Democrats and Liberals Give Obama a Pass on Closing Gitmo

"I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that"

-President Barack Obama

Liberals disgust me. With 2014 being an election year and the looming announcement from Queen Hillary the Inevitable that she is running for president in 2016 liberals and their beloved Democratic Party are closing ranks and circling the wagons to protect Team Blue Jackass from heretics unwilling to line up and salute the party flag. Obama is now well into his second term and the American torture and concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay is still open for business, a pox upon our once great country and one that along with the abominable practices there – namely torture and the prevention from it officially becoming a “death camp” only because the US government is force feeding prisoners who are attempting hunger strikes – continue and will continue because after all, it is an election year and God forbid if the Democrats make it any easier for their more overtly fascist opponents to call them “chicken”. 

Obama ran on closing this monstrous facility and to this day, five and a half years into his second term it has yet to be done. Oh, but the Democrats and the liberals blame those bad, bad Republicans for their ongoing obstructionism and preventing Barry from carrying out his agenda - horseshit! Obama had two years when his party controlled the Congress and the only thing of substance that managed to get accomplished was bailing out the criminals on Wall Street whose bad gambling bets wrecked the economy. Obama could have - and could still close the goddamned wretched place any time that he chooses, after all the Bush-Cheney regime firmly established the American version of the  Führerprinzip or as it is known in The Homeland: the Unitary Executive. This renders moot any Democrat whining that Obama is powerless - he does manage to get a lot done when it comes to unleashing the NSA Stasi against the public and having his ruthless underboss Eric Holder to use the arcane 1917 Espionage Act as a bludgeon to suppress whistleblowers and those who report on them. He also manages to do one hell of a job of conducting extrajudicial assassinations against American citizens, covering up torture and other high crimes of his predecessor and instigating hostilities with a nuclear armed Russia because he was insulted by President Putin.

Obama is far from the helpless, besieged by racists and obstructionists and teabaggers historic leader that he is made out to be and the same liberals who shrieked for Bush and Cheney's heads on pikes for far less than the loathsome Obama regime has pulled are falling into line and shuffling towards the Kool Aid vat just as they always do. Obama gave his much hyped foreign policy speech at West Point where he gave the commencement address to the future corporate cannon fodder of illegal wars of aggression and vowed to close the facility again. The speech was more of the same teleprompter drivel in which Obama laid out the proverbial line of bullshit long enough to fertilize the Sahara with his interventionist rhetoric and defense of that most obscene of concepts that is American exceptionalism. I excerpt the following from the transcript:

Think about it. Our military has no peer. The odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low, and do not come close to the dangers we faced during the Cold War. Meanwhile, our economy remains the most dynamic on Earth, our businesses the most innovative. Each year, we grow more energy independent. From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations.

America continues to attract striving immigrants. The values of our founding inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around the globe. And when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help. (Applause.) So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century past, and it will be true for the century to come.

 But the world is changing with accelerating speed. This presents opportunity, but also new dangers. We know all too well, after 9/11, just how technology and globalization has put power once reserved for states in the hands of individuals, raising the capacity of terrorists to do harm.

 Russia’s aggression towards former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors.

 AND

I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.

 And that’s why I will continue to push to close Gitmo, because American values and legal traditions do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders. (Applause.) That’s why we’re putting in place new restrictions on how America collects and uses intelligence -- because we will have fewer partners and be less effective if a perception takes hold that we’re conducting surveillance against ordinary citizens. (Applause.) America does not simply stand for stability or the absence of conflict, no matter what the cost; we stand for the more lasting peace that can only come through opportunity and freedom for people everywhere -- which brings me to the fourth and final element of American leadership: our willingness to act on behalf of human dignity.

America’s support for democracy and human rights goes beyond idealism; it is a matter of national security. Democracies are our closest friends and are far less likely to go to war. Economies based on free and open markets perform better and become markets for our goods. Respect for human rights is an antidote to instability and the grievances that fuel violence and terror.

At that point the commanders should have ordered the cadets to break ranks and get out the shovels. I mean for God's sake - can't we even manage to produce coherent bullshit in this country anymore? The neocons howled like dogs being castrated because it just wasn't Hitlerian enough for their tastes but the meat of the speech - on the continuation of US interventionism for vaguely defined humanitarian missions must have made the panties of both warmongering femme fatales Susan Rice and Samantha Powers get wet. Nothing quite sells like sending in the US special ops and hit teams to rescue a couple of hundred of hapless Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Islamists largely empowered by the US destabilization of Africa and the Democrats are at the end of the day as bloodthirsty as their criminal cohorts across the aisle. Hillary will be perfect for the coming wave of American whip ass that will be unleashed for "humanitarian" or "Responsibility to Protect (P2P)" Team America style incursions and nothing could be more pleasing to the party base, fucking hypocrites that they all are.

In my daily online travels I frequent a number of progressive sites where I often voice my opinion in the comments sections for articles and I have noticed an alarming amount of what appear to be long dormant Hillary Clinton sleeper cells being activated. You can always tell these because first off the person making comments is asinine and secondly, many of the accounts show a creation date of 2008 and 2009 with minimal comments over five years until a recent spike of activity. There are also many pieces and articles popping up like toadstools out of piles of cow shit after a morning rain calling for unity behind a “far from perfect” candidate because the Republicans would be much, much worse.

The unenlightened always play to the silly pack of low information types – or much information that is no more than DNC propaganda – with their fear of the GOP war on the rights of some besieged and helpless identity based group. The good thing now is that thanks to the horrific track record of Barack Obama that a lot more people than before do not buy into that two-party hogwash this time around and it is causing a huge problem not only for Democrats but for the entire sham system itself.

Former New York Times foreign correspondent and author Chris Hedges, himself more of a socialist – calm down libertarians, he did sue Obama over the National Defense Authorization Act – called out liberals for the hypocrites that they are shortly after the election of the man of hope and change. From his December 7, 2009 column entitled “Liberals are Useless”:

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

 I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

AND

 I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

Hedges of course was vilified by the liberal elitists and the Democrats after he nailed them so precisely and now as the cheer-leading and activism begins for the newest great liberal hope Hillary so will any who dare to speak such blasphemy. I have long advocated for an alliance between thinking progressives, leftists, libertarians and principled conservatives against our true enemy - the entire corrupt two party US political system itself and thanks to Obama the choir that I preach to is growing by the day.

Would You Buy a Car From This Man?

As an American would you put your full faith and trust in not only an agent of the US Government but one of President Barack Obama's hand-picked best and brightest, a man who will never simply be thrown under the bus in an election year like the freshly jettisoned Eric Shinseki? This is no ordinary man but one of mighty power who presides over the national intelligence apparatus, the Big Kahuna who is able to lie to Congress with impunity and as Director of National Intelligence presides over the red, white and blue Orwellian security state that is beyond reproach and despite the damage done by the leaks of patriotic whistleblower Edward Snowden the hyrda is already re-configuring with the sneering, bald head of James Clapper erupting from it's scaled, winged body in all of his hissing, forked-tongue resplendence.

The Obama administration and the United States Government itself is asking all Americans to place their blind faith in the behemoth of the surveillance state as though it were almighty God himself and swallow the tale hook, line and sinker that Snowden lied about ever escalating his concerns through the appropriate channels before performing his act of great service and exposing that the bastards are engaged in mass surveillance, data-mining and Christ only knows what else. Put your faith in James Clapper and others just like him because that is exactly what is being requested by Leviathan.

The inevitable counter-attack against Snowden after his Wednesday night blockbuster interview with the big state ass-kisser and establishment media mouthpiece Brian Williams is on and the NSA is wailing "LIAR" as it has released a lone email from Snowden that it claims is the only one that it can find that provides proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the erstwhile contractor did not adhere to the proper protocol in following the chain of command. While making hay out of Snowden's "I was trained as a spy" statement - which by any reasonable definition of what exactly a "spy" does is true the tactics have shifted. I excerpt the following from ABC News but similar cookie-cutter attacks can be found pretty much everywhere today.

Edward Snowden said in a recent interview he tried to go through internal channels to raise his concerns about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs before he slipped out of the country with a trove of secret documents. The NSA disagrees and says it has the email exchange to prove it.

“I actually did go through channels, and that is documented. The NSA has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of it – legal authorities,” Snowden told NBC News in a wide-ranging interview. “I reported that there were real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities. And I went even further in this, to say that they could be unconstitutional, that they were sort of abrogating our model of government in a way that empowered presidents to override our statutory laws. And this was made very clear. And the response was, more or less, in bureaucratic language, was, ‘You should stop asking questions.’”

In the interview, Snowden called on Congress to verify that the communications exist.

Today the NSA posted online the email exchange to which the government agency says it believes Snowden is referring. The exchange released by the NSA took place in early April, months after Snowden reportedly contacted journalists in preparation to expose the secret programs.

According to the documents posted online, Snowden wrote to the NSA’s Office of General Counsel on Friday, April 5, 2013 asking for legal clarification about whether Presidential executive orders can supersede federal statute, and whether Department of Defense (DOD) or Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) regulations get “greater precedence.”

The response from the General Counsel’s office, dated Monday, April 8, says that while executive orders have the “force and effect of law,” they cannot override a statute. The response also said that DOD and ODNI regulations are afforded “similar precedence” and one may have more depending on subject matter or date. The respondent invites Snowden to “give [him or her] a call if [he] would like to discuss further.”

The NSA said in statement that Snowden’s email “did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed.”

“There was no additional follow-up noted,” the NSA said. “There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations. We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.”

For what it's worth which isn't much in the treacherous US state media Snowden offered a rebuttal to the NSA's Sgt. Schultz "I know nothing" treatment of his attempt to bring the actions of the run amok American Stasi to light but really, the man has already been judged in NBC's kangaroo court by the set for life power suckler Brian Williams. I just did a quick Google search and every fake media and opinion outlet from "conservative" to "liberal" is running with the Snowden lied narrative. 

Who are you going to believe?

First off anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation knows that reporting any type of malfeasance through the "appropriate channels" is bullshit and that human resources departments exist solely to protect the interests of upper management, functioning as a de facto sort of Gestapo in ensuring that valid complaints are quashed and that those making them are punished and usually escorted out of the building. To believe that this would NOT be the practice in the climes of big government and especially American taxpayer dollar devouring leeches like national security contractors is asinine. One wonders just how fucking dumb that the American sheeple are to constantly gobble down the bullshit biscuits fed to them by their corrupt government and it's media propaganda machine - I mean do any of them actually bother to use logic by applying the same rules that their employers use writ large? Not that I would expect any sort of an  answer to that one after the last thirteen and a half years of living as a peasant in  The Homeland under constant surveillance. Americans just line up to salute whatever horseshit that is run up the flagpole by their benevolent leaders. 

The late, great Hunter S. Thompson had it right in his short diatribe "Hey Rube":

“Hey, Rube” is an old-timey phrase, coined in the merciless culture of the traveling carnival gangs that roamed from town to town in the early 20^th century.

Every stop on the circuit was just another chance to fleece another crowd of free-spending Rubes – Suckers, Hicks, Yokels, Johns, Fish, Marks, Bums, Losers, Day Traders in Portland, fools who buy diamonds from gypsies, and anyone over the age of nine in this country who still believes in his heart that all cops are honest and would never lie in a courtroom.

These people are everywhere. They are Legion, soon to be a majority, and 10,000 more are being born every day. It was P.T. Barnum, the Circus man, who explained the real secret of his vast commercial success by repeating his now-famous motto, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” in this country, ahd his job was to keep them amused, with a zeal that has never been equaled in the history of American show business.

Barnum knew what people wanted: Freaks, Clowns, and Wild Animals. The Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town only once a year, and those days were marked as sacred holidays on the John Deere calendars of every Rube in America…. Those dates were special; many schools closed when the Circus came to town, and not every student returned when the public frenzy was over. “Running away with the Circus” was the dream of every schoolboy and the nightmare of every mother with a bored and beautiful daughter. 

Whoever believes the official government fairy tales on Snowden, whether it be that he is a liar, a low level hacker, a narcissist (like Obama), a man living in a James Bond-Jason Bourne style fantasy world or a Chinese-Russian agent is a sucker and a chump and one who should wise up before it is too late. Unfortunately such types breed like rabbits here in the land of the sheep and the home of the slaves.

Clapper is only the figurehead, the barker outside of the geek tent at the local fair selling tickets to the feces eating context but he represents the US establishment itself - just go to Photoshop and cut and paste any of their heads onto his body, they are all the same beneath the surface. 

Hey Rube, wanna hear something......

Smearing of Snowden Begins after NBC Interview

The most hated man in America today, at least  by the unprincipled charlatans in the establishment is former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the lackeys of the corrupt National Security State and the polluted Obama regime have attacked him as they were a pack of mange crazed dogs. The running man managed to hit the big time - at least in America where television is the drug of choice - in an exclusive interview with NBC's Brian Williams. It was Snowden's big public relations opportunity after months of being kicked around by scum the likes of Peter King, Mike Rogers, Michael Hayden and on Wednesday Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry who is befitting to wear the crown of king of American assholes after his last nine or ten months on the job. Kerry hit the Wednesday morning television circuit to repeatedly and dishonestly trash Snowden as a "traitor" and a "coward" in much the same way that the angel of death Dick Cheney did to the 2004 version of Kerry himself. Seems like once a particular level is achieved in the American political class that a truly putrescent rottenness blooms and Kerry is resplendent as he practically glows with hypocrisy, moral debauchery and elitist decadence.

The massive smear job on Snowden started early yesterday, well before the airing of the interview based on a sneak preview segment (one wonders if NBC picked it out) where he made comments to the effect that he was trained as a spy. The usual suspects pounced on that to mock the top target on Obama's kill list as living in a fantasy world and other horseshit - the number one tactic of the pigs who run this star-spangled sty is to discredit and turn their vast propaganda apparatus loose. But really, considering what Snowden really said: “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word — in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I’m not and even being assigned a name that was not mine”. While Snowden's official duty with the Central Intelligence Agency remains mysterious when one is working either directly for or as a contractor for the US government, under a fake name, at a fake business in a foreign country and conducting surveillance I would venture to say that such a person would in fact be a "spy" in the truest sense of the world. It is lost on millions of meat heads though but those really aren't the type of people that you really want to try to convince of anything anyway. As the old saying goes, "never try to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig".

But I digress...

After the exclusive NBC interview with the celebrity talking head Williams it was time to pile on Snowden and the attacks, while ridiculous and predictable were particularly nasty. NBC News has the Snowden interview on their website with the subtitle "Traitor or Patriot", the New York Times slyly floated the innuendo that Snowden was an agent of Putin (with special bonus points for kicking Glenn Greenwald in the balls as "smug and unreasonable") and the gaggle of vermin like Peter King, the unhinged terrorist supporter called the interview an "infomercial". On top of it all, after Snowden stated that he had attempted to use formal channels to report an NSA run amok the American Stasi came out today and released some bullshit email from Snowden as 'proof' that he never attempted to utilize the proper channels. According to a story in The Guardian the NSA stated that it was the only record it could find. This is the same agency that lies about everything and performs duties for a government that sends forth perjurers like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to lie to Congress about the unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining programs that the patriot Snowden exposed.

The deck is stacked in the US media, one who opposes Leviathan is never going to get a fair trial in the court of public opinion and over the next few days Snowden will be electronically lynched, likely culminating with an all star lineup of fascist scum on the Sunday morning 'news' show circuit. A truth teller will never get any sort of honest treatment in the US corporate-state media and while Snowden may be smart he is naive to have afforded a fully vested servant of the establishment such as Brian Williams serve as his Judas Goat.

Neocons Yowl Like Scalded Cats Over Obama Speech

President Barack Obama gave his heralded speech to the cannon fodder at West Point yesterday and the neocons went batshit in that the emperor failed to give a full-throated endorsement of their insane ideology of global conquest. By the time that the last words were ticking off of the teleprompter the neocon propaganda flagship at the Washington Post had already published a blistering screed by their morally bereft, warmongering editorial board denouncing what was in actuality a support of continued American interventionism by the Commander in Chief.

The editorial board screed, "At West Point, President Obama binds America’s hands on foreign affairs" is nothing more or less than the standard chickenhawk, spread "democracy" at gunpoint malarkey that roils one's stomach to even read it. I excerpt from this wretched, whining jeremiad as follows:

In his address Wednesday to the graduating cadets at West Point , Mr. Obama marshaled a virtual corps of straw men, dismissing those who “say that every problem has a military solution,” who “think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak,” who favor putting “American troops into the middle of [Syria’s] increasingly sectarian civil war,” who propose “invading every country that harbors terrorist networks” and who think that “working through international institutions . . . or respecting international law is a sign of weakness.”

Few, if any, of those who question the president’s record hold such views. Instead, they are asking why an arbitrary date should be set for withdrawing all forces from Afghanistan, especially given the baleful results of the “zero option” in Iraq. They are suggesting that military steps short of the deployment of U.S. ground troops could stop the murderous air and chemical attacks by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. They are arguing that the United States should not be constrained by Cyprus or Bulgaria in responding to Russia’s invasion and annexation of parts of Ukraine.

To those doubters, the president’s address offered scant comfort. Reiterating and further tightening a doctrine he laid out in a speech to the United Nations last fall, Mr. Obama said the United States should act unilaterally only in defense of a narrow set of “core interests,” such as the free flow of trade. When “crises arise that stir our conscience or push the world in a more dangerous direction,” he said, “we should not go it alone.”

This binding of U.S. power places Mr. Obama at odds with every U.S. president since World War II. In effect, he ruled out interventions to stop genocide or reverse aggression absent a direct threat to the U.S. homeland or a multilateral initiative. Those terms would exclude missions by previous administrations in places such as Somalia and Haiti and Mr. Obama’s own proposal to strike Syria last year — but not the war in Iraq, which was a multilateral campaign.

Mr. Obama made one new practical proposal: to set up a $5 billion fund to “train, build capacity and facilitate partner countries on the front lines” of fighting terrorism. The initiative is worthy of support as a way of checking emerging threats in places such as Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Mali. But just as a U.S. invasion is not needed for every terrorist haven, not all can be eliminated by training other countries’ forces.

Mr. Obama also pledged to “ramp up support” for the Syrian opposition. But he made the same promise last year and failed to follow through. Those U.S. allies who worry about Mr. Obama’s foreign policy retreat — and those who have exploited it — will be impressed by a change in U.S. behavior, not the president’s rhetoric.

More whining about Syria - given that the neocons are such ardent supporters of extremist right-wing Israel it is more than a bit mind boggling that advocacy of supporting extremist Islamist elements in Syria - including flesh eating cannibals who actually boast about their actions - but the same traffickers of outrage also hypocritically line up behind the neo-Nazis that are being backed in Ukraine despite the devastation wreaked upon the Jewish people by Hitler and his real Nazis.

Tellingly, the "army of straw men" applause line also appeared in another WaPo Editorial but Iran-Contra criminal and deeply embedded arch-neocon Elliott Abrams who went on his own tirade over Obama's 'failure' to execute the Project for the New American Century plan. Abrams should have long ago been thrown into one of the darkest and dankest holes of a US federal prison for his crimes, instead he landed a gig with the Bush II administration and continues to be a key player within the Deep State.

As for Obama's speech, it really is nothing more but the same imperialist horseshit all wrapped up in a red, white and blue package - more of the same warmongering abroad and more tyranny and revocation of liberties, nullification of the US Constitution and repression at home.

It falls short of what the neocons desire though but even Hitler himself would have problems satisfying their insanity.

Is There a More Loathsome American than John Kerry?

Today the finger-wagger was out early and with a vengeance, determined to prove that he is the winner of the most disgusting and embarrassing American of 2014. The Secretary of State, with his chronic diarrhea of the mouth and increasingly shrill holier than thou attitude appeared on morning network television in all of his elitist Skull and Bones puckered asshole glory. The occasion was of course to once again smear former government contractor turned heroic NSA whistleblower as a "traitor"and a "coward" and demanding that Snowden "man up" whatever that means. The flaming liberal windbag from Massachusetts who hit the jackpot by marrying into the Heinz Ketchup Empire isn't much of an authority on "manning up" especially considering the dive that he took in Ohio in 2004 surrendering the presidency to another former Skull and Bones elitist swine George W. Bush despite widespread irregularities.

Kerry is the embodiment of America itself these days, once a heroic and noble 'war hero' (if you believe his self-serving career of cashing in like his pal John McCain) who denounced the Vietnam War as the lost cause that it always was Mr. Kerry has morphed into a powerful figure who is as vile and corrupt, as venal and hypocritical of the very system that he serves. This whole nutty soap opera of Kerry lying and threatening Putin, baiting Snowden and standing up for neo-Nazi scum in Ukraine is obviously personal. Snowden and Putin dared to show him up to his fellow high-rolling globalist snobs in the Davos set. Kerry once embodied a youthful idealism and a sense of honor and justice but now is just another poisoned, soulless wealthy cadaver, devoid of even a shred of morality nor the common decency to just resign and spare all of us Americans from the ongoing temper tantrums, demagoguery and huffing and puffing. If there were ever a man who should just go and fuck off forever it is John F. Kerry. As the great American columnist H.L. Mencken put it "imagine a gentleman and you have just imagined everything that he was not".

The forum for this pompous ass was CBS This Morning and Kerry's remarks are excerpted from the story in The Guardian entitled "Snowden unlikely to 'man up' in face of Espionage Act, legal adviser says":

In a television appearance on Wednesday morning, Kerry said that if Snowden were a “patriot”, he would return to the United States from Russia to face criminal charges. Snowden was charged last June with three felonies under the 1917 Espionage Act.

"This is a man who has betrayed his country,” Kerry told CBS News. “He should man up and come back to the US.”

Kerry’s comments came as NBC News prepared to broadcast an extended interview with Snowden on Wednesday night, beginning at 10pm ET. Snowden revealed his identity almost one year ago, on 9 June 2013.

Responding to Kerry’s comments on Wednesday, Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and a legal adviser to Snowden, said the whistleblower hoped to return to the United States one day, but that he could not do so under the current Espionage Act charges, which make it impossible for him to argue that his disclosures had served the common good.

“The laws under which Snowden is charged don’t distinguish between sharing information with the press in the public interest, and selling secrets to a foreign enemy,” Wizner said.

“The laws would not provide him any opportunity to say that the information never should have been withheld from the public in the first place. And the fact that the disclosures have led to the highest journalism rewards, have led to historic reforms in the US and around the world – all of that would be irrelevant in a prosecution under the espionage laws in the United States.”

Snowden also could face an untold number of additional charges if he returned to the United States. “He could be charged for each of the documents that has been published,” Wizner said. “The exposure that he faces is virtually unlimited under this.”

Wizner is correct, it is a rigged game and if Snowden were to be stupid enough to take vermin like Kerry at their word when it comes to fair treatment he would be disappeared immediately into one of America's torture gulags or simply just held forever in limbo in some tiny prison cell on a military base. But Snowden is not a stupid man and this most of all puts a bug up the tarnished types like Kerry who sold his soul for pennies on the dollar.

The real "traitors" in this country are the "cowards" who hid behind an archaic World War I law in The Espionage Act of 1917 that was created solely to persecute those who were opposed to the lying bastard and father of the rotten imperialism that came in that damned war's wake - Woodrow Wilson - another messianic meddler of the type that the USA, USA, USA has far too many in our cherished and often damnable history. The invocation of the Espionage Act by the lawless Obama regime reveals the grinning death's head behind El Presidente's Fozzie Bear Fascism and his regime stands for nothing more than the same rotten tyranny as that of George W. Bush only he has been made into a product that provides him with an impenetrable Teflon shield where the gullible and the O-Bots are unable to recognize his bullshit for what it is. The same type of imperialism as Wilson, Bush or any of the other war criminals who have held the exalted office. 

So Snowden gives hims ballyhooed interview tonight to NBC's lickspittle state-corporate celebrity talking head Brian Williams, I suppose that having to at some point turn oneself into the entertainment in the electronic court of bought off jackasses like Williams was inevitable to get any public exposure outside of the lies of state. The drive by attacks are already underway despite that we are hours from the interview's being aired.

During his sit down with the employee of the mammoth defense contractor GE, Snowden made the statement that he was "trained as a spy" or in the context from NBC News:

“I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,”

The propaganda machine pounced on that and all of the paid sock puppets and corrupt pundits and columnists are using this statement to paint the man as delusional and they can get away with it on this sorrowful star-spangled lemming farm simply because too many people cannot be bothered to fucking think for themselves. Snowden when with the CIA worked in a foreign country, under a false name, for a false front company conducting surveillance and data-mining operations - sure sounds like a fucking SPY to me.

The Snowden affair is playing out now, the interview with the corrupt NBC is a sing of that but the last of the real reporting by Glenn Greenwald has yet to be done. According to accounts the finale will include names of those that the NSA Stasi has spied on - I suspect that list will include a man known by Mr. Kerry named John Edwards, perhaps Eliot Spitzer and who knows how many more. I also hope that there is the wild card that is the MAIN CORE database that will be revealed and that when it all comes out that it will be enough to crucify every rotten cocksucker like that rancid son of a bitch John Kerry who sold out their country to a cross of their own corruption and let the birds pick out and eat their eyeballs while they hang there.

New US Puppet in Kiev: Chocolate King Escalates Violence

The much hyped elections in Ukraine (at least the US-EU-NATO backed part of the country) took place on Sunday and have enthroned another greedy oligarch in Petro Poroshenko aka “The Chocolate King”. Despite much of the besieged country, under attack by the global finance mafia, rapacious corporations - like gas company Burisma Holdings which in one of those cozy crony capitalist mob deals just hired VP Joe Biden's son R.Hunter Biden to divvy up the spoils - and savage neo-Nazis that serve as the muscle for the coup regime of Arseniy Yatsenuyk or as he is affectionately referred to by State Department neocon Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland - not being able to vote. The election of the candy man is just another one of those staged by the state-corporate media for the benefit of the schmucks illusions that this once great country now must suffer on a near daily basis.

Let the austerity begin - but first there is killing to be done and the eager to please Poroshenko has already adopted the US talking points in referring to anti-fascist, anti-austerity "rebels" in the East as "terrorists". Only in America can raw horseshit like this be sold to so many eager buyers - wasn't the entire fucking premise of the overthrow of democratically elected leader Viktor Yanukovych that he was a sleazy oligarch whoring out to foreign interests and shitting on toilets made of gold? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If there is one minor benefit to soon to be fleeced by the IMF and other global piranhas is that the deranged Yulia Tymoshenko aka “The Gas Princess” was thrashed soundly along with her avowed referendum to start WWIII by locking down a death pact with NATO. Small matter of consolation to the victims of the latest violent escalation by the illicit regime - chocolate mogul or not - that has unleashed a new wave of carnage including the use of military helicopters against civilians.

The porcine Poroshenko will be a big hit with the neocons at Foggy Bottom and in the Obama White House, Barry himself probably can't be more thrilled now that he has more cover for the actions of his Reagan style death squads as they continue to wantonly murder civilians. The stammering ass himself, John "Skull and Bones" Kerry has already come out and spoken glowingly of the new order in Ukraine. Per The Guardian:

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, said that Sunday’s presidential elections in Ukraine sent a “clear message” that the country's people want to “live in a united, democratic and peaceful Ukraine anchored in European institutions”.

Though Kerry's statement, issued on Monday, did not name President Vladimir Putin of Russia by name, his comments on the all but certain electoral victory of the pro-west businessman Petro Poroshenko were clearly directed towards Moscow.

High praise coming from a man who has continually tried to sell a new war to Americans based on false flag sarin gas attacks in Syria but Kerry has no honor, nor any shame, he is a true creature of the financial elite who when the wet work has been done in East Ukraine will descend like vultures to loot in an orgiastic frenzy while Poroshenko wipes his ass with American hundred dollar bills. Men like John Forbes Kerry represent the worst elements in the diseased character of those who have seized control of America, he once apparently stood for principle - at least in the aftermath of his Vietnam service but with the way this horse-faced charlatan conducts himself one has to wonder whether the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were onto something. Kerry made it a point to dig his bony nose into Putin's chest with his comments that the farcical elections (omitting the ongoing murders) were a "clear message" to Russia.

Is there any wonder why the entire civilized world hates America so much? I mean is this the best that we have to offer? 

This bullshit election does nothing to remedy the neocon coup d'etat disaster in Ukraine, it only worsens matters and the Chocolate King is already mouthing off about Crimea too so instead of deescalating this mess the Obama regime is only hastening what now appears to be our imminent date with historical infamy. 

All because these slimy, criminal psychopaths like Obama had their poor egos bruised by the big bad Putin. 

Financial Neutron Bomb Against Russia Latest US Lunacy

The stupid rush to a war of some sort against Russia never stops with the latest bit of exceptional arrogance directed at taking down Russia's leader Vladimir Putin being the most dangerous one yet. In a horrifying recent article written by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at The Telegraph a new kind of weapon of mass destruction, one designed to bring down the Russian financial system not only exists but is being given serious consideration by our idiotic and short-sighted US cadre of political and bureaucratic lunatics running the big red, white and blue asylum.

The article describes a secret financial aspect to that most anti-American of laws that is the USAPATRIOT Act that has been polished by an "elite cell" at the US Treasury Department in what is tabbed as the "Manhattan Project of the 21st Century" in which "scarlet letters" can be applied to foreign banks deemed by the standard loose definitions to have been involved in money laundering to support terrorist activities. In terms of sheer hypocrisy alone when considering the to this day unpunished crime spree of domestic economic terrorism directed at millions of Americans by the big Wall Street banks/casinos with their own money laundering schemes - cleaned up and called derivatives - this has to be the proverbial mother of all bad ideas.

I excerpt from the Telegraph article, entitled "US financial showdown with Russia is more dangerous than it looks, for both sides" from which I excerpt:

The United States has constructed a financial neutron bomb. For the past 12 years an elite cell at the US Treasury has been sharpening the tools of economic warfare, designing ways to bring almost any country to its knees without firing a shot.

The strategy relies on hegemonic control over the global banking system, buttressed by a network of allies and the reluctant acquiescence of neutral states. Let us call this the Manhattan Project of the early 21st century.

"It is a new kind of war, like a creeping financial insurgency, intended to constrict our enemies' financial lifeblood, unprecedented in its reach and effectiveness," says Juan Zarate, the Treasury and White House official who helped spearhead policy after 9/11.

“The new geo-economic game may be more efficient and subtle than past geopolitical competitions, but it is no less ruthless and destructive,” he writes in his book Treasury's War: the Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare.

Bear this in mind as Washington tightens the noose on Vladimir Putin's Russia, slowly shutting off market access for Russian banks, companies and state bodies with $714bn of dollar debt (Sberbank data).

The stealth weapon is a "scarlet letter", devised under Section 311 of the US Patriot Act. Once a bank is tainted in this way - accused of money-laundering or underwriting terrorist activities, a suitably loose offence - it becomes radioactive, caught in the "boa constrictor's lethal embrace", as Mr Zarate puts it.

This can be a death sentence even if the lender has no operations in the US. European banks do not dare to defy US regulators. They sever all dealings with the victim.

That the US government, particularly the US Treasury which is nothing but a revolving door that spins like wind turbine for the likes of the corrupt elite of the New York based high finance jackals such as former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson who engineered the disastrous financial bailout and former NY FED boss Timothy Geithner whose phony stress tests allowed the Wall Street casinos to become bigger and more immune from accountability is even contemplating such a serious provocation, a virtual declaration of war against a nuclear power is indicative of the rot and how deep it goes. The best thing that any emerging power, particularly Russia, China or India can do is to get out of the US based financial and banking system entirely.

Back to the Telegraph article:

The US Treasury faces a more formidable prey with Russia, the world's biggest producer of energy with a $2 trillion economy, superb scientists and a first-strike nuclear arsenal. It is also tightly linked to the German and east European economies. The US risks endangering its own alliance system if it runs roughshod over friends. It is in much the same situation as Britain in the mid-19th century when it enforced naval supremacy, boarding alleged slave ships anywhere in the world, under any flag, ruffling everybody's feathers.

President Putin knows exactly what the US can do with its financial weapons. Russia was brought into the loop when the two countries were for a while "allies" in the fight against Jihadi terrorism. Mr Putin appointed loyalist Viktor Zubkov - later prime minister - to handle dealings with the US Treasury.

 Mr Zarate said the Obama White House has waited too long to strike in earnest, clinging to the hope that Putin would stop short of tearing up the global rule book. "They should take the gloves off. The longer the wait, the more maximalist they may have to be," he said.

 This would be a calibrated escalation, issuing the scarlet letter to Russian banks that help Syria's regime.

He thinks it may already too late to stop Eastern Ukraine spinning out of control, but not too late to inflict a high cost. "If the US Treasury says three Russian banks are "primary money-laundering concerns", do you think that UBS, or Standard Chartered will have anything to do with them?"

The Ukraine disaster has now taken a turn for the worst with the installation of the new US puppet over the weekend in what amounts to a rigged election.  Petro Poroshenko aka “The Chocolate King” is another sleazy corrupt oligarch who like a depraved dog is already licking Uncle Scam's balls with an escalation of the "anti-terrorist" actions - in layman's terms - slaughter of anti-fascist, anti-austerity Ukranians in the east, particularly in Donetsk where Zarate's "high cost" is being inflicted on civilians who reject the Kiev coup government and it's neo-Nazis. With the new false legitimacy of the "Chocolate King" trumpeted by the corrupt US state-corporate media the real bloodshed is about to begin.

The threat by Zarate to use the USAPATRIOT Act provisions against Russian banks  for being "primary money-laundering concerns" over the laughable charge of backing terrorists in Syria would represent an escalation of extreme danger in that it could implode the entire global economy given the degree of interconnection that currently exists. This would amount to a self-inflicted wound of the gravest nature simply for the childish reason of sticking it to Putin. Granted Zarate has a new book to hustle but considering events over the last year from our political class - including President Barack Obama and John Kerry's State Department bringing down the entire economic house of cards is entirely probable. Zarate also wrote a column at the neocon propaganda beacon that is the Washington Post back in March in which he called for the US Treasury to attack the Russian banking system. 

Once again returning to the Telegraph article Russia would surely retaliate for such an unprecedented and arrogantly conceived act of aggression:

Yet as the old proverb goes: "Russia is never as strong as she looks; Russia is never as weak as she looks."

Princeton professor Harold James sees echoes of events before the First World War when Britain and France imagined they could use financial warfare to check German power.

He says the world's interlocking nexus means this cannot be contained. Sanctions risk setting off a chain-reaction to match the 2008 shock. "Lehman was a small institution compared with the Austrian, French and German banks that have become highly exposed to Russia’s financial system. A Russian asset freeze could be catastrophic for European – indeed, global – financial markets," he wrote on Project Syndicate.

Chancellor George Osborne must have been let into the secret of US plans by now. Perhaps that is why he issued last week's alert in Washington, warning City bankers to prepare for a sanctions fall-out. The City is precious, he said, "but that doesn't mean its interests will come above the national security interests of our country".

The greatest risk is surely an "asymmetric" riposte by the Kremlin. Russia's cyber-warfare experts are among the best, and they had their own trial run on Estonia in 2007. A cyber shutdown of an Illinois water system was tracked to Russian sources in 2011. We don't know whether US Homeland Security can counter a full-blown "denial-of-service" attack on electricity grids, water systems, air traffic control, or indeed the New York Stock Exchange, and nor does Washington.

"If we were in a cyberwar today, the US would lose. We're simply the most dependent and most vulnerable," said US spy chief Mike McConnell in 2010.

That the US would "lose" a cyberwar is a given in considering the pathology of the personality types tasked with the defense against such. Look at the NSA Stasi that is so intent on building a surveillance machine to turn against any potential US political dissent, commit acts of industrial espionage and blackmail that too little time is likely invested by the hotshots at Ft. Meade to actually consider protecting The Homeland in the event of such an attack. Russia would be entirely justified to launch one too if the US Treasury "elite cell" succeeds in getting Obama to issue the order against Putin's banks. 

An economic collapse would be the best scenario in that case, if the crazies in Washington actually are able to use such tactics to topple Putin and if hard liners end up in charge of Russia's nukes then it could be hasta la vista baby. 

Fire Up Those Grills and Remember that Pink Slime is Good for You

Grilling season officially opened this weekend so tire up those barbecue grills my fellow Americans, to combat soaring beef prices the noxious product Pink Slime is coming back with a vengeance. Pink Slime or as the corporations that manufacture it like to refer to it "lean finely textured beef" or "LFTB" is a filler product or food additive that amounts to basically the shit that is swept off of the slaughterhouse floor along with other trimmings and byproducts that can't be sold and then chemically treated to give it the appearance of chewed pink bubble gum.

The description on how it is manufactured taken from the Wikipedia page is as follows:

The product is used as a filler or to reduce the overall fat content of ground beef. It is produced by processing low-grade beef trimmings and other meat by-products such as cartilage, connective tissue and sinew,  which contain fat and small amounts of lean beef, and mechanically separating the lean beef from the fat through the use of a centrifuge at about 100°F (38°C). The heat liquefies the fat to help separate lean beef from fat and other by-products. The recovered beef material is processed, heated, and treated with gaseous ammonia or citric acid to kill E. coli, salmonella, and other bacteria. Gaseous ammonia in contact with the water in the meat produces ammonium hydroxide. The product is finely ground, compressed into pellets or blocks, flash frozen and then shipped for use as an additive.

Rick Jochum, a spokesperson for Beef Products Inc. (BPI) stated that the finished product is 94 to 97 percent lean beef, and has a nutritional value comparable to 90 percent lean ground beef. Furthermore, it was stated that the product's content is very high in protein, is low in fat, and contains iron, zinc and B vitamins. Jochum also said that BPI's product does not contain cow intestines or connective tissue such as tendons.  Food editor and cookbook author J.M. Hirsh described it as highly mealy with bits and studs of cartilage-like matter, and a USDA microbiologist says the product does contain connective tissue "instead of muscle" and thus it is "not meat" and is "not nutritionally equivalent" to ground beef. [Mr. Jochum can't be taken seriously considering that his paycheck rides on selling garbage like Pink Slime to the public]

Most of the product is produced and sold by BPI, Cargill Meat Solutions, and Tyson Foods. The product sold by BPI introduces the trimmings to ammonium hydroxide (a solution of ammonia in water), while the Cargill product uses citric acid instead of ammonium hydroxide.  Part of the manufacturing process at BPI includes extruding the material through long tubes that are thinner than a pencil, during which time the meat is exposed to gaseous ammonia.

Yikes! I remember the revulsion that I had after I read Eric Schlosser's book "Fast Food Nation" but this is even more disgusting than that gut-wrenching expose. Of course Cargill and Tyson - two of the massive meat production corporations that continually are looking for ways to profit off of selling increasingly lower quality product are involved. These corporations are the strongest arguments for local food production that exist and if you happen to have a good farmers market within the vicinity just avoid the corporate food behemoths altogether. You will save money and be healthier.

The return of Pink Slime is given an excellent treatment over at the libertarian financial site Zero Hedge in a piece entitled "The Solution To Record Meat Prices: The Return Of Pink Slime" that touches on some of the other aspects of the spiking cost of meat in America including - GASP - rampant inflation of the type that is hidden by the US government in that core inflation omits food and energy costs. Years of Federal Reserve money printing and the backstopping of the rigged six ways from Sunday financial markets bear a large share of the blame for Americans getting jammed again as the economy steers into the next leg down. If one pays attention to the propagandists in the state-corporate media, particularly in regards to the economy any shortcoming is always blamed on the weather anymore although in the case of beef that is at least somewhat true considering the record droughts.

I excerpt at length from the Zero Hedge piece:

A few months ago we reported that while the Fed is seeing nothing but hedonic deflation as far as the eye can see, food prices - for whatever reason but "certainly not" due to trillions in liquidity entering a close system so just blame it on the weather - were soaring to record highs. Among them was the price of beef, which in 2014 alone has soared by the most in over a decade. This led the US Department of Agriculture to warn of "sticker shock" facing home chefs on the eve of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the unofficial start of the U.S. summer grilling season.

According to the USDA, reported by Reuters, conditions in California could have "large and lasting effects on U.S. fruit, vegetable, dairy and egg prices," as the most populous U.S. state struggles through what officials are calling a catastrophic drought. Alas, the USDA had nothing to say about the Fed's unprecedented desire to reflate the US economy which is still suffering from the catastrophic depression which started nearly 7 years ago.

Link to Reuters story:  "USDA warns of sticker shock on U.S. beef as grilling season starts"

Ok we get it: soaring food prices are not only already here but are set to surge even more, especially for those who rather eat real meat than mystery meat dispensed with largesse at your favorite $0.99 fast food outlet.

So what are food processors to do facing soaring meat input costs and unwilling to suffer bottom line hits? Why, return to that old staple of unknown origin of course.

Here comes Pink Slime... again.

According to the WSJ, "finely textured beef, dubbed "pink slime" by critics, is mounting a comeback as retailers seek cheaper trimmings to include in hamburger meat and processors find new products to put it in."

Proving that popular memory lasts at best a couple of years, it was only in 2012 when sales of pink slime, processed from beef scraps left after cattle are butchered, collapsed in 2012 after a "social-media frenzy spurred by television reports raising questions about its legitimacy as a beef product. The ingredient's two largest producers, Beef Products Inc. and Cargill Inc., closed plants that made it and cut hundreds of jobs—while defending the product's quality and pointing out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture deems it safe."

What really allowed the scrapping of pink slime, however, was the broad decline in prices of non-alternative meat, as in the real deal. However, now that meat prices are soaring again (all weather mind you, nothing to do with the Fed), it is time for US consumers to eat "hedonically-cheap" "meat" once again.

Link to Wall Street Journal story "'Pink Slime' Makes Comeback as Beef Prices Spike" (behind pay wall so excerpted below)

From the WSJ:

Today, Cargill sells finely textured beef to about 400 retail, food-service and food-processing customers, more than before the 2012 controversy, though overall they now buy smaller amounts, company officials said. Production of finely textured beef at Beef Products has doubled from its low point.

The resurgence is being driven, in part, by an aversion to something many consumers and companies find even less pleasant than the pink-slime nickname: red-hot prices. Prolonged drought in the southern Great Plains has shrunk U.S. cattle supplies to historic lows. The retail price of ground beef soared 27% in the two years through April to a record $3.808 a pound,according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That means serious sticker shock for U.S. consumers preparing to fire up their barbecues for Memorial Day weekend—the traditional start to the summer grilling season. The week leading up to the Monday holiday is typically one of the biggest sales periods for ground beef, with an estimated 160 million pounds likely to be sold during that stretch this year, according to CattleFax, a Colorado-based research firm.

How much of that burger meat contains finely textured beef isn't clear. Prior to the flurry of media attention in 2012, Beef Products estimates, the ingredient was in as much as 70% of the ground beef sold in the U.S. at retail and in food service. Cargill and Beef Products decline to give a similar estimate now, but they say sales have rebounded sharply from their 2012 lows.

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So... 100%? But at least the Fed will soon be able to claim that "food" (or byproducts rather, but who cares) prices are plunging, even as it itself announced that food prices in its cafeteria have soared by up to 33% as Zero Hedge reported yesterday.

Meanwhile, it's a feeding frenzy, pardon the pun, out there by those who know too well that Americans don't really care what they shove in their mouths as long as it i) tastes kinda meaty and ii) is cheap.

The Zero Hedge piece then gives a synopsis on the recent history of Pink Slime so check it out.

So just enjoy those burgers today and cue up the Lee Greenwood music because even if you are eating shit mixed with chemicals you can be proud to be an American because at least you know you're free.

God bless the USA, USA, USA!