A five hundred million dollar training program to put together an Iraqi army to fight ISIS has yielded, by the admission of the American general staff, about five or six functioning fighters. Five or six? The only answer to incompetence like that is off with their heads. The Pentagon needs to be completely replaced.
Samantha Power, our Ambassador to the UN, tells us that the situation is very complex. This is a woman who doesn’t know the difference between complex and completely non-functional. There’s nothing complex about pissing away five hundred million bucks and getting nothing for it.
For that much money we could buy our own mercenary army and not have to worry about trying to train a bunch of small time Sunni bandits to protect their own country. The Iraqi population doesn’t seem able to produce any kind if functioning fighter, this after fighting among themselves for a thousand years. No wonder their internal wars went on for so long. No one was capable of winning a fight. No one knew how.
Power thinks that the DOD has some moves in mind that would enhance our chances of not wasting more of our taxpayer’s money. Yeah, like dumping the program and using the rest of the money for infrastructure back here. Every dime we spend in the Middle East is money flushed down the toilet. We send millions in weaponry to Saudi Arabia and they don’t use it to fight. We spend a half a billion bucks to develop an Iraqi army and we get five or six fighters. Trump’s right. No one respects us but it’s not because of our government its because of the Pentagon.
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Since John Boehner quit as Speaker of the House, everyone’s asking; what caused it, what does it mean to the up-coming election and will this help or hurt the Republican party going into the future? The answers to all these questions, all of which are important, are that nobody knows nothin’. That’s right fans, you ask a hundred people and you’ll get a hundred different answers, which always means that at this point there is no answer, at least not one that anyone can make any sense out of.
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Leon HG Wolf, a bigoted moron who writes for Red State spent Thursday attacking William Scott, a witness before Senator Cruz’s committee investigating government regulations.
Scott spoke to the now regulated problems with certain kinds of seeds, and then went on to use the wood in the capital building as an illustration of environmental problems brought about by preservatives. This was too much for Wolf whose head blew off spreading what passes for his brains all over his office. Who knows what really happened, but his editorial in Red State mocking Mr. Scott for his environmental observations, appeared to have been written by someone with neither head nor brains.
The problem here is brute ignorance, not Mr. Scott’s but Mr. Wolf’s. This is a writer, editorializing about a subject, of which he obviously has no knowledge. Mr. Scott was speaking about the highly poisonous preservatives that once appeared in wood products and most carpets, all of which have been banned by regulation to protect the general public from unscrupulous manufacturers who care nothing for their customer’s health as long as they sell more product and make more money.
Wolf is obviously, by his own rhetoric, a shill for the big corporations and has no concern what goes into your home. Maybe he ought to find out what he’s talking about before he opens his mouth.
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There has been a great deal of noise made about the fact that Hillary Clinton has come out against the TPP. The GOP would like you to think it’s a flip-flop from her earlier position of backing it but that’s not exactly the way it lays out. If Hillary’s critics had been paying attention instead of making up their own press releases, the Republicans would have seen that Hillary was receptive but not a backer of the TPP when it was conceived, She recognized it was a potential gold standard of trade agreements and that it could be very good for us and the whole region, but that as she stated then, unlike most Republicans, she would like to actually read it before she made up her mind. Hillary’s acceptance of other trade bills has been the same. She backs some and opposes others but she withholds judgment until the bills are written and even more importantly, until she has read them. Her GOP adversaries would be well advised to take that plan of action to heart.
Hillary has voted against CASTA, the Central American trade agreement, even as she was voting for a free trade agreement with Australia. Unlike most politicians she doesn’t try to apply one rule to all circumstances but looks at each situation with fresh eyes and makes a judgment based on what is actually there. She opposes the TPP because it lacks currency manipulation rules and does not favor positions that would be good for American labor or constraints on the out of control costs of drugs, even though there are many favorable aspects to the pact.
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Watched two Republicans, Dave Brat of the Freedom Caucus, and Conservative Charlie Dent go at each other on Meet the Press. They proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Brat and his Freedom Caucus are interested in anything but helping the nation. It was all about who was right and who was wrong and the idea that they might be hurting the American people didn’t seem to interest Brat. That’s the problem. Dent seems to understand that the Republicans in the House will have to deal with the Democrats in order to get anything done in the way of governing. Brat, on the other hand seems not to understand that they are in congress to function as a government. Brat is only interested in the tiny concept of getting what he wants, regardless of how it affects the country he is supposed to be governing. It is inconceivable that the nation can proceed on this basis.
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Sure it’s been going on for a while but once again this past weekend The Trumpster came after Jeb Bush over his reiteration of the falsehood that his brother George, kept America safe during his reign. No one thinks less of Trump than this writer but in this one instance he is one hundred percent right.
911 Happened on Bush’s watch. No, he didn’t fly the planes but his administration ignored warnings that it was going to happen, warnings that were correct and considering the earlier attack on the Trade Center, something that should have been top priority in an administration that was paying attention. Bush/Cheney obviously weren’t, so how does that say they kept us safe?
Then, not satisfied with presiding over the largest attack on continental United States, Bush pushed us into unmotivated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We lost around five thousand American kids in those wars and had about twenty five thousand wounded. Is that keeping America safe? Neither of these countries were attacking us. If we wanted to invade somebody it should have been Saudi Arabia where most of the 911 attackers came from.
Then, as if not satisfied with making the country physically unsafe, Bush moved into the fiscal side and presided, through his tearing down of banking regulations, over the destruction of our economy.
If Jeb really thinks that his brother is an example of a chief executive keeping his country safe, then he is obviously not competent to serve in that office himself. One might ask oneself; what is left for the Bush family to destroy? Well, considering his views on climate change in the face of the fossil fuel business, how about the planet?
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Palestinians are stabbing Israelis and Israelis are shooting Palestinians. What else is new? This has been going on almost forever and it will continue to go on until we get moderates leading both the Palestinians and the nation of Israel. There is really only one solution, partition. The Israelis are terrified about the Palestinians ability to reproduce and eventually outnumber them. They understand that if there is only one Israel with both factions represented that eventually the Arab children will outvote the Israeli children and take over the nation. This is what is in back of all Israeli planning.
So it’s partition, or the status quo and right now the status quo, killing everyone in sight, is winning. No it’s not a realistic plan but as long as people like Netanyahu are running Israel it’s the only one available.
The only sensible solution is to move the Palestinians from Gaza to the settlements that Israel has illegally created on the West Bank and to move those Israeli settlers to Gaza and create two countries. Sure, this won’t work but only because there are too many people on each side that don’t want it to; that have entrenched interests that would be hurt by such a move, fanatical religious interests, greedy economical interests and bigoted social interests that preclude any good thing happening for either side.
The players involved are not good people. They are people who want their way and don’t give a damn about either of their peoples. Sound familiar? It should. It’s exactly what is happening here with our two parties. Yes, the world stinks and it will continue to stink until that shadowy God that most humans believe in, in some shape or form, sends down a couple of leaders who are interested in the good of their people and not just the achievements of their personal goals.
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The Hungarian camerawoman, Petra Laszlo who was caught on camera, herself, tripping a Syrian refugee as he fled Hungarian police with his infant in his arms and then later kicking a girl in the same group has decided to sue the man she tripped along with Facebook where the film appeared. Now I’ve heard everything. This disgrace to the human race is going to sue the victim. She’s already shown that she’s a mean spirited piece of garbage, now she wants to prove it.
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Paul Ryan is willing to become the Speaker of the House but like most Republicans he wants it to be a part time job.
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How much trouble are the Republicans actually in? Well, Kevin McCarthy, the first choice to replace John (The Crybaby) Boehner, has already blown the Benghazi hearings out of the water with his statement that they were only organized to cost Hillary Clinton poll points. Then we have a new champion, Jason Chaffetz, who in attacking Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood, presented a phony chart, showing how abortions had gone up and other services had gone down to the House committee investigating that organization.
Not only did this dummy not know how to make such a chart, it turned out that the information on it did not come, as Chaffetz claimed, from Planned Parenthoods reports, but from American’s United for Life, a nutcase anti-abortion group, proving that Chaffetz has absolutely zero credibility and is in fact an embarrassment to any position he would seek. Richards made him look like a complete fool or maybe only a half assed one. This is the caliber of material that the GOP has put forward for the third highest post in the government. Pathetic. And as a footnote to the whole fiasco, a journalist identified Chaffetz’ chart as completely nonfunctional as a chart itself. Kind of like the whole GOP isn’t it?
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In the last three elections the country, mainly through the device of poor voter turnout, has elected Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. Given their power in both houses the Republicans now have the opportunity to show their functionality in governance. They have failed miserably. Does that mean that if we elected Democrats that would be any better? Maybe not, but they couldn’t be any worse.