Friday, September 22, 2023. Shia al-Sudani uses his US visit to meet
with many, Rupert Murdoch heads off for his coffin as the sun rises,
Ronald DeSantis drops further in the polls and much more.
Iraq's
Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani came to the United States this
week to address the United Nations' General Assembly. He's also met
with numerous politicians and world leaders as well as business leaders
and journalists. Late yesterday, the White House issued the following
statement:
Deputy Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the
Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk and Deputy Assistant and
Senior Advisor to the President for Energy and Investment Amos
Hochstein met last night with Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani of
Iraq to confirm the strong U.S. partnership with Iraq as outlined in the
Strategic Framework Agreement between the two countries. The United
States took special note of Prime Minister Sudani’s leadership moving
Iraq’s policy towards strengthening its own energy security, including
with electricity grid connections to Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia,
as well as major energy deals with western firms to capture flared gas
in southern Iraq for domestic use and future export. Hochstein and
McGurk also welcomed recent agreements between the Government of Iraq
and the Kurdistan Regional Government regarding monthly budget
allocations, and emphasized the urgency of reopening the Iraq-Turkiye
Pipeline as soon as possible. On regional matters, McGurk pledged full
U.S. support to help finally resolve outstanding maritime boundary
issues with Kuwait, particularly in relation to UNSCR 833. Sudani
welcomed this support, and reaffirmed Iraq’s longstanding and clear
policy recognizing Kuwait’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, all
prior bilateral agreements between the two friendly countries, and
adherence to international law, including UN Security Council
Resolutions.
###
In other news, Rupert Murdoch is returning to Bran Castle in Romania. Paul Rudnick Tweets:
Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate who built an unmatched global media
empire over seven decades from a single newspaper he inherited in his
native Australia, announced on Thursday that he would step down.
"I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change," Murdoch wrote in a memo to employees at Fox News, The Wall Street Journal,
and the many other properties that make up his two corporations, Fox
Corp. and News Corp. "The time is right for me to take on different
roles."
Murdoch's career has been marked by a singular drive
for business success, an eagerness to have sway over elections and
policies, and the repeated eruption of scandals. Fox News, which he
founded in 1996, has played an increasingly prominent role in his
profits, his influence, and his crises.
[. . .]
Murdoch's Sun tabloid relied on anonymous police sources to
blame soccer hooligans for a deadly stampede after a stadium collapse;
in fact, the police's own poor disaster response was found to be
responsible. News Corp. later paid hundreds of millions of dollars after
it came to light that people acting on its behalf had hacked into the
mobile phones, voicemails and emails. The Murdochs closed down one of
its tabloids, News of the World, and abandoned hope of taking full
control of Sky, a major British satellite television outfit in which it
held a significant stake.
In the U.S., Fox News paid nine
figures to resolve a growing wave of sexual harassment accusations
against then-Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, among others. It
later paid millions of dollars to the family of a slain Democratic
National Committee staffer whom it baselessly claimed had leaked
thousands of party emails that had actually been hacked during the 2016
campaign by the Russian government.
Yet nothing matched the debacle after the 2020 presidential election.
Murdoch's
role in allowing Fox News stars to embrace discredited claims of fraud
in that race came into sharp view during a defamation suit filed against
the network and Fox Corp. The company settled for $787.5 million
this spring, just before opening arguments in the trial were to begin.
Dominion Voting Systems, the plaintiff, planned to make Murdoch one of
the first witnesses to testify before the jury.
Despite
Murdoch's contempt for Trump, Fox amplified his baseless claims of
having been cheated out of victory. Documents from that legal case show network leaders were desperate to win back viewers angry that Fox News journalists had projected Trump would lose Arizona on Election Night.
Nothing matched the debacle after the 2020 presidential election?
Nothing?
I guess that's true . . . if you write a 920 word column and none of the words are: Iraq War.
But in the real world, far away from NPR apparently, the Iraq War is the debacle of the 21st century. As the UK's HEAD TOPICS notes:
An MSNBC presenter, Mehdi Hasan, linked Mr Murdoch’s influence and Fox’s
news agenda to different political events in the past 20 years. He said
in a post on X that “some of the worst things we have had to experience
in recent years – the Iraq war, the rise of Trump, the Big Election Lie
– are all thanks to him and Fox”. headtopics.
At THE NEW REPUBLIC, in a piece titled "Rupert Murdoch Made The World Worse," Alex Shephard writes:
The
worst thing that you can say about Rupert Murdoch, who resigned from
the board of the Fox and News Corporations on Tuesday, is that no one
has had a greater influence on the news over the last half-century.
Murdoch’s influence is both incalculable and fantastically corrosive. It
is impossible to look at all of the most malignant aspects of the
current news environment—its pace, its callousness, its rancor—without
seeing his impact. It is also a fully baked cake. Murdoch may be exiting
the scene, but there is no undoing the damage he has done.
[. . .]
Much
will be made about Fox News, Murdoch’s greatest and most destructive
creation. With Roger Ailes, he turned it into a juggernaut and
transformed the media. The cable news industry as we know it is, more or
less, the invention of Murdoch and Ailes. News had long been packaged
as entertainment, but this reached new heights at Fox News. The network
itself existed as an answer to long-standing conservative complaints
that the media had a “liberal” bias. It portrayed itself as a “fair and balanced” corrective. It was, instead, a new, powerful partisan machine. It worked immaculately.
Fox
News, with Murdoch and Ailes at the helm, transformed news into a
massive engine of confirmation bias. It was a safe space for Americans,
most of them older and white, to have their fantasies affirmed:
Immigrants were pouring into the country, crime was out of control,
their way of life was under threat from sources both foreign and
domestic. For decades, it pushed conspiracies of every stripe and played
a major role in pushing numerous disasters, from the Iraq War to the
January 6 insurrection. Pushing conspiracies was and is Fox’s business
plan: It exists to tell its viewers that their political opponents are
not just their adversaries but represent an existential threat.
Before
Rupert Murdoch began illegally making inroads in the US media (foreign
ownership was forbidden when Murdoch began his media empire building in
the US and he had not yet become a US citizen -- wouldn't until 1985),
his trashy ways were already well known. COUNTERPUNCH has republished a 1976 piece by the late Alexander Cockburn.
US political races? So
ABC NEWS is the one who let Ronald DeSantis lie this week. Is that the
deal? He does a sit down interview with you and you agree to let him
lie? From ABC NEWS' report on Linsey Davis' interview with him:
"For
example, I served in Iraq back in the day. al-Qaida didn't wear
uniforms. You know, the typical Arab male would have had the man dress
on. You didn't know if they had a bomb strapped to them or not. They
carry around the AK-47s, normal civilians would, so you couldn't even
say if they had," he said.
You were a member of JAG. You were a well protected attorney in Iraq.
At
least he didn't try to lie again about being a Navy Seal. But he was
not in combat. He was not doing deliveries and driving through
hazardous roads and regions as part of his job. He was in a comfy well
protected office. Green Zone Baby, basically.
"The man dress"? How stupid and insulting is this idiot?
He
most likely means the dishdasha. He wants to cite his time in Iraq as
experience but he can't even identify a dishdasha or a kandora. He's an
idiot. A short, little fat man who wears that lesbian vest everywhere
he goes. For someone who hates and persecutes LGBTQ+ people, he sure
does like to dress like a lesbian in the 80s -- even that awful
hairstyle. I find it hilarious that he calls out drag queens as though
he thinks he's the portrait of manly.
+ New CNN/UNH poll shows DeSantis in freefall in New Hampshire since the last poll in July.
Trump: 39% (+2)
Ramaswamy: 13% (+8)
Haley: 12% (+7)
Christie: 11% (+5)
DeSantis: 10% (-13)
Scott: 5% (-3)
Pence: 2% (+1)
Burgum: 1% (-5)
Several e-mailed the public account regarding the following Tweets from Glenneth Greenwald.
One
of the conceits the Dem-loyal left tells itself is that the corporate
media is deeply hostile to it, because they're so threatening to
establishment interests.
Meanwhile, I don't think I've ever seen the NYT lavish a book with more
endless praise than Naomi Klein's new one.
The
vast majority of media figures who lucratively branded as radical,
disruptive, anti-establishment leftists -- by attaching to the Bernie
campaign -- is now indistinguishable from MSNBC liberalism.
They don't pretend any more, which I guess is good. They're all in on
Biden.
Also, one day someone will have to explain this to me:
Those who cheer the same war policy Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham support are the real left-liberals.
Those who oppose the US role in that war are "far-right fascists."
These labels are pointless:
I'm
dictating this and the Tweets are being pulled from e-mails by the
person I'm dictating too. Wasn't planning on addressing this or I would
have embedded the Tweets before I got on the tread mill. At any rate .
..
1)
Naomi Klein's book. I haven't read the reviews. I did review it here
on Saturday "
Naomi Klein's DOPPELGANGER" and on Sunday Ava and I did "
Books (Ava and C.I.)" (which I think posted
Monday at THIRD). I do recommend the book -- Jim asked, after he read
my review, besides the punctuation what did I like about it? I don't do
puff pieces. It's a good book. It's worth reading. If you're a
feminist, you'll be disappointed because you will grasp Anais Nin's
importance to Otto Rank (as a patient, as a translator, as a
practitioner, as a lover). So if you're mentioning Rank, you really
don't know what you're talking about if you're not mentioning Anais.
That's especially true if you're writing of doppelgangers, doubles,
twins. And Anais Nin's entire output in terms of novels is nothing but
the twinning. Freud really doesn't apply to what Naomi Klein's going
after. Now most readers won't be feminists and that's going to sail
over them. I write from my point of view and if I ever have anything to
offer that's the only reason why. So, again, don't do puff pieces --
noted that in Friday's snapshot because people were e-mailing asking me
to review the book. I do tear-downs all the time. Didn't do a
tear-down on Naomi Klein. If I'd wanted to, I would have. And I've
even got a helpful parenthetical in my review referring anyone who wants
to do a negative review of the book. And, again, if I wanted to do a
tear-down, I could have.
2)
Glenneth hates Naomi. He's hated her for some time. This predates his
leaving THE INTERCEPT. In fairness to him, she did come down on the
wrong side -- ethically and legally -- when THE INTERCEPT refused to run
Glenneth's column about the Hunter Biden laptop. She slammed him
publicly and shouldn't have. A) One writer to another, she should have
stood with him against censorship. If she couldn't do that, the kind
thing to have done was to have said nothing in the immediate aftermath.
Glenneth was an idiot himself. They violated his contract, so he
quit. He should have sued, that's why you have contracts to begin
with. (I've sometimes made more money from a project I've signed for
then one I've completed.) When I note that's he's not a very smart
attorney, that's what I'm talking about.
3) Glenneth's bad mouthed Naomi for over a decade so factor that in to any of his Tweets.
4)
Also factor in his stupidity. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW is not
taking orders from the editorial board of the newspaper. It and THE NEW
YORK TIMES MAGAZINE operate with a degree of independence. NYT BOOK
REVIEW is -- and always has been -- rather clannish. NYT did not rave
over Naomi Klein, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW did. I'd think clarity
would be something an 'attorney' would strive for.
5)
When he Tweets "The vast majority of media figures who lucratively
branded as radical, disruptive, anti-establishment leftists -- by
attaching to the Bernie campaign -- is now indistinguishable from MSNBC
liberalism." Huh? He's made that a part of the thread with his Naomi
Tweet. Is she one of the vast majority . . .? I don't get what he's
trying to say or smear her with.
Has
she presented herself as a radical? I don't believe she has but I
could be wrong. In terms of Canadian activists, she's pretty much in
the mainstream. (That's not me sneering at her. I'm not a radical -- I
lack the energy.) Did she attach herself to Bernie's campaign? If so,
that was wrong. I had originally dictated something on that but we're
pulling it because it will be mean towards her and we've said it before
so there's no reason to say it again. There may be at another time but
certainly no reason to bring it up while responding to Glenneth's
nonsense. I wish she were more and I'm probably harder on her for that
reason. But, objectively, who she is is largely who she self-presents
as and I don't believe she's claimed to be a radical. She's a climate
activist mainly. She's also a mother and I found that section of the
book to be the most moving.
In
terms of her work, she's been far more consistent than Glenneth has.
She's also got consistency that he lacks as he tries to grift her and
there or play the trickster when he's influencing (or trying to) an
election. Like back in 2008.
Glenneth
doesn't like women. He's too busy rejecting them and anything feminine
so that he can look 'like a man.' Remember, he was closeted to most in
college and did everything he could to fit in with straight bullies.
He gets his attitude towards women from them. If you went through his
Tweets and just compiled statistics, you'd realize how unimportant women
are to Glenneth.
As for
the third Tweet? Just another example of how the supposed attorney lack
clarity. I've been against the proxy war on Ukraine since it started.
When CODESTINK wasn't sure where to come down, I'd already made my
position clear. WSWS are not "far right fascists" and they're also
against the proxy war. There are many more. But Glenneth creates straw
men because he's always been afraid of getting his butt kicked by
actual men. (Which is why I do believe that flash drive contained
Glenneth's browser history.)
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