trolled the entire Senate with his snowball on Thursday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse stepped up to the mic with his fact snowplow to clear away the mess.

So much win.

Here's the transcript:






http://crooksandliars.com/2015/02/senator-whitehouse-rips-senator-snowball

February 27, 2015

Benjamin Netanyahu Has Been LYING TO AMERICANS For 20 Years

Next week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present his case against President Obama's talks with Iran; he is expected to portray Iran as an untrustworthy actor and Obama's diplomacy as naive and a distraction from more sanctions or even military action. This case suffered a major setback this week as a major intelligence leak showed that Israel's own intelligence service, the Mossad, privately contradicted Netanyahu's public statements on Iran. The leaked secret cables show that as Netanyahu was presenting at the United Nations in 2012 a narrative that Iran that was just “weeks” away from producing enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, Israel's own intelligence service found a very different conclusion. From The Guardian:










Thirteen years later, Netanyahu has yet to offer any sort of mea culpa for his remarks before the Congress about Iraq, but he did return his sights to his original target: Iran. In September of 2012, he appeared on Meet The Press to claim that Iran was “very close, they are six months away from being about 90 percent of having the enriched uranium for an atom bomb.” And it was that year " target="_blank">where he gave his infamous cartoon-bomb-chart-assisted U.N. speech, which the recent leaks of Mossad intelligence severely undercut. In 2001, a private video was filmed of Netanyahu at a campaign supporter's house shows him boasting that “America is a thing you can move very easily” – noting that he purposely dragged on the process with the Palestinians in order to prevent any resolution. And indeed during his 2011 speech to Congress, he seemed to be proved correct. At that time, Members of Congress gave him 29 standing ovations, more than they gave their own president. But things appear to have changed as he may have finally overplayed his hand. His upcoming address to Congress is being boycotted by nearly 30 Members of Congress; the White House won't be meeting with him, and neither will Secretary of State John Kerry. Additional sanctions on Iran, more or less designed to kill talks with that country, appear to be stalled, and a historic Iran deal appears imminent.






cont'


http://www.alternet.org/world/benjamin-netanyahu-has-been-lying-americans-20-years

February 26, 2015

Australian Comedian Jim Jefferies TAKES ON NRA, American Gun Nuts And Wins

Australian comedian Jim Jefferies, whose brilliant commentary on American gun policies make up a good portion of the Netflix comedy special “Bare,” says he receives a minimum of 15 hate letters per day, from US-born-and-bred gun nuts. Hate mail and death threats aside, Jefferies’ stand up won The Interrobang’s Best Comedy Special of 2014.

Who cares what some Australian has to say about American gun policies? Well, I do, for one. So should everyone who actually cares about this country and wants to protect the lives of the people who live here. Australia banned guns in the 1990’s, and not a single mass shooting has taken place in that country since. What’s more, at last count, Americans were over 20 times more likely to be killed by firearms than citizens of Australia.

But it’s not just Australia. It’s Australia, France, the United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland), Israel, South Korea, Norway, Poland and Slovenia. Americans are over 20 times more likely to be killed by guns than citizens in any of those countries. And let’s look at Japan, a country which has implemented some of the strictest gun policies on the planet. According to The Atlantic:



Citizens of the US are ten to sixteen times more likely to be killed by a gun than citizens of Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain.

The list goes on and on and on.





cont'

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/02/26/australian-comedian-jim-jefferies-gun-control-video/

February 26, 2015

Bill O'Reilly FORCED TO CLARIFY Remarks About Murdered Nuns

The latest round of scrutiny, over a claim by O'Reilly that he "saw nuns get shot in the back of the head" in El Salvador, forced the top-rated host to clarify his remarks. For the second time in as many days, Media Matters for America on Wednesday released a report detailing "an apparent fabrication" by O'Reilly. Media Matters produced two clips of O'Reilly talking about the murders. During a December 2012 broadcast of "The O'Reilly Factor," the host recalled describing the atrocity to his mother. "When I would tell her, hey, mom, I was in El Salvador and I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head, she almost couldn't process it," O'Reilly said. "She couldn't process it, you know."


O'Reilly didn't detail when or where in El Salvador he saw those murders. In a statement to CNNMoney on Wednesday night, O'Reilly said that reporters covering the conflict in El Salvador were shown "depictions of nuns who were murdered." He noted that his reference to the nuns in 2012 came on the day of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
"While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered," O'Reilly said. "The mention of the nuns on my program came the day of the Newtown massacre (December 14, 2012). The segment was about evil and how hard it is for folks to comprehend it." "I used the murdered nuns as an example of that evil," O'Reilly continued. "That's what I am referring to when I say 'I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.' No one could possibly take that segment as reporting on El Salvador."


The United States was rocked in December 1980, when three American nuns and a lay woman were murdered in El Salvador. O'Reilly notes in his book "The No Spin Zone" that he went to El Salvador to cover the strife shortly after he was made a correspondent by CBS News in 1981. In a 2009 interview, he said he had arrived in the country "right after" the murder of the nuns. Media Matters cited a professor of religion at the University of Florida who wrote that "no priests or nuns were killed in El Salvador for more than eight years" after January 1981. The professor, Anna L. Peterson, also noted that "thousands of lay Christian activists continued to die at the hands of death squads and the military." Peterson told CNNMoney that what she wrote "is correct, to the best of my knowledge." She said that video footage of political killings in El Salvador is rare, but still photos of dead bodies are widely available.


Media Matters has been digging in to O'Reilly's past statements since Mother Jones magazine questioned O'Reilly's claim to have been in a "war zone" during the Falklands war. He was actually reporting from Buenos Aires, thousands of miles from the Falkland Islands.
On Tuesday, Media Matters challenged O'Reilly's repeated claims to have been at the scene when George de Mohrenschildt, a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, committed suicide. Media Matters, which is dedicated to correcting misinformation in conservative media, has long kept a critical eye on O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox News. The group is currently urging supporters to demand that Fox News "hold O'Reilly accountable for his deception." O'Reilly has dismissed Media Matters in the past as a "vicious" propaganda outfit.
"Those fascists have tried everything they can try to get me off the air," O'Reilly said in 2012.





cont'

http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/25/media/bill-oreilly-el-salvador-nuns/

February 26, 2015

BIBI's LATEST LIE

As you can see here, Prime Minister Netanyahu has doubled down on attacking President Obama and European leaders for allegedly 'giving up' on efforts to stop Iranian from acquiring nuclear warheads. But in the course of his scorched earth campaign for reelection, he's done something as yet little noticed in the US. He's run a campaign ad which not only hugely distorts history but also managed to libel the US.

In the ad Netanyahu explicitly places himself as a latter day ben Gurion, standing up to a United States betraying the embryonic Jewish state. Indeed, the ad claims that Israel might not even exist today if ben Gurion hadn't defied the United States and declared Israeli Independence in May 1948. The precise chain of events is complicated. But this is at best a willful distortion of what happened. John Judis goes through the history in some detail here.





While the US did not move into its current level of alignment with Israel until after the Six Day War and especially in the 1980s, the United States was at least a critical force if not the critical force in providing the diplomatic basis and support for Israel's birth. But the ad is a falsehood on a deeper level. Nothing was more essential to ben Gurion's theory of geopolitics than the belief that Israel, a small country among hostile neighbors, required the backing a Great Power, which he increasingly over the years identified as the United States. It also needed a powerful army which could not only defend the country but provide the deterrence to make life there possible. But the necessity of a great power alliance was never far from his mind and it recurs again and again in papers. To the extent we can manage the anachronism of placing someone from the past in a future they never knew, ben Gurion would never have played the game Netanyahu is now playing. That's not to say for a moment that he would have been indifferent to the Iran threat. Far from it. But I think most students of the man would agree he never would have approached the critical protective role of the US alliance in this way.





http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bibis-latest-lie

February 26, 2015

Chicago Progressives To Rahm: GET LOST!

A newly confident progressive movement delivered a body blow to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Tuesday night—and is now gearing up for another knockout punch to what it derisively calls the Corporate Wing of the Democratic Party. This defeat was one for the record books. Emanuel became the first incumbent mayor on Tuesday to fail to get 50 percent of the primary vote since Chicago adopted nonpartisan elections in 1983. The hard-charging former congressman and chief of staff in the Obama White House angered many liberal Chicagoans, especially minorities and members of labor unions, by embarking on aggressive education reform agenda that included the closing of fifty schools. Emanuel, who cruised to victory in 2011 by 30 percentage points, has also been knocked for implementing red light cameras, which some Chicagoans say disproportionately target minorities, and for focusing on bringing business downtown at the expense of neighborhoods.


Chicago teachers union head Karen Lewis, described the move as favoring his “hedge fund homies” over the rest of the city. Rahm defeated Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Cook County Commissioner 45-34—that’s five points short of what the polls showed he had just a few days ago. “This is the happiest day of my life—Rahm Emanuel is in a run-off,” said Delmarie Cobb, a longtime Chicago progressive political consultant. “He is everything the city cannot continue to have in terms of its survival. The African-American is holding on by a thread from decades of benign neglect. It didn’t start with him. But he exacerbated it.” Emanuel became mayor when six-term incumbent Richard Daley decided not to seek a second term. He was supposed to have an easy first re-election when Lewis, who had been laying the groundwork for a run, dropped out after developing a brain tumor.


That Garcia, a little known official, was able to get that close to the mayor is a testament to Rahm’s unpopularity. After all, his $15 million war chest was four times what the entire rest of the field had on hand and should have swamped even the most ambitious challenger. But many liberals say, the credit goes to a resurgent progressive movement that has left a string of centrist Democrats in its wake, and point to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio as their success stories. In New York, de Blasio’s landslide win in 2013 was largely a result of a decade of organizing by labor and progressive groups under the guise of the Working Families Party, a quasi third party that the new mayor helped found. In 2009, Democratic city treasurer Bill Thompson nearly pulled an unforeseen upset against incumbent Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and a handful of liberals formed a new bloc in the city council, presaging de Blasio’s win four years later. In Chicago, the progressive movement has been slower to coalesce after decades of Daley, but the city did see a handful of progressives elected to the Council in the Rahm-era, and most look set to survive re-election despite efforts by Emanuel and the business community to take them out. Last summer, a Chicago offshoot of the WFP, United Working Families, formed to lend sophistication to progressives campaign efforts.


For Chicago area liberals, this year was supposed to be like 2009 in New York—a chance to scare the establishment and lay the groundwork for the next go around. Now though progressives are salivating at the prospect of ending the Emanuel-era in Chicago prematurely. “The next six weeks will be the defining electoral contest of 2015, between the power of the people on one hand and the power of big money on the other,” said Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, which has joined other liberal groups in trying to draft Elizabeth Warren into the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. “Pro-corporate Democrats want to go one way, and progressive and working families Democrats want to go another, and this election will be the biggest fight in the nation on that topic.” Thom Serafin, a longtime Democratic consultant in Chicago, said that Garcia’s showing was more a testament to the a low turnout primary on a cold February day, (although the 34 percent who did show up to vote dwarfed the showing in big city primaries in New York and Los Angeles) and to the fact that many political players in Chicago just wanted to see Emanuel sweat one out a bit. “Aldermen wanted a runoff just so that Rahm would spend a little more time with them,” Serafin said. “There was a genuine enthusiasm for not going over 50 percent so that we could now have a real debate.” In order to erase the ten point (and tens of millions of dollars) Emanuel advantage, Serafin said that Garcia will have to show that he is capable of running the nation’s third largest city.






cont'

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/25/chicago-progressives-to-rahm-get-lost.html

February 26, 2015

Bill O'Reilly LIED ABOUT WITNESSING SUICIDE Of JFK Assassin's Friend, Former Co-Workers Say

As Bill O’Reilly continues on the warpath against those reporting on whether he embellished his combat experience, new allegations have emerged that the Fox News anchor lied about being present at a suicide in Florida. “He was in Dallas,” Tracy Rowlett, a former colleague of O’Reilly’s at Dallas station WFAA, told liberal watchdog Media Matters. “Bill O’Reilly’s a phony -- there’s no other way to put it.” The Fox host has claimed on several occasions that he heard the gunshot that killed George de Mohrenschildt, a friend of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald who committed suicide at his daughter’s home in Florida in 1977. O’Reilly originally made the claim in his 2012 book, Killing Kennedy. He repeated it during an appearance on "Fox & Friends" while promoting the book: “I was about to knock on the door where [de Mohrenschildt] was, his daughter’s house, and he blew his brains out with a shotgun,” O'Reilly said (see embedded video at the bottom of this piece). He made the claim again in an adaption of Killing Kennedy for younger readers.

Rowlett and Byron Harris, another of O’Reilly’s WFAA colleagues at the time, both say the embattled host was with them at WFAA’s Dallas headquarters when de Mohrenschildt died. The station "would have reported it as some kind of exclusive -- and there was no exclusive -- if O'Reilly had been standing outside the door,” Harris said. Not only did WFAA run no exclusive, but the story was broken by The Dallas Morning News. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office investigation of de Mohrenschildt’s death does not mention O’Reilly. Nor does The Associated Press report of the incident, which only says de Mohrenschildt was in the house with two maids at the time, neither of which heard the gunshot. According to Rowlett and Harris, O’Reilly never mentioned while he was working at WFAA that he was present when de Mohrenschildt committed suicide. “That came later," Rowlett said. “That must have been a brain surge when he was writing the book.” O’Reilly’s claim to have been in Florida is also contradicted by conversations the Fox host had with Gaeton Fonzi, an investigative journalist who wrote extensively about the Kennedy assassination. Fozi, who is now deceased, writes in his biography that he received a call from O’Reilly shortly after the suicide, asking for confirmation it had happened. From Fozi’s autobiography:



The new charges promise further trouble for the embattled Fox entertainer, who since last Thursday has fended off accusations that he overstated his war reporting experience. O’Reilly has claimed in the past that he "reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands" during his time with CBS and "survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War.” O’Reilly was in Buenos Aires -- 1,200 miles from the Falklands -- when the conflict ended, but maintained in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt* that the riots he witnessed in the capital constitute a “combat situation.”





cont'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/25/oreilly-suicide-mohrenschildt_n_6749182.html

February 25, 2015

The Defense Of Bill O'Reilly Enters THE THUGGISH PHASE

I predicted last week that David Corn's questioning of Bill O'Reilly's claim that he experienced "combat" in Buenos Aires during the Falklands War won't do the slightest bit of harm to O'Reilly's career; I anticipated that the response would eventually turn vicious and thuggish, and would eventually involve ad hominem attacks on O'Reilly's critics.

Well, here's a moment of thuggishness from O'Reilly himself, as reported in The New York Times:





In a better media world, this would offend every journalist who wasn't an ideological ally of O'Reilly's. This would get the rest of the press's back up. But it won't, because the nerdy members of the Journalism Club see O'Reilly and the rest of the people at Fox as BMOCs who sit at the cool table in the media's high school cafeteria. They fear Fox. So most of them won't wade into the fight. Meanwhile ,David Corn went on right-wing apparatchik Hugh Hewitt's radio show yesterday. Expecting to be asked about the O'Reilly story, Corn was subjected to attacks on his own character for most of an hour, eventually terminating the phone call with Hewitt. Real Clear Politics has posted the audio, deceptively headlining the clip "David Corn Hangs Up On Hugh Hewitt After 45-Minute Grilling on Bill O'Reilly." It wasn't a "45-minute grilling on Bill O'Reilly." Most of it wasn't "on Bill O'Reilly" at all. It was an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink attempted character assassination of Corn, built on irrelevancies twisted into something sinister.


The transcript is here. The effort to impugn Corn started early:





You see where this is going -- Corn questioned O'Reilly's memories of thirty years ago ... and what was Corn doing decades ago? Becoming a member of Phi Beta Kappa! Did he deserve it? Does he now know why that happened? Is his memory of becoming a member of PBK accurate? Hunh? Hunh?




cont'


http://crooksandliars.com/2015/02/defense-bill-oreilly-enters-thuggish-phase