The Real News Network has the interview U.S. Will Fail In Attempt to Create Proxy Army in Syria.

BENNIS: I have no doubt that those who support the idea that the U.S. should actually send ground troops into one more war in the Middle East–something that the American people are vastly opposed to, that analysts who understand what the consequences are are enormously opposed to. But nonetheless there are political actors who are calling for it, as you say, and they will no doubt use this as more evidence that it never works unless there are U.S. troops on the ground.

The problem is, number one, it hasn’t worked when there are U.S. troops on the ground. So the argument simply falls apart.

But I think there’s also the possibility that some in the CIA may have leaked this report not as a way of justifying putting more troops on the ground, although that’s possible, but as a way of explaining their inevitable failure, that these air raids are not going to succeed, not because there aren’t also troops on the ground, but because there are no military solutions. This is what President Obama has said over and over again, and it’s the one right thing that he has been consistent about in his rhetoric, and it’s the one thing he has consistently violated in his actions.

There are no military solutions here. And claiming that there are, trying to use military solutions, is inevitably going to fail. It will fail dramatically if it’s only airstrikes. It will fail even more dramatically if it is airstrikes plus U.S. ground forces. There are no military solutions.

And the political solutions that are necessary are not yet being put in place, because all of the focus is going towards the military, despite the claim that the military actions are only one part and we’re really working on the diplomacy, the military actions are preventing any serious diplomatic move from going forward.

What’s needed in Iraq is an end to the understanding of Iraq’s Sunni population that the government in Baghdad, backed by the United States, has no interest in protecting their rights. That’s why they began to support ISIS and organizations like it in the past. The Sunni tribal leaders, the Sunni former generals, and ordinary Sunnis started to support organizations like ISIS because they felt that the government in Baghdad was consistently attacking them through its own sectarian militias and its army, which is really, historically, one more Shia sectarian militia in Iraq, albeit the biggest one.

In that context, every time the U.S. goes in with airstrikes in support of the Kurds and the Shia against ISIS, it’s seen by Sunnis as one more airstrike against Sunnis, and it’s going to undermine any possibility of changing the politics.

What seemed to have worked to get former Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki off the dime and retire was Obama’s refusal to help with the ISIS problem until Maliki relented. Putting pressure on Iraq to have a more inclusive government is the non-military way of solving the problem. If we take the pressure off of the Iraqi politicians by using our military powers to hide the reality from them, then we will never get them to do what they must do. That is why there is no US backed military solution to the problem. The military “solution” is actually one cause of the problem in that it allows the Iraqi politicians to avoid facing reality.

The Daily Show has the segment Au Bon Panic.

Instead of letting Texas secede, maybe we should push it out of the union. Now you know why Sharon says she is from Texas, as far from Texas as she can get.

One time we had the pleasure of sitting with her brother in the emergency room at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. They had no intention of treating his infected leg. Not enough of an emergency, I suppose. They didn’t tell us that, of course. They just made us wait for hours and hours until we gave up. Maybe ebola isn’t that big of an emergency either.

The Daily Kos has the story Since St. Louis has decided against releasing a report, here’s the timeline of Mike Brown’s death.

The article explains how the time-line was assembled.  You can make your own judgment of how accurate you think it might be.  If it is accurate, I think this changes everything you thought you thought you knew about the case.  This is cold-blooded murder, possibly in the first degree, by my non-professional judgment.  This explains a lot of the reasons for the continued unrest in St. Louis.

The Daily Kos has the article with the odd headline Wendy Davis slams Greg Abbott on MSNBC ignoring wheelchair ad attacks.

They featured the video below which seems to me to be better suited to my headline than theirs.

Wendy Davis refuses to let the false righteous indignation by the traditional MSM about her searing Greg Abbott wheelchair add to deter her from telling the truth about his hypocrisy.

Wendy Davis drives the narrative unapologetically on Greg Abbott’s hypocrisy.

Wendy Davis used the segment MSNBC attempted to use to question her ad as a platform where she enumerated Greg Abbott’s hypocrisy as well as his contempt for Texans disregarding their needs in favor of the wants of the few well-connected.

Do you think that Texans will be able to figure this out? Any Texans care to answer?

The Daily Kos has the article Republican budget cutting nearly halved CDC’s emergency preparedness since 2006.

The Republican fetish with starving government has helped land West Africa in an Ebola crisis.

Do you think there is enough math skill left in the populace for people to still be able to put 2 and 2 together and come up with Republican budget cutting can be lethal?

From the YouTube video Republican Cuts Kill.

‘Republican Cuts Kill,’ which was produced by the Agenda Project Action Fund, mixes disturbing footage of the Ebola outbreak—including images of body bags, hazmat suits, and corpses—with clips of Mitch McConnell, Pat Roberts, Rand Paul, and Republicans in some of the most competitive races around the country demanding more spending cuts. The demand for cuts is juxtaposed against testimony from top CDC and NIH officials detailing how budget cuts substantially hampered their ability to address the crisis.

It was The Daily Kos article Meet the toughest political ad in memory: “Republican Cuts Kill.” that introduced this video to me.

New economic Perspectives has the article We Now Know what Form of Bank Fraud at JPMorgan it Takes to Alarm President Obama by William K. Black.  Here is the key.

So, repeat after me, Jamie Dimon is an FSB agent secretly working for Putin.

Black forgot to add, “and he has Ebola.”

New Economic Perspectives has the article Beware of Policies and Legislation Based on the Generational Accounting Scam.

…the US has policy space to cope with recessions and depressions that many nations, including the nations of the Eurozone don’t have. Passing generational accounting-based legislation will only hamstring the US in using the policy space given us by the Constitution and the Founding Fathers to rebuild a rapidly declining America.

There is so much to do! We must not be prevented from doing it by a network of deficit terrorist fiscal legislation.
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In short, the w of generational accounting-based legislation supporters is not about sweetness, and light, and reasonableness and harmony, and the American people coming together to act “responsibly.” Instead, it is about the kind of noxious bipartisanship that aligns a group of high-placed elites in a conspiracy against what the American people have repeatedly said they really want: full employment and strengthened social safety net programs.
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Real Fiscal Responsibility can only be achieved if we defeat any and all generational accounting-based legislation. We must do that to safeguard the Federal Government fiscal policy space we will need if we’re going to recapture America for the 99% and reduce the growing inequality that austerity in Government spending has created among us.

Please do not foster “bipartisanship” that promotes the agenda of the network of deficit terrorists. This kind of terrorism is much more threatening than anything ISIS can throw our way.

Now for something completely different … (Where have I heard that before?)

If you like the video below, you have a chance to financially support Rick Weiland running to be the U.S. Senator from South Dakota.

Naked Capitalism has the post A Picture Worth 1000 Words: A Sighting from the McJobs Market.

…employers are following the lead of Obama, who last year touted Amazon warehouse jobs that paid below living wage levels as “middle class jobs.” With the President subtly jawboning wage expectations down, why shouldn’t employers see how far they can get with bottom fishing?

….The message from Obama is clear: Americans are now expected to celebrate when companies are willing to pay at or not much above a living wage [for a single person]. As long as you pay enough that the workers don’t wind up having to seek public assistance in the form of food stamps or emergency rooms for medical care, you’ll now be promoted as creating better conditions for Americans. That’s true as long as you remember that the Americans that benefit from this grinding down of ordinary citizens are Obama’s backers and other members of the elite.

So the questions I ask again,

Should we be looking for someone to run for the nomination for President in 2016 from the Democratic party who is  further  to the political right than President Obama?  Are we looking for a next President who will coddle the very oligarchs who want to grind us into the ground?

If you don’t think our next President should be the one I described above, what are you doing to make sure an unreformed Hillary Clinton does not get the nomination?  Do you think you should even bother to tell Hillary that the direction she is going in is not the one we need to be following?

Do you think there will be much middle class left if you wait until 2024 to fight for the type of President that we desperately need?

I’d truly like to get a sense of what progressive people are thinking if they favor Hillary Clinton over Elizabeth Warren.