Green Eagle

I just read an extremely interesting article about a potential decline of Saudi Arabia into a condition not much better than that of Iraq, Syria or Libya.  I guess I always assumed that the Saudis' oil wealth would protect them from that, but maybe I was very wrong. I'm not going to try to summarize the article here; I'm not even going to claim that I know enough to say how much credence to give to it.  But I do think it's an important read, and I encourage you to take a look at it.  All we need is for Saudi Arabia to sink into chaos, so even the thought is enough to keep me up at night.  I'd be most interesting to hear any opinions about this article.

Republicans in Congress working for you, every day! "The House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks is now the longest congressional investigation in history...As of Monday, the House Select Committee on Benghazi, has been active for 72 weeks -- surpassing the record previously held by the Watergate Committee in the 1970's" No comment really necessary.

Today's Wingnut Wrapup respectfully dedicated to Sarah Palin, who had the unmitigated gall to make the following claim: "Palin also disagreed with a recent statement by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who said last week that the Republican Party "often appears cold and unwelcoming to minorities."   "I can't think of any Republican that I know who would have that in their heart," Palin said. The Republican party "... is the party that would wish to bring people in together, standing together, putting America first, even in terms of the culture, accepting people's differences and the diverse views and everything else, because we have common sense driving our party," she said . I'd spend the whole rest of this post trying to unpack the delusions and lies contained in that last paragraph, so let's just continue with some more right wing delusion, before I fall into a coma: Rev. Mark H. Creech, Renew America:  "The Chris...

Here's a thing that will surprise most people:  The Speaker of the House does not need to be a member of the House.  Here's the relevant language from the Constitution: "The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment." So, with this in mind, I strongly urge the Republicans to finalize the obvious, and pick the person who has been the de facto leader of House Republicans for a couple of years now: Yes, I believe that if the Republicans really believe the sewage they are selling to the American people, Ted Cruz is the only fit person to be made Speaker of the House.  Okay, he is a sitting U.S. Senator, where his main purpose seems to be seeing to it that the government does nothing, and he is also engaged in a meaningless, egomaniacal "run" for President.  He's doing great with those two things, so why couldn't he take on one more job, where his only goal will be to drive...

Bye bye to celebrity drunk John Boehner, who is finally joining Sarah Palin in the Quitters' Brigade. You know, I feel a little sorry for him.  He's constantly attacked as the worst speaker of the House in history, but I'm not sure how well anyone could do, faced with the intransigent right wing army his fellow Republicans worked so hard to create. So, I've already heard a right wing talk show host this morning bringing up the name of Louie Gohmert as Boehner's replacement.  That would be a treat, huh? ____________________________ Update:   Well, it's several hours later, and for some reason I have been surprised to find the main take of the "liberal" press seems to be that this act- a sitting House speaker driven from office by his party's own extremists- is being presented as a really good thing for the Republicans, on the basis that it will by some magic force cause those very same extremists who just won a great victory to not want to s...

So, now Ben Carson is saying that science is just fairy tales, and that Charles Darwin got the idea for evolution from Satan. And everyone says, "how can Ben say that- after all, he is a scientist." Well, Ben has motivated me to make a belligerent point.  Surgeons are not scientists.  They are people who have been extensively trained to perform physical acts with extreme precision.  That makes them more like plumbers than nuclear physicists.  So let's stop pretending that Ben's success as a surgeon gives him any greater insight into science than anyone else.  Because, it clearly doesn't.

Scott Walker suspended his campaign today, when he realized that, without a vast pool of Koch Brothers money, he couldn't convince his own mother that he was a decent human being.  Don't worry though- If the Kochs should change their mind, he'll be back plenty damned quick.

This news just in from South Africa: "More than 4,000 inmates evacuated from a South African jail after two inmates died from a rat-related disease due to "overcrowding" and "inhumane" conditions." I hear the same thing nearly happened at the Republican debate last week.

I'm not in the practice of reposting graphics from Facebook featuring quotations from politicians, but this one is really too much: And this is the person who stood before the nation the other day and told a complete, malignant lie about Planned Parenthood- and don't even try to tell me that she was just mistaken.  Her smears have now catapulted her into second place in Republican polls.  This is supposed to be the anti-Hillary- a useless failure who made millions while destroying tens of thousands of her own company's jobs, who has never been elected to anything, and who lies without a sign that she cares about it, if it gets her what she wants.  When, gentlemen of the press, is enough enough?  Or are you going to go on providing these people with cover until the earth is an uninhabitable desert, and there is no one left to lie to?

I guess we are all aware that Scott Walker, the most mean-spirited of all the Republican candidates for President, has sunk like a rock in the polls; his own performance swiftly reducing him to a near nonentity, in a few short weeks.  So, yesterday he pulled out all the stops in a direct appeal to his real base: "According to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, police officers — who have killed more than 700 people so far this year — are always right.   “Do we have an issue in this country that we have to deal with when it comes to race? Absolutely,” he said. “But we shouldn’t confuse that into somehow thinking that that means we shouldn’t treat our law enforcement professionals as the great men and women that they are.”   He continued, refusing to admit that any of the officers involved in the recent, high-profile deadly shootings may have made a mistake..."Every leader we have — at the local level, the state level, all the way up to the president of the United States, ...

I must confess that I feel that I really didn't do enough this year to make people aware of the War on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

 Maybe in the future Carly Fiorina administration. This just in from ABC News: "While gunfire rang out in the streets, Burkina Faso’s military took to the airwaves Thursday to declare it now controls the West African country, confirming that a coup has taken place just weeks before elections... The coup leaders...identified themselves as the National Council for Democracy."

So, of course, the "mainstream" press is tying itself in knots today trying to pretend that a damned thing worth reporting happened at the Republicans' 3 hour clown show yesterday. Well, it didn't.  Three hours of empty posturing and boring obesiance to the crazy wing of the Republican party (i.e. at this point, about 95% of it)  while ducking any shred of reasonable consideration of anything important.  Meanwhile, Hillary continues to lay out substantial positions, which are totally ignored. That's what happened, and that's all I have to say.

Those evil union thugs.  So good to see that they are just about a thing of the past. Here's a perfect demonstration of the damage they have done, from one chart, at a blog called UnionsWORK, which I found via Daily Kos: See, unions just steal money from the job creators and give it to everyone else.  No place for that in 21st century America.

Just to keep up Green Eagle's traditional reporting on right wing protest marches (something I have been doing for quite a long time now,) I think I should make a comment on their latest orgy of jackassery, a few days ago in Washington.  This event was a major one, promoted in advance, and with an all star lineup of speakers, including Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, radio liars Glenn Beck and Mark Levin, and others. The event, on the Capitol steps, received a lot of attention both from the usual right wing websites and the national press.  A couple of things were missing from almost every story, however.  That would include any estimates of the size of the "crowd" that showed up to see all this star power, and any pictures which clearly showed the crowd as a whole. Well, Green Eagle searched pretty far and wide for pictures of the event.  My practice has always to play things fairly and show the photos with the largest number of people in the crowd, and her...

I must have seen, in the last few weeks, about three hundred articles and blog posts about the current "European" refugee problem.  As far as I can remember, they were all about the supposed heartlessness of Europeans, and Americans too, for not being ready to take in these two million people.  What none of these articles seems to consider is why these refugees exist in the first place, and what needs to be done to stop the production of millions more of them. I'm not suggesting that I have a full answer here, but I do want to say that anyone who only deals with the symptoms of the problem and not the problem itself is just creating a mechanism for the production of tens of millions more of these people, a situation that will really overwhelm Europe. The Western toleration for, and often encouragement of governments that make this kind of disaster almost inevitable must stop.  The three countries which are now producing this disaster, Syria, Iraq and Libya, have spent...

Charlie: We all know about Charlie.  He's in the news every two years, when he appears for his "parole hearing."  I put the term in parentheses, because Charlie knows the only way he is getting out of prison is in a pine box.  So, he uses his appearances for the only thing he can do any more: enhance his image as The Scariest Guy In The World.  It's understandable, because it's really the only fun he can get out of life any more.  So, go for it, Charlie. Now, on to Dick: He may not be in prison, but he really has only one way of spending his time too.  He knows perfectly well that he was the main force behind the greatest military blunder since Austria invaded Serbia in 1914, precipitating World War I.  So all he can do is go around on TV and try to pin the blame on the guy who took over from him, and had to clean up his colossal mess.  And that's what he does.  Now, he has even written a book detailing his carefully crafted lies abo...

Let's just clear the backlog, to get ready for the even crazier stuff that is bound to be just around the corner. First a shoutout to the most idiotic Conservative delusion of the last couple of weeks; a category in which there is always intense competition: Oh well, let's just get on to the rest: Katie Pavlich, Town Hall:  "Carly Fiorina Responds to Hillary's Comparison of Republicans to Terrorists" Oh, that's exciting.  Can't wait to hear more about that.  Just not right now, thanks. S. E. Cupp, Town Hall:  "Blame Liberals for the Rise of Trump...I have a different explanation for ascendant Trumpism. It isn't the result of conservatism but of liberalism." Well, of course it's liberals' fault when the entire Republican party apparatus runs off the rails.  Everything is.  My only surprise is that she didn't blame Obama personally. Matt Vespa:  “Hillary compares Republicans to terrorists...If A Republican Did Thi...

Let's get this straight:  In 1953, the United States overthrew Iran's legally elected, democratic government, because we wanted their oil.  We then imposed a vicious dictator on them, who lasted in power from the 1950's until 1979.  We supplied his military, and the CIA helped form his secret service, which was responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of Iranians who opposed his dictatorship. Then, in 1990, Iraq, under the eventually demonized Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran and started the longest land war of the twentieth century.  The role of the United States? "The United States pursued policies in favour of Iraq by reopening diplomatic channels, lifting restrictions on the export of dual-use technology, overseeing the transfer of third-party military hardware, and providing operational intelligence on the battlefield." Here's American war criminal Donald Rumsfeld, in the famous picture showing the United States gleefully collaborating with ...

Via a very important post at Crooks and Liars, concerning a segment on the execrable MSNBC show Morning Joe: "...during the rebroadcast of the segment, Morning Joe cut away from Ignatius' explanation mid-sentence. During the initial broadcast, Ignatius said (emphasis added), "As I talked to a half dozen of lawyers who do nothing but this kind of work, they said they couldn't remember a case like this, where people informally and inadvertently draw classified information into their phone conversations or their unclassified server conversations, where there had been a prosecution." When the segment re-aired, Ignatius is heard saying, "As I talked to a half dozen of lawyers who do nothing but this kind of work, they said they couldn't remember a case like this," before the show skipped forward to a remark by co-host Mika Brzezinski about Clinton aide Cheryl Mills." Thus making it seem not that there had never been a prosecution like this, bu...

We all know by now that the seemingly endless series of manipulated, lying videos from a James O'Keefe associate are utterly false, but I noticed a new trick that the purveyors of this dishonest crap are using.  I haven't seen much attention directed to this specifically, so I thought I would write a brief post about it. It has become the standard practice of these guys to also release long, allegedly unedited versions of their interviews, to make it appear that what they previously released was an honest account.  It should be noted that an independent analysis of the first of these "unedited" videos revealed 42 splices, many of them removing numerous remarks by the Planned Parenthood staff that utterly contradicted the accusations against them.  To be blunt, the long versions of these videos were lies, just like the short versions released to the press. These people know perfectly well that they are in the wrong, but as usual with Conservatives, they do not care...

Most of my coverage of the right on this blog has been in the form of short excerpts followed by ridicule.  Really, that is all the lies and smears that make up Conservative thinking deserve, but occasionally, I find something I want to deal with at greater length.  Here is an example that I think calls for extended treatment, as it shows the malignant intellectual bankruptcy that makes up the core of Conservative cant.  It is the second part of an extended hallucination about the connection between the Nazis and American liberals, written by an ignorant, stupid man by the name of Ellis Washington, formerly of the Rutherford Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting fantasies about the alleged persecution of Christians in the United States.  Anyway, let's get on with it.  What follows is most of this article; I've left out the most boring parts. Over the last decade or so, I have taken an active interest in Germany, from its modern inception at the han...