Truthout has the story The “Possible Military Dimensions” Bomb That Could Blow Up the Iran Deal.

The Obama administration has been under heavy pressure from the Israelis and their supporters in Washington to insist that Iran confess to having carried out nuclear weapons research and development as a condition for sanctions relief.

That pressure is the result of several years of news media coverage that has treated allegations that Iran carried out research and development on nuclear weapons, published by the IAEA in 2011, as established fact. The media have constantly repeated the theme that Iran has been “stonewalling” the IAEA to cover up its past nuclear weapons experiments.

Absent from the media narrative is the fact that the allegations that the IAEA is demanding that Iran explain are all based on intelligence that is now known to have come from Israel and which the IAEA itself suspected of being fabricated, from 2005 to 2009.

Put this together with my previous post NBC’s Conduct in Engel Kidnapping Story is More Troubling than the Brian Williams Scandal, and you no longer have to wonder why I am skeptical about everything I read including the Truthout article.  I might as well be reading the Ripley’s Believe it or Not section of the paper as anything else.  At least Ripley warned you about its stories.

It is a very interresting trip to follow the links I followed to get to this story.  First thanks to Nancy Weinberg for putting this on her Facebook Wall.  I followed the link she gave to Glenn Greenwald’s First Look which had the story NBC’s Conduct in Engel Kidnapping Story is More Troubling than the Brian Williams Scandal.

That there was ample reason to doubt Engel’s belief about the identity of his captors is proven by how many people publicly called it into doubt. That NBC’s broadcasts reflected none of this doubt, and instead allowed a one-sided tale that we now know to be false to go unquestioned by the entire network is bad enough. That these executives seemed to have had ample reason to doubt the story themselves makes it far worse than just merely “bad”: it is the type of systematic journalistic deceit and propaganda that we have seen over and over, almost always on the side and in service of the U.S. government’s agenda of endless war.

The First Look story says that The New York Times broke this story. The link to The New York Times that I followed was NBC News Alters Account of Correspondent’s Kidnapping in Syria.

NBC’s own assessment during the kidnapping had focused on Mr. Qassab and Mr. Ajouj, according to a half-dozen people involved in the recovery effort. NBC had received GPS data from the team’s emergency beacon that showed it had been held early in the abduction at a chicken farm widely known by local residents and other rebels to be controlled by the Sunni criminal group.

As long as I had come this far, I decided  to go to NBC itself for the Engel post New Details on 2012 Kidnapping of NBC News Team in Syria.  This article was anti-climactic by comparison.

I don’t know what is most ironic.

1. NBC news executives acting more deceitfully than Brian Williams whom they have suspended for what he did.
2. The New York Times taking umbrage that a “respected” news medium would lie about a story to support the US government’s cause of the moment.
3. Richard Engel downplaying the role his bosses played in this farce.

I refer to a certain network as Faux Noise.  What should I start calling NBC?  Or The New York Times for that matter. I already say that The New York Times “prints all the news it sees fit to print”.

It just proves that one should always be skeptical of what one reads, even (or especially) about what one reads on this blog.  I don’t even believe myself anymore.

Mother Jones has the article The Second Amendment Doesn’t Say What You Think It Does.  The article is an interview with Michael Waldman the author if the book The Second Amendment: A Biography.  I liked the following example in discussing the legal “scholarship” that went into the Heller decision at the Supreme Court.

MW: They certainly supported a lot of it. The way it works in constitutional law is that legal scholarship plays a pretty big role. So there became a rather deafening roar of the pro-individual gun ownership model: They were publishing and reinforcing each other. Some of it was very useful, and I cite it in the book. And some of it, when you look at some of the claims, they are easily punctured. It reminded me of the people who write movie posters, in terms of pulling quotes out of context. Like this Thomas Jefferson quote—”One loves to possess arms.” It is in serious law review articles. It’s presented as proof of what the founders really meant. But what happened was Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to George Washington, saying, “Remember I sent you a bunch of those letters from when I was Secretary of State? Could you send them back to me? I think I’m going to get attacked for this position I made. I want to be able to defend myself: ‘One loves to possess arms,’ even though one hopes not to use them.” It’s a metaphor! But it’s in these law review articles. It’s funny! When you go to the NRA website, it’s still there. You can buy a T-shirt that has the quote!

I couldn’t find the T-Shirt mentioned in the article, but I did find this “scholarship”, CLEARING THE  SMOKE FROM THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT by ANTHONY J. DENNIS Copyright © 1995 Akron Law Review

Thanks to Summer Starbuck for posting this on Facebook.

Naked Capitalism has the article Elizabeth Warren Throws Down Gauntlet, Calls for Genuine Financial Reform.

At the Levy Conference, Elizabeth Warren launched a new campaign for tough-minded, effective financial regulation. This ought to be a straightforward call for restoring banking to its traditional role of facilitating real economy activity. Instead, in this era of “cream for the banks, crumbs for everyone else,” common-sense reforms to make banks deal fairly with customers and remove their outsized subsidies will no doubt be depicted by pampered financiers as an unfair plot to target a successful industry. But as we’ve stressed, Big Finance gets more government support than any line of business, even military contractors. They are utilities and should be regulated as such. Thus even Warren’s bold call to action falls short of the degree to which the financial service industry need to be curbed.

If you don’t watch this video, you won’t have a clue as to what is going on in the financial world that absolutely must come to a halt. You won’t have a clue as to how weak the Obama administration has been in enforcing the laws against the big banks. You also won’t have a clue as to what steps need to be taken to fix the problems. If it is ok by you to be choosing Presidential candidates while remaining in the dark about these key issues, then you aren’t living up to your civic responsibilities.

I give you permission to skip about the first 50 seconds of the video where people are just waiting for the introduction to Elizabeth Warren.

Bernie Sanders has a poster on his Facebook wall.

What Bernie Sanders says here is on the edge of what I can support. For years, I have been saying other people in the world deserve to have good jobs, too. We have no right to tell other people what is an acceptable level of pay for them.  They should have the right to decide that for themselves.  We also have no right to a standard of living that is far higher than what exists in developing countries.  For historical reasons, we do have a higher standard of living, but in a fair world, this cannot go on forever.  We should be working for a solution that raises other peoples’ standards of living to come up to our level rather than trying to depress our standard of living to match theirs.

American exceptionalism has given us in the USA an exaggerated concept of the right to the exceptional standard of living we enjoy. If people in other countries are willing to work for lower wages and yet do a good job, then there is justice in the work flowing to them. The key is their “willingness”. The only thing we should be negotiating in trade agreements is a certain standard of human rights. Beyond that, we have no right to complain about the other people willing to do our jobs as well or better than we can, and at a lower wage. We may not like it, but the world does not owe us the higher standard of living that we enjoy.

In the adjustment of our standard of living that seems inevitable to me, we don’t have to choose a method that puts all the pain on the backs of American working people. Letting the value of our dollar weaken as it should do, will let all the people in the USA, the wealthy included, share in the pain of the adjustment. If we don’t compare ourselves to other countries, the relative adjustment could be almost unnoticeable to us. In other words the rise in standard of living in other countries could be much larger than the fall here. If we were really lucky there would not have to be any fall here, just a huge rise elsewhere.

The people who call for maintaining the strength of the dollar, are asking for the most painful way to have the adjustment to occur.  Well, painful for us average folk, but good for the richest among us.

Talking Points Memo has the article N.J. Deli Forced To Shut Down After Posting ‘White History Month’ Sign.

A Flemington, N.J. deli was forced to close its doors after the owner placed a “White History Month” sign in the window of the establishment, the Hunterdon County Democrat reported on Thursday.

This story caught my eye because we lived in Flemington for a couple of  years in the mid-1970s.  Should I have a sense of pride for having lived there?  Maybe this incident redeems New Jersey’s reputation for having been a southern like state when it came to civil rights.

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Media Fall for Hillary Clinton’s Gensler Gambit by William K. Black. While he does praise Gensler’s work during the Obama administration, he comes to the following conclusion:

Ignore the media crush on Gensler’s appointment.  As campaign CFO for H. Clinton his job is the care and feeding of the DLC’s financial base – the finance industry.  H. Clinton’s Gensler gambit is smart politics, but if you think it means she is seeking progressive advice you are being played – successfully.

You’ll have to read the article to find the details behind this conclusion.

Looking at my previous post Clinton to name former financial regulator as CFO -Bloomberg, you will see that I was almost played successfully.  However, I did show some skepticism about the appointment.  In fact, I said that I was waiting to see what William K. Black had to say about this.

Reuters “reporting” on a Bloomberg story has the article Clinton to name former financial regulator as CFO -Bloomberg.

Bloomberg cited in its report an unnamed Democrat familiar with the decision. Gensler, whose five-year term as the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ended in January 2014, came to embody President Barack Obama’s push for Wall Street reforms in the trillion-dollar derivatives market.

A one-time Goldman Sachs swaps trader, he transformed the watchdog from a relatively sleepy agriculture-focused regulator to a powerful overseer of Wall Street.

He proved a polarizing figure with his aggressive interpretation of swaps reforms after the financial crisis, irritating both Wall Street and international counterparts.

Despite, or maybe because of, his Wall Street background, he does seem to have been an effective regulator.

The WikiPedia article on Gary Gensler, has pretty high praise for him.   I checked one of the sources referred to in the article which did not expose any holes in the WikiPedia write-up.  You can tell that I am skeptical of Clinton’s appointees, so I will wait to hear what William Black has to say.  Except for just fining Barclay’s bank over the Libor scandal instead of jailing the offenders according to The New York Times article Libor Case Energizes a Wall Street Watchdog, I can’t find anything else that Elizabeth Warren would complain about.  That is a pretty big exception, and one of my major knocks against Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. I just don’t know what Elizabeth Warren or William K. Black will say about his record.  At least there is a possibility that he is really as good a guy as some people make him out to be.

Time Magazine has the article Martin O’Malley Criticizes Hillary Clinton for Flip-Flopping. I haven’t been following Martin O’Malley, and this article isn’t much to go on, but he looks promising.

“Leadership is about making the right decision, and the best decision before sometimes it becomes entirely popular,” he continued.

Clinton has adopted a more populist tone than she has in the past during her recent tour this week to Iowa, where she made her first stops on the 2016 campaign trail.

Since this is a democracy, leadership is more than just about making the right decision.  It is also an effort to make that decision popular by explaining it to people.  You may not succeed  in making it popular, but the effort to do so is important whether you succeed or not.

What I realized from this article is that Clinton may finally be coming around to my positions, but I would love to have a President that was in the vanguard of progressive ideas, not reluctantly trailing behind.  Of course, reluctantly training behind is probably better than refusing to keep up or going in the other direction.