Democracy Now has the interview Juan Cole: Mass Sunni Uprising Forces Iraq to Confront Sectarian Blowback of 2003 U.S. Invasion.

ARON MATÉ: And, Juan Cole, how would you characterize this conflict right now? When we talk about ISIS, it’s generally referred to as this monolithic force, but of course there are many militant groups that comprise this pushback against the Iraqi government. So, your assessment of the overall picture right now?

JUAN COLE: I don’t believe that we can think about the—what has happened in Iraq as a series of military conquests. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a small group, a few thousand fighters. It doesn’t have formations or brigades. And I think what really happened was that they have cells on the ground in the Sunni Arab cities, and they coordinated with other groups, including secular and socialist groups, like ex-Baathists, to stage urban uprisings against the al-Maliki regime and its security forces. So, I think that this is a very complex phenomenon and an expression of popular discontent, and not just a series of military advances.
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JUAN COLE: Well, the Bush administration very explicitly sided with the Shiites and wanted to create a Shiite-dominated government and enthusiastically cooperated in the de-Baathification or the firing of thousands and thousands of Sunni bureaucrats and teachers from their jobs. So this—this was a policy of the Bush administration, and it is, in some large part, responsible for the current crisis.

Here is the link  to Juan Cole’s blog Informed Comment that is mentioned several times in the video.

Thanks to Marden Seavey’s posting this on his Facebook wall.

The UK Telegraph has the article Saudi Arabia: ‘This is Iraq’s problem and they must sort it out themselves’ by Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf Al Saud, Ambassador to the UK of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

There are three things that the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia strives for above all others: peace, stability and security, for the international community, for our region, and for our country and our people, whether they are old or young, men or women, Sunni or Shia. These are the cornerstones of our government and at the foundation of our thinking.

The escalating and alarming situation in Iraq is of serious concern to us. These are our neighbours, our friends, and we watch with distress as this terrible situation escalates next to us.

As our Foreign Minister HRH Prince Saud al Faisal told the Islamic Conference of regional leaders meeting in Jeddah this week: “This grave situation carries with it signs of civil war that has implications for the region we cannot fathom.”
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So where do we stand? Despite the false allegations of the Iraqi Ministerial Cabinet, whose exclusionary policies have fomented this current crisis, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia supports the preservation of Iraq’s sovereignty, its unity and territorial integrity.

We oppose all foreign intervention and interference. There must be no meddling in Iraq’s internal affairs, not by us or by the US, the UK or by any other government. This is Iraq’s problem and they must sort it out themselves. Any government that meddles in Iraq’s affairs runs the risk of escalating the situation, creating greater mistrust between the people of Iraq – both Sunni and Shia.

Instead, we urge all the people of Iraq, whatever their religious denominations, to unite to overcome the current threats and challenges facing the country.

Perhaps this may appear to be just a bit self-serving and hard to believe.  Perhaps it is a case of one hand in Saudi Arabia not knowing what the other hand is doing.  Perhaps it is actually true.

Surely, the Saudi government has told this directly to the Obama administration.  I wonder if any of this will give the Obama administration even a moment of pause before they head down the destructive path that they seem hell bent on following.  What do McCain and Graham know about this?  Will they listen?

I just came back from a house party in Worcester for Maura Healey.  Jacquelyn Wells already has some pictures posted on Facebook.

I was inclined to vote for Maura Healey because I knew of her experience in the Attorney General’s office, and because I am not so deep into Massachusetts politics that I knew much about her opponent.  Since I had been so focused on the Governor’s race up till now, I decided it was time to find out more about the candidates for the other offices.  So I jumped at the chance to meet a candidate for Attorney General when Jacquelyn invited me.

I must say that I was duly impressed by Maura Healey.  She had a depth of experience and firm convictions on a wide range of issues that the Attorney General could influence – and there aren’t many issues that the Attorney General does not get involved in.  Not only  does she have experience as an individual lawyer, but she has the experience of managing about half the staff in the current Attorney General’s office.  She has a lot of energy and a lot of issues that she wants to tackle.  As an experienced manager, she knows that she doesn’t do this all by herself.  She has resources that she manages to accomplish the goals she has set forth.

I didn’t find it necessary to push myself to get to talk to her personally, and  the questions I had prepared were already adequately answered.  However, she came over to me to introduce herself and ask me about myself.  We had a very good conversation.

One of the points that I made was that frequently politicians forget that a very important part of their job is to bring the voter along with her on issues where some explaining needed to be done to get people to understand the value in whatever goal she was trying to accomplish.  I was impressed by the way she had spoken to us indicating the fact that she seemed to get this concept very well.  In our one-on-one conversation, she mentioned that one way she would work with the legislature, for instance, was to first go to the public, and then have the public exert the influence on the legislature to get something done.  In a way, the public would give the politician cover to make it politically safe to do the right thing. She also pointed out in her fight to overturn the Defense Of Marriage Act, this process of moving public sentiment was one of the keys to success.

It was at that point, that I knew for sure that she really got it.  I made the same type of judgment about Elizabeth Warren, and I am very happy with the way that turned out.  With Maura Healey as Attorney General, a strong, progressive governor,  and a strong, progressive Congressional delegation, Massachusetts has the prospect of helping to turn this country around for the better.

The Hill has the article GOP: Send Benghazi suspect to Gitmo.

Now that we seem to have captured a suspect in the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, we have insane reactions from Republicans. I’ll give you the most temperate comment I have heard from a certain gang of clowns in our Congress. This is Lindsey Graham being quoted.

Graham urged that the military be allowed to interrogate him before he was read Miranda rights.

“We should have some quality time with this guy, weeks and months,” said Graham. “Don’t torture him, but have some quality time with him.”

What are we to make of calls to send him to the torture chamber, but just don’t torture him. Why is Lindsey Graham so afraid of what could happen in the regular “Justice” system?

How far do we have to travel down this road before the citizens of this country can rise up and make their voices heard that such talk by a politician will just not be tolerated come election time?

Some people might respond to my blog post that nobody suspected of doing what this detainee is suspected of doing should be protected by the once cherished principles of our law. These people will be giving sad testimony to how far we have already traveled down the road to utter depravity.

If we don’t start making it perfectly clear that such talk is not acceptable in this country, it might be too late when we finally do wake up to the danger.

The Real News Network has the interview video ISIS Born from Occupation of Iraq, not Syrian Civil War.

VIJAY PRASHAD, EDWARD SAID CHAIR, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT:
Well, ISIS has had a major breakthrough this week. It took, of course, Mosul, came down south of the Tigris, took Tikrit, which is the hometown of Saddam Hussein and therefore very significant to the three organizations that are working together–ISIS, the Military Council, which is made up of former Iraqi army people, and then the Naqshbandi movement, which is led by a former deputy of Saddam Hussein, Izzat al-Douri. So these three organizations–the Baathists, Iraqi military forces, and ISIS–have taken a vast amount of Iraq in a very short time. But mainly it had been in the north-south axis from Mosul down to near Samarra.

Now they have moved westward. They’ve taken Tal Afar. They’ve already taken small roads that go toward Syria. But the Tal Afar capture has opened a corridor for them that will take them to the major eastern city in Syria of Deir ez-Zor, and from there, of course, right to Raqqah, which is the first major city in Syria that the ISIS organization had taken. So now we have from the borders of Aleppo–major city in Syria–all the way out to Mosul, we have a banner area, a kind of–we have, like, a belt controlled by the group ISIS, helped along in Iraq by former Baathists and former Iraqi military personnel.

Whether you believe Vijay Prashad or not, could his analysis be any worse than that of John McCain and Lindsey Graham? See my previous post Mess O’Potamia – Now That’s What I Call Being Completely F**king Wrong About Iraq.

Maybe Jon Stewart can get through to our Lame Stream Media and to the public for which it stands.

Have they no shame at all?

The Real News Network has the concluding segment Ugly Money Politics – Robert Johnson on Reality Asserts Itself (8/8) in its series. My previous blog post Reality Asserts Itself – Robert Johnson covers the first 7 segments.

The first topic is the problems with the city of Detroit.

Well, in particular in Detroit there are always–I mean, there are many factors in Detroit, demographic decline in the aftermath of the ’67 riots, long periods of white flight, etc. But going back to your perspective on finance, what sends them over the waterfall are very, very large, questionable derivatives trades guaranteeing what are called certificates of obligation that lead to penalties.
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What you’ve seen since the crisis of 2008 is federal cutbacks to state and local governments, which causes the states to, how you say, tighten their belts and cut off the cities or diminish transfers to the city. You then see diminished income tax revenue, sales tax revenue, and property tax revenue associated with the slump. So you go into a budget crisis and you tend to, quote, underprovision for the pension. The annual required contribution is not made. As the funded assets fall in relation to the value of obligations, the tendency is to throw the Hail Mary pass, reach out to higher-yield investments. But that despair is what makes what you might call the temptation to resort to things that turn out to be frauds or, how you say, too good to be true more and more prevalent, which tends deepen the losses.

My point in choosing the above excerpts is to drive home the point of how the financial collapse has drive the federal government to lower aid to the states and localities, and this has driven these entities to either cut back or go bankrupt, or even fall victim to the financial fraud that started it all.

People who don’t understand this path to ruin are often led to believe that it is the fault of the innocent pensioners that the city cannot pay their pensions anymore.

The Real News Network has the interview Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (1/3).  For those with an aversion to Chris Hedges, there is very little of him in this video.  It is mostly Noam Chomsky.

The first–it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell–he didn’t have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan “Peace without Victory”. And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn’t play Beethoven. You know. And they succeeded.

Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. You know, again, you can guess what it was. And they’ve at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into, you know, warmongering fanatics.

And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found–the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.

The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a “new art” in democracy, “manufacturing consent”. That’s where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was “engineering of consent”. The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We’re the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be–I’m quoting–“free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd”, the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”–the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be “spectators”, not participants. And every couple of years they’re permitted to choose among one of the “responsible men”, us.

I have been listening to Noam Chomsky for years now.  For most of that time I thought of him as an over the top old crank.  Lately, I have begun to see how much closer to reality he was than I was when I used to think about him the way I did.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I now realize that I have bought a new exercise machine that I can and do use for hours on end.

Yesterday, I had it loaded up with about 480 pounds of people (including myself) and I was the pusher. My calves are really feeling it today. We walked our standard walk about 2% faster today.