Obama Regime Continues to Sell Khorasan Hoax

Americans were served up a nice big piece of government fear-mongering to go along with their Sunday dinners last night. In an appearance on the state-corporate media’s flagship propaganda showcase 60 Minutes, Obama’s FBI director invoked the latest bogeyman Khorasan to keep the sheep flock in the state of constant dread that allows for the imposition of fascism in America.  James Comey went on national television and basically lied to an uncritical interviewer in order to perpetuate the myth of the ultra-secret, worse than IS ( or ISIL or IS) scariest bad-asses of all time. It was so 2004 and being a year that ends in an even digit 2014 is also an election year only now the Democrats are wielding the terrorist defender bludgeon.

According to a story from The Hill entitled “FBI director warns of Khorasan attack”:

The head of the FBI said in an interview broadcast late Sunday that the U.S. is preparing for an imminent terrorist attack.

FBI Director James Comey said the Khorasan Group, an al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, may still be working on a plan to hit the United States.

“Khorasan was working and may still be working on an effort to attack the United States or our allies, and looking to do it very, very soon,” he said on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

I can’t sit here and tell you whether it’s their plan is tomorrow or three weeks or three months from now,” he said.

“Given our visibility, we know they’re serious people, bent on destruction. And so we have to act as if it’s coming tomorrow.”

He said that terrorist networks in Syria are a product of “the metastasis of al Qaeda” with the two major groups, al Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“They are both vicious, sort of the inheritors of a lot of the mantle of al Qaeda and present different threats in a lot of ways,” Comey said.

He described the al Nusra group as experienced bomb makers, killers and planners seeking international targets.

“These are people who have thought about bringing terrorism on a global scale,” he said.

“ISIL is as sophisticated, maybe more than any of the others in its media presence and its recruiting and training efforts online,” he said, using another acronym for ISIS.

The Obama regime is desperate to prevent the loss of the Senate and has even tacitly admitted that his putrid party is facing electoral doom so why not just conjure up a phantom menace and start  accusing political opponents and critics of being terrorist sympathizers.  It is as Herman Goering allegedly once remarked: “it works the same in any country”.

Khorasan however has been debunked already although you will never read about it or see in on television in the corrupt Obama friendly media. The entire bogus threat was brilliantly deconstructed by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain at the online magazine The Intercept in a story entitled “The Khorasan Group: Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria” which states:

As the Obama administration prepared to bomb Syria without Congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.

The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group.” After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat – too radical even for Al Qaeda! – administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

It is an excellent piece as it tracks the promotion of the big government lie about the spooky, never before heard of group as it worked its way through the media echo chamber. That Obama would go to the well once again about Khorosan is a sign of his sweaty desperation. Has anyone else noticed that a good deal of the hysteria over ISIS has died down since the Khorosan hoax was rolled out? Now that the justification for another lucrative war has served its purpose it is too dangerous that the idea that ISIS has largely been armed by U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries get out. Vice President Joe Biden made that mistake last week in a speech when according to a story from The Daily Beast entitled "VP Biden Apologizes for Telling Truth About Turkey, Saudi and ISIS":

Vice President Joe Biden is apologizing again for speaking the truth. After talking for an hour and a half at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Forum last Thursday, he took a question from a student who asked a wise question: “In retrospect do you believe the United States should have acted earlier in Syria, and if not, why is now the right moment?"

Biden, predictably, said “the answer is ‘no’ for two reasons.” The first being the unreliability, incompetence and radicalism of the forces the United States would have been supporting on the ground. No real surprise there. But then he said what everyone in the region knows and The Daily Beast has reported extensively:

“My constant cry was that our biggest problem is our allies — our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria,” Biden told his listeners in remarks subsequently posted on the White House YouTube channel (go to 1:32:00 if you want to skip the earlier speech).

 “The Turks were great friends,” he notes, adding that he recently spent considerable time with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and they have “a great relationship.” Ditto the Saudis and the Emiratis. But when it came to Syria and the effort to bring down President Bashar Assad there, those allies’ policies wound up helping to arm and build allies of al Qaeda and eventually the terrorist “Islamic State.”

“What were they doing?” Biden asked rhetorically. “They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad — except that the people who were being supplied were al Nusra and al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

Note that Biden did not say the intent of any of these allies was to supply terrorists, only that a hell of a lot of the arms and the money wound up in the hands of people who are sworn enemies of the West as well as of Assad.

“Now you think I’m exaggerating,” said Biden. “Take a look! Where did all of this go?”

It was a gaffe befitting of Secretary of State John “Skull and Bones” Kerry, the other half of the Obama regime’s dynamic diarrhea of the mouth duo. Biden had to plant his lips on the asses of our terrorist supporting “allies” and give them a big wet sloppy kiss for his breach of protocol. God knows that those sleazy regimes over there are the root cause of western problems in the Islamic world yet it can't be acknowledged. This is particularly the case with Saudi Arabia where fifteen of the nineteen hijackers hailed from and there is still the matter of those 28 pages that have been suppressed from the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.

Halloween is season is the time for scary shenanigans and there will be plenty of them in the coming weeks as Operation Save Obama’s Ass from Impeachment empties the trick bag in a frantic effort to hold onto the Senate for the Demsocrats.

Obama Yucks it Up With Presstitute Media at DC Soiree

The White House Correspondent's Association dinner is a public display of why there is no legitimate media in this country anymore. The annual event is an opportunity for the sitting US President to play comedian, delivering one-liners and gimmicks to a gaggle of adoring an self-important media hacks whose invitation to the party is one of the key perks of being a government conduit for misinformation and the crown jewel on the DC circle jerk circuit. It is a celebration of Washington's own pompous self worship and a pox upon what at least once in theory was a democracy were the power of the state was held in check by a critical press carrying out their duties in the traditions of the First Amendment. Now it is only a festival of political con artists and what can only be described as presstitutes for their ongoing selling out of journalistic ideals and responsibilities to suckle power and damn those who don't. 

While lacking the complete gaucheness and insensitivity that has been on display in the past - particularly George W. Bush's disgusting jokes and slide show about Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction as Iraq was engulfed in violence and American troops were dying or Karl Rove's rap routine (note the slimy David Gregory)  this year's soiree was sickening in it's own way. The 2014 edition took place over the weekend at the Washington Hilton and in giving his performance Barack Obama was exalted as a great comedian by the adoring audience. Here are some pieces excerpted from El Presidente's remarks as published on the White House website:

I want to thank the White House Correspondents Association for hosting us here tonight.  I am happy to be here, even though I am a little jet-lagged from my trip to Malaysia.  The lengths we have to go to get CNN coverage these days.  (Laughter and applause.)  I think they’re still searching for their table.  (Laughter and applause.)

[Very presidential, joking about that missing airplane is as insensitive and dishonorable to the grieving families of the passengers as anything CNN has done in the 24/7 coverage]

We have some other athletes here tonight, including Olympic snowboarding gold medalist Jamie Anderson is here.  We’re proud of her.  (Applause.)  Incredibly talented young lady.  Michelle and I watched the Olympics -- we cannot believe what these folks do -- death-defying feats -- haven’t seen somebody pull a “180” that fast since Rand Paul disinvited that Nevada rancher from this dinner.  (Laughter.)  As a general rule, things don’t like end well if the sentence starts, “Let me tell you something I know about the negro.”  (Laughter.)  You don’t really need to hear the rest of it.  (Laughter and applause.)  Just a tip for you -- don’t start your sentence that way.  (Laughter.)

[Gratuitous establishment shot at Paul but I will give Obama credit here, the Senator is often his own worst enemy and the attachment to the racist welfare rancher for cheap political points and then Republican running from the man as if he had the Ebola virus is par for the course]

Speaking of Rand Paul -- (laughter) -- Colorado legalized marijuana this year, an interesting social experiment.  I do hope it doesn’t lead to a whole lot of paranoid people who think that the federal government is out to get them and listening to their phone calls.  (Laughter.)  That would be a problem.  (Laughter.)

[A truly disgusting comment that shows just how serious that Barack Obama is on reigning his NSA Stasi and their unconstitutional surveillance and data-mining programs - also the talking point "paranoid libertarians" is invoked again to stifle debate]

Anyway, this year, I’ve promised to use more executive actions to get things done without Congress.  My critics call this the “imperial presidency.”  The truth is, I just show up every day in my office and do my job.  I’ve got a picture of this I think.  (Laughter and applause.)  You would think they’d appreciate a more assertive approach, considering that the new conservative darling is none other than Vladimir Putin.  (Laughter.)  Last year, Pat Buchanan said Putin is “headed straight for the Nobel Peace Prize.”  He said this.  Now I know it sounds crazy but to be fair, they give those to just about anybody these days.  (Laughter.)  So it could happen.

[Of course Obama doesn't bother with the inconvenient truths that the trouble in Ukraine was completely provoked by the US and his State Department with their coup d-etat against the democratically elected leader and backed by neo-Nazi thugs like the ones who just burned down a trade union hall in Odessa the other day - something that Barry still has not acknowledged. The Putin bashing comes down to a thin-skinned narcissist avenging his wounded pride despite the possibility that his petulance could provoke a nuclear war - and they all laughed too...] 

n a more serious note, tonight reminds us that we really are lucky to live in a country where reporters get to give a head of state a hard time on a daily basis -- and then, once a year, give him or her the chance, at least, to try to return the favor.

But we also know that not every journalist, or photographer, or crewmember is so fortunate, because even as we celebrate the free press tonight, our thoughts are with those in places around the globe like Ukraine, and Afghanistan, and Syria, and Egypt, who risk everything -- in some cases, even give their lives -- to report the news.

And what tonight also reminds us is that the fight for full and fair access goes beyond the chance to ask a question.  As Steve mentioned, decades ago, an African American who wanted to cover his or her President might be barred from journalism school, burdened by Jim Crow, and, once in Washington, banned from press conferences.  But after years of effort, black editors and publishers began meeting with FDR’s press secretary, Steve Early.  And then they met with the President himself, who declared that a black reporter would get a credential.  And even when Harry McAlpin made history as the first African American to attend a presidential news conference, he wasn’t always welcomed by the other reporters.  But he was welcomed by the President, who told him, I’m glad to see you, McAlpin, and I’m very happy to have you here.

[Out comes the race card again - hey, it's an election year and both sides play it although one would expect that the sitting US President would deem such a thing as beneath the dignity of the office]

That is enough of it, if you want to see it the link is here and is yet another damning piece of evidence at exactly how low that we have sank in America. While the roast went on in Washington the roasted bodies were still being dug out of that burned down trade union hall in Odessa. I will give Obama a small bit of credit though, at least he didn't make any jokes about torture like that moron Sarah Palin did at the NRA convention. The event itself is a long-running tradition, much like that loathsome National Prayer Breakfast that ignores the separation of church and state and they are both a waste of time for anything other than the DC inside baseball clique and the careerist media toadies whose participation puts them in a position to prostitute themselves out to the power that they are supposed to be protecting the rest of us from. The only time that the event had anything worthwhile to offer was the classic 2006 demolition of then president George W. Bush by Stephen Colbert  that was accompanied by the sounds of puckering assholes and clicking china.

They are like H.L. Mencken would have referred to such as "jackals" and "jackasses"

(Image: Getty Images)

U.S. Rejoices as Olympic Hockey Team Spanks Russians

The ceaseless U.S. propaganda campaign that has relentlessly smeared Russia and particularly Vladimir Putin since he granted asylum to former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and then derailed the big push for a war on Syria scored big time on Saturday. The 2014 edition of the U.S. Olympic men's hockey team beat their Russian counterparts setting off a wave of raw nationalist fervor and conjuring up memories of the Cold War era. One of the greatest propaganda triumphs of the latter part of the 20th Century was when the 1980 team defied all odds and beat the big red machine at Lake Placid, NY in what was proclaimed as the "Miracle on Ice" sending a reeling nation into jubilation and pride and creating a cottage industry. In the typical unstuck in time, lacking historical context and politically motivated fashion the state-corporate media seized on the win - the final result cemented in one of those ridiculous bush league shootouts that the National Hockey League has adopted to market the sport domestically - to poke a star spangled middle finger into Putin's eye.

It was a tight, hard fought game before a raucous crowd at the Bolshoi Ice Dome including the Russian leader himself in which the U.S. squad benefited hugely from a disallowed goal late in the third period that led to the shootout. St. Louis Blues forward T.J. Oshie then scored four times in the shootout for the final 3-2 tally. Being a hockey fan of sorts there are two things that I despise one being poor officiating and two being those ridiculous shootouts, how better to wreck a good game than ending it in a silly skills contest? In the NHL playoffs there is a thing called overtime and the teams play until one actually wins in honest fashion. The disallowed Russian goal was one of the former, the net was moved off of its moorings by U.S. goalie Jonathan Quick of the Los Angeles Kings. The problem is not that the net was moved, by a look at the video it clearly was but went unnoticed by anyone until Quick himself pointed it out after he was beaten for the likely winning goal. As in all sports contests fans tend to go off over lousy officiating, a Russian politician's tweet was grabbed and featured in the Washington Post under "Russian Politician Smells a Rat" a propaganda coup.

The post-game results were predictable, the comparisons to the 1980 team and the "Miracle on Ice" were used early and often despite that none of the current members of the U.S. team had even been born yet when Mike Eruzione punched his squad's ticket with destiny. That there is no comparison whatsoever between the teams, in 1980 there were no professional athletes unlike now when every member plays in the NHL which takes a nearly three week mid-season hiatus for the Olympics. The Russian team at that time was an awesome global powerhouse while the U.S. bunch was a scrappy, well-coached collection of amateurs with plenty of heart, it was a historic sports upset that was well deserving of the adoration for a tremendous achievement. It's just hard to get too revved over a collection of highly paid mercenaries who will be back on their own teams come next week. None of this matters though to the pathetic excuse for a media, one of the more nauseating pieces comes from Sports Illustrated:

On the first day of the rest of his life, T. J. Oshie, shootout god, had gained some 50,000 Twitter followers and at least one nickname:

“Now he can talk about his (goals) for the next 30 years,” defenseman Ryan Suter said of Oshie, a comment that also served as a sly dig at the man who scored the game winner in the 1980 Miracle against the Soviet Union and has been dining out on it ever since. “We’ve been giving (T.J.) a hard time in the room. I even told my Dad that. (Bob Suter played on the 1980 Olympic team.) He said that maybe now we can talk about something else for a while.”

Because jibes are the currency of the dressing room, Oshie is now the richest man in Sochi - an American hockey oligarch. He heard the chirping the second he walked into the room after the Russian game on Saturday because, really, no good deed should go unpunished. There are other nicknames floating around – Team USA captain Zach Parise apparently has a beauty – but Oshie is trying to squash them before they leak. Or worse, trend.

“More Twitter followers, that’s about it,” Oshie said when asked about how his life had changed after Team USA’s 5-1 victory over Slovenia on Sunday, a win that gave the Americans a direct berth into the quarterfinals on Wednesday. “I’m still the same guy, the same hockey player, just out here having fun. 

Oshie keeps it in perspective, his St. Louis Blues are in the thick of the race in the Western Conference and the most coveted hardware to a professional hockey player is the Stanley Cup. Besides, the win over the Russians was only in the preliminary round, there is the possibility that they will meet again this week but even if the U.S. wins again it will be no "Miracle on Ice". The duel for the gold will probably be between the U.S. and Canada, the Russians are not in the same league as the 1980 big red machine and are saddled with both the perennial choker Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals and vicious woman abuser Semyon Varlamov of the Colorado Avalanche.

The real winner of the Olympic gold medal, at least in the propaganda slalom would be the ever abysmal domestic media in The Homeland, they continue to plumb the depths with their ongoing hatchet job on all things Russian. You have to be a serious cynic to find as much humor in it all but how do you not laugh when reading something as idiotic as this from the Washington Post "In Russia, World War II is suddenly everywhere again" that unbelievably slams the Russians for invoking WWII:

The pageant of Russian history presented in the Olympic Opening Ceremonies passed over the Soviet victory in World War II to the consternation of more than a few patriots. But the war seems to be making the news these days more than ever nonetheless.

Russian sacrifices in the fight against the Nazis 70 years ago were stupendous, and feelings still run deep. Every family paid a price, and the war haunts everyday life here in a way that short-memory Americans would find startling. But there’s another side to its legacy: For decades after the war, Soviet leaders sought to reinforce their legitimacy by exploiting the memory of the titanic struggle.

And today the Russian government appears to be turning in the same direction.

President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin has portrayed Russia as being under ideological attack. The West, it says, wants to impose a different and alien value system on the Russian people. Critics say Putin has been warning against demons abroad as a way of shoring up his own standing during uncertain times.

And there could be no more potent denunciation of the West’s alleged motives than to compare them to those of Nazi Germany.

I don't know where to start on this one. It is lost on the writer that World War II references are often used to justify everything in the Homeland, each new war is spun by invoking the “good war” and every foreign leader with which the U.S. establishment has an ax to grind with is the “new Hitler”. As for the west (translation: the U.S. of A.) and comparisons to Nazi Germany I wonder where one would get a crazy idea like that. After all, it's not like our media has become the greatest propaganda machine since the Goebbels era, nor do we engage in illegal invasions of foreign countries, we sure as hell don't have a massive Gestapo like surveillance apparatus spying on our every conversation, text, purchase and email and it's not like we will ever have internment camps here. Those goddamned Russians are totally batshit!

But when it comes down to the theater of the absurd it is hard to beat the surfacing of the political cadaver that is Mitt Romney who joined the Russian bashing on NBC’s Meet the Press with David Gregory on Sunday morning.  Mr. ‘47 percent’ being a self-proclaimed authority on all things Olympic after his involvement with the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City, Utah smacked Putin around for -get this- spending too much money to “cynically, to show off the politicians in a country”. I excerpt the following from The Guardian:

Mitt Romney has condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin for spending billions on the Sochi Winter Olympics, as part of an “unsavoury” vanity project.

However Romney, who made his name turning around the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002 before running unsuccessfully for president as a Republican in 2008 and 2012, risks being accused of hypocrisy. Several officials who worked alongside Romney in Salt Lake City have gone on record accusing him of using the Games for his own political gain.

Romney famously approved a series of Olympic pins bearing his own face, including one in which he was surrounded by official Games mascots beneath the slogan: “Hey Mitt, We Love You!”

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Romney complained that public funds for Olympics were being used “cynically, to show off the politicians in a country”, and said the International Olympic Committee should cap the amount spent on the Games.

“You don’t need to spend $50bn as Russia has or as China did [for the 2008 summer Games], to put on Olympic sport. Olympic sport can be demonstrated at $2-3bn, and all that extra money could be used to do some very important things in terms of fighting poverty and fighting disease around the world.”

He added: “To take money from some people so that politicians can be puffed up and can be shown around the world is, I think, something that is very distasteful at a time when there is so much poverty and so much need.”

What a stunning bit of hypocrisy given the wealthy elitist's on the record contempt towards the little people. Hell, I suppose if they could exhume Ronald Reagan’s corpse and haul it around the country like some bizarre sequel to Weekend at Bernie's that even the Gipper would be in on the new national pastime of kicking Putin in the nuts. I mean can it get any more absurd than trotting out Mitt Romney who crapped his magic Mormon underwear somewhere between the gross celebration of national ignorance during the endless series of GOP primaries and the fulfillment of the White Horse Prophesy?  The guy is a loser and his even his great wealth couldn’t buy enough credibility with the party base (that never trusted the guy in the first place) to take out the vulnerable Obama. So what if Romney was the Big Kahuna at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, what the hell has he done to keep the unconstitutional and illegal NSA out of Utah? Why is it that the LOSERS of U.S. elections can’t just do the dignified thing and go away? John Kerry, John McCain and now Romney all make Al Gore look like a veritable recluse.

The Sochi Olympics can't end soon enough, the state-corporate media needs to get back to covering really important matters like the Kardashians and the Oscar Pistorius trial.

The Hypocrisy of Obama's MSNBC Water Carriers

Seldom discussed as a propaganda organ that is in its own right every bit the equal of Fox News MSNBC plumbs the depths of political discourse in providing a constant forum of dishonesty and hypocrisy.  The network, which is owned by GE, one of the largest defense contractors of the U.S. military industrial complex regularly shills for more war albeit wrapped up in the bright shining lie of a package of humanitarian interventions. The resulting dead from the collateral damage of wars of aggression or missions of ‘mercy’ are no different and the profits reaped by GE remain constant. The network is so shameless of a water-carrier for the Barack Obama administration that it is astounding that it receives any legitimacy at all. Fox is after all very transparent as the media arm of the Republican party establishment which in a perverse and twisted sort of way is somewhat honorable. I suppose that some credit can go to former Richard M. Nixon media guru Roger Ailes who is as unabashedly incapable of shame as fellow former Nixon administration figures such as Pat Buchanan who wears his bigotry on his sleeve and G. Gordon Liddy who in his book “Will” admitted his admiration for Hitler.

Buchanan is among the last of a dying breed and a dinosaur who used to drink Wild Turkey with Hunter S. Thompson is not going to be sucked into the tar pit without a struggle but he has now become a cartoon. His contemporary G. Gordon Liddy, also getting ready to pass into history was always a no bullshit guy when it came to his true sentiments as well. I especially liked the following expression of his burgeoning man love for a newly discovered idol from "Will" where he speaks wistfully of how the Liddy family maid, Teresa inculcated in the young whelp an adoration of Der Führer:

One day Teresa was excited. He was going to be on the radio. Just wait till I hear him speak! Eagerly, I joined her at the Emerson [radio]. First the music, the now familiar strains of a song that started, “Die Fahne hoch…” – Raise the banner…” It was a rousing, powerful anthem the Horst Wessel song.

 We could tell he was about to speak. The crowd could hardly contain itself. They hailed him in the huge swelling ovations that carried me along. Sieg!”someone would shout, and what seemed like all the people in the world would answer with a roar, “Heil!”. For he was their leader, Der Führer, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s voice started out calmly, in low, dispassionate tones, but as he spoke of what his people would accomplish, his voice rose in pitch and tempo. Once united, the German people could do anything, surmount any obstacle, rout any enemy, achieve fulfillment. He would lead them; there would be one people, one nation, one leader. Here was the very antithesis of fear – sheer animal confidence and the power of will. He sent an electric current through my body and, as the massive audience thundered its absolute support and determination, the hair on the back of my neck rose and I realized suddenly that I had stopped breathing.

Liddy’s love affair with full-blown Nazism would go on and he allegedly once arranged for a showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s famous propaganda film Triumph of the Will to fellow fascist worshipers in the White House. At least the old school guys from Nixon’s administration had a strange sort of integrity in that they are unabashed about their bigotry unlike the young turks currently operating in the political realm with their weasel words and focus group distilled blather. Only in the 2014 Homeland could one find any virtue in this but such is the world in which we now live, a dystopian nightmare where ignorance is exalted and with each passing day we see that Orwell was an optimist.

But as the Dylan song goes, “you know sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace” and there is much brimstone scented smoke that emanates from the MSNBC sets. Some of the worst swill that is upchucked from the Democratic party electronic propaganda sewer spews forth five nights a week on the Rachel Maddow Show.  Maddow, who is a lesbian regularly uses her broadcast to hide her task as a Democratic party saleswoman under layers of identity group saturated diatribes that primarily serve as polemics against some of the more blatantly asinine statements by Republican party politicians, primarily those of the so-called tea party. Maddow, who parlayed her fame as a member of the Air America liberal radio network into her present career, much like Minnesota Senator Al Franken a fellow traveler is now an essential protector of the establishment while other former hosts who did not conform (Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy) have been exiled to the fringes. I will admittedly on occasion tune in to Maddow although I often regret it fairly quickly given the lack of substantive coverage of real issues, a failure to hold the Obama administration accountable and the selling of the war machine, a good deal of it by resident Pentagon flack Richard Engel who tried his damned best to push for war in Syria.

Last night prior to the BCS Championship game really getting revved up I happened to catch Maddow’s interview with  Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Wall St.).  The bagman for financial criminals, following the lunatic Peter King (R-IRA) chose to pile onto Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a favorite punching bag for the two-party syndicate that protects the corrupt system. Schumer, reciting straight from the Obama-DNC talking points went for Pauls throat over the expiration of extended benefits for the long-term unemployed painting him as the leader of the “hard right Republicans” who are “stopping everything”, using a comment attributed to the son of Ron that “unemployment insurance is a disservice to the American worker”, more than likely taken out of context and packaged as a chunk of bloody red meat.

While it wasn’t exactly King accusing him of letting New Yorkers be murdered by Muslim terrorists it was every bit as disingenuous. When Schumer gets up on his soapbox on the Maddow Show and proclaims that “The turning away from the middle class is dominated by one party” and brays in ginned up outrage about Rand Paul’s comments fly in the very face of (gag) the “American ethos” being attacked:

“What he’s saying is, that people would rather not work and collect these meager unemployment benefits. That is not true. There is a work ethos in America, it’s part of our American being and it doesn’t just apply to CEOs or nuclear physicists. The guy who cleans the floor late at night has a pride in making sure that floor is really clean. The woman who will organize an office has a real pride in making sure it is extremely well organized and everything is in it’s place. So this idea that the hard right has that people will stop looking for work and is just bunk and insulting to the American worker and to the American ethos”

What a condescending phony prick. Just think of how MSNBC would portray that sort of a rotten elitist comment were it to have come from Mitt Romney. It brings to mind Judge Smails from Caddyshack who proclaimed that “The world needs ditch-diggers too”.

Maddow of course would never dare to question the Wall Street's own senator and senator from the party and the administration that has continually screwed the American worker, ethos be damned while pumping 85 billion dollars of month into the banking casinos. Nor as to why any American worker who has a shit job such as cleaning the floors late at night (probably for minimum wage) or the woman who organizes offices would have any reason to be “proud” of such lousy employment opportunities while Schumer and his ilk continue to loot the coffers to subsidize the banksters who destroyed the economy once and are rapidly inflating the mother of all bubbles that will ultimately bring about the final collapse. That an unprincipled charlatan such as Schumer can go out and make this argument is as obscene as it is insulting to the intelligence of anyone who has been paying attention to the joint bipartisan effort to dismantle the middle class through the Ponzi schemes of high finance, crony capitalism, cheating and offshoring American jobs by the millions to low-cost third world shitholes where people will work in abhorrent sweatshop conditions for pennies an hour. As the late H.L. Mencken would have put it “imagine a gentleman and you will imagined everything that he was not”.

Senator Schumer by the way is also one of the key drivers of the efforts to undermine the P5+1 talks to restrict the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. It has been pretty much acknowledged that the sabotage of the current diplomatic negotiations by swine like Schumer who don’t give a rat’s ass about American interests will lead to war. But that war will make GE and Shumer’s buddies on Wall Street very happy with the tide of blood money that will come rolling in.

Establishment Propaganda Organ Time Magazine Snubs Snowden

With the state-corporate in The Homeland being nothing more than a unceasing barrage of pro-establishment propaganda it is difficult to single out which forum is the worst. When it comes to making a list though, one would have to rank Time Magazine within the top ten and with the annual "Person of the Year" issue hitting the newsstands this week there is every reason why it is fully deserving of such lofty placement. Don't forget that it was this very publication that back in 2009 tabbed one Helicopter Ben Bernanke, the man who saved the planet for the dubious honor. The soon to be gone Federal Reserve chairman was quite the sensation back then, at the tip of the spear for the relentless public relations campaign by the greedy Wall Street banksters who blew up the economy and then fleeced the taxpayers to back their bad bets when the bearded one showed up on another high ranking propaganda organ CBS's 60 Minutes to lovingly introduce the focus group friendly term "green shoots" into the national lexicon. It was tough to follow-up the gag factor of last week's edition, the cover of which featured Carl Icahn, another one of the greedy bastards whose irresponsible gambling has created the current situation where the 2009 person of the year's employer has to now pump 85 billion dollars a month into the rigged markets to prevent another implosion. It was a typical hagiography by a long corrupt media in glorifying the amorality of the looter class in which the churning out of books, movies etc. exalting such degenerates as offshoring pioneer "Chainsaw" Jack Welch the noxious horse's ass Donald Trump. Time however managed to put the crowning cherry on the shit cake of 2013 with bestowing their enshrinement of Pope Francis as this year's 'winner'.

It would seem to be a bit odd to follow-up the slobbering homage to Icahn with a man who just issued the most blistering condemnation of capitalism since Karl Marx walked the Earth so it was already a done deal prior to the Pope's apostolic exhortation two weeks ago. Pope Francis was already an improvement over his predecessor Herr Ratzinger who was in his early years a member of the Hitler Youth but I have to admit that he was dead on with his remarks on the mutated form of capitalism that currently exists today: "How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?".  Just that sentence alone sounds very strangely like Jesus, the one who actually chased the money changers from the temple rather than the Jesus V.2 who wields a mighty sword, hates gay people and whose true teachings about the evils of accumulated wealth have been washed away by some bastardized version of the bible known as the Prosperity Gospel. There is no question that greed and corruption have destroyed capitalism and the Pope had some stones to tell it like it is but I doubt that the Vatican will soon begin to divest itself of it's obscene wealth in order to minister to the poor and downtrodden. In America the Pope's remarks earned him the scorn of multi-billionaire gasbag Rush Hudson Limbaugh III who came out and called him a Marxist in the back to the future John Birch Society dialogue that is so prevalent today.

Had the Pope's slamming of bastardized capitalism come earlier the magazine would have had to come up with some other figure, perhaps Jodi Arias or some celebrity flake but what goes unspoken is that it had to be ANYONE OTHER THAN EDWARD SNOWDEN!  Let's face it, the "Person of the Year" is technically supposed to be awarded to one who has been most influential to domestic and world events and the zeitgeist. This is why some other former honorees were the likes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the Ayatollah Khomeini and George W. Bush. Snowden has done one hell of a lot to roil the global waters with his revelations of an out of control Anglo-American surveillance machine that continues to grow exponentially, limited only by rapidly developing technology. Thanks to the former government contractor Booz Allen whistleblower the way that international relations, especially business will be changed forever and Snowden has bestowed the gift of a reason to distrust the unchecked power of the state to non-libertarians.

In a system not rigged and rotten Mr. Snowden would have been the winner but with the corrupt government and ruling establishment still reeling from the damage inflicted on their nefarious activities by his exposure the last thing that would be desired is for his face to adorn the cover. That could possibly inspire the sheep to get the idea that their enemy is domestic rather than the foreign bogeyman of the week and to actually try to do something about it. In fairness to Time they do mention Snowden but the story is buried inside the issue and as most of it's content is pretty mediocre. For a much better story on the real persons of the year check out Rolling Stone's year end issue and the story: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets. At least that is a magazine that has some integrity and a much better writing staff as well.