Commentary // Current TV

The Antiwar Comic: Cops or Soldiers

Has the militarization of the police gone too far?

TonyDiGerolamo
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4 days ago
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What Do You Do When The Country Where You Live Is Literally Going Insane?

Do you ever get the feeling that the world around you is going crazy? If you live in... more

Revelation1217
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8 days ago
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59 comments

Keith Olbermann - Caffeine = The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell (Audio interview)

An audio interview with Lawrence O'Donnell, host of MSNBC's "The Last... more

andelman
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1 month ago
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Newstalgia Reference Room - December 1956 In A Cold War World.

Names and faces change - circumstances, not so much.

Gordonskene
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1 month ago
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Muppet Movie Controversy - Promoting Liberal Agenda WTF?

This week the Muppets were accused of promoting a liberal agenda in the new Muppet... more

eightimprov
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2 months ago
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Washington’s Secret Wars

Following the widely reported Iranian government plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington and alarming new reports of civilian deaths in Syria, the White House has issued several findings to the intelligence community authorizing stepped-up covert action against both Damascus and Tehran. A “finding” is top-level approval for secret operations considered to be particularly politically sensitive. Taken together, the recent findings, combined with the evidence of major intelligence operations being run in Lebanon, amount to a secret war against Iran and its allies in the Mideast.

Since 2008 the United States has regarded the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. This enables the Department of the Treasury to freeze its business interests and bank accounts. But it has also permitted aggressive steps against the group itself, including killing its members under the White House doctrine that all terrorists arepotential targets anywhere in the world. A finding approved by the Bush administration in 2003 and strengthened in 2006 on the pretext that Iran was “interfering” in Iraq and Afghanistan authorized the use of intelligence assets to disrupt Iranian Revolutionary Guard activity in border zones. These included areas adjacent to Pakistan inhabited by ethnic Baluchs, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, and the ethnically Arab province of Khuzestan, which borders southeastern Iraq.

Activity in the Kurdish region was most intense because it was regarded as a more permissible operating environment with a long, open border and a friendly local government in Arbil, but it was limited by Turkish sensitivities and was partially run by Israelis to provide deniability by the U.S. That effort was abandoned altogether in 2009, when the Obama administration decided to double down on the Turkish relationship, increasing intelligence and military cooperation with Ankara against the Kurdish Workers’Party (PKK). Attacks in Baluchestan and the Arab region over the past seven years have continued intermittently, however, killing a large number of Revolutionary Guards and even more civilians.
A separate finding on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program was signed in 2007 by President Bush. It authorized attacks against Iranian nuclear scientists and other facilities in Tehran and elsewhere as well as coordination with the Israelis to develop computer viruses to disrupt the Iranian computer network, a program that led to the production of the Stuxnet worm. While the media credits “the Israelis” in the assassinations of Iranian scientists, the reality is that no Israeli (or American) intelligence officer could possibly operate effectively inside Iran to carry out a killing. The assassinations, which are acts of war, have actually been carried out by followers of the dissident Iranian Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), the separatist Baluch Jundallah, and the Kurdish PJAK, all acting under direction from American and Israeli intelligence officers. The MEK’s role in doing the CIA’s and Mossad’s dirty work is one reason so many neoconservatives and national security experts have been calling for the group to be removed from the U.S. terrorist group list.
The new finding on Iran extends existing initiatives and is intended to strangle Iran by creating insurgencies along all of the country’s borders. It includes involvement with the Azeris, who inhabit northwestern Iran and share a common border, language, and culture with the people of Azerbaijan. Twenty million ethnic Azeris in Iran make up nearly 25 percent of the population. When combined with the 2 percent who are Baluchs, 7 percent who are Kurds, and 3 percent who are Arabs, it is easy to understand that Iran has a significant ethnic problem concentrated along its borders. This is precisely what the covert action seeks to exploit by encouraging ethnic fragmentation in the country’s border regions and supplying dissidents with communications equipment, training, money, and weapons.

Not at all coincidentally, the foreign minister of Azerbaijan, Elmar Mammadyarov, visited Brussels in October to discuss issues of common concern with NATO. He met with U.S. officials and, inter alia, received private intelligence briefings focused on the “Iranian threat.”Azeris inside Iran are generally well-assimilated — Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is himself half-Azeri — but there is a small movement to join the Azeri region of Iran with the existing state of Azerbaijan. The central government in Tehran is indeed unpopular among Azeris, though one could easily argue that it is equally unpopular among most Persians. In February 2007, tens of thousands of Azeris marched against Iranian state-sponsored suppression of their language and culture, but there is little to no evidence that many Azeris would take up arms against Tehran to advance their cause.

The situation in Syria is quite different. Russia and China have warned against foreign intervention in the country, but the intervention is already well under way using some open but mostly covert resources. An extensive clandestine network of support for the insurgency against the government of President Bashar al-Assad has been put in place, assisted by Turkey and several Western European countries. The Free Syrian Army, the armed wing of the Syrian National Council, operates out of the Turkish city of Iskenderun, near the Syrian border. The rebels are being armed with surplus weapons from Libya that are being shipped on NATO aircraft even though NATO is not officially involved in the activity against Damascus. There are also reports that as many as 600 Libyan fighters from the Transitional National Council in Tripoli have traveled with the weapons to provide pointers on how guerrilla forces might fight regular army soldiers, something they learned at a cost while fighting Gadhafi’s forces. French and British special forces trainers have also been reported to be present on the ground. The United States is providing communications equipment and intelligence information to assist the rebel cause, together with the usual National Endowment for Democracy cadres for training on “how to build democracy” to justify the extraordinary and manifestly illegal effort.

Lest there be any confusion as to the overall objective, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently predicted that there would soon be a civil war in Syria. As the pretext for the intervention in Syria has been an amorphous “responsibility to protect” the nation’s civilians, it would appear to be a rather curious resolution to the problem, pitting the various ethnic and sectarian groups in the country against each other in a struggle for dominance in what might well turn out to be a truncated state. Most observers of the region believe that if Assad goes, the likely victor will be the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the only group that is well-organized and-funded with an infrastructure inside Syria. If that happens, it will mean hard times for the country’s Christian, Alawite, and Shi’ite minorities. It is all too easy to forget that Syria has a largely secular regime, such as existed in neighboring Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that “humanitarian democratization” will bring to the fore both good things and bad things. Among the bad things is the likelihood that the groups that are best configured to take advantage of change will rise to the top. They will not necessarily be the friends of pluralism and liberal democratic values.

(more @ link)

http://poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com/2011/12/washingtons-secret-wars.htmlFollowing the widely reported Iranian government plot to assassinate the Saudi... more

Anonmaly
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2 months ago
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Newstalgia Reference Room - Marya Mannes On The State Of Dissent In 1968.

Marya Mannes - writer, journalist and not-so-casual, casual observer.

Gordonskene
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2 months ago
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The Best Among Us; Join the Revolt On Wall Street or Stand On The Wrong Side of History

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say "I am innocent" is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children's children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.
Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/best-amoung-us.htmlThere are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and... more

Anonmaly
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4 months ago
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Russ' Filtered Stew: Solyndra Was Bush's Baby and Top Topics

"Solyndra was cleared to participate in this loan-guarantee program by President... more

StewSteve
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4 months ago
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When Men Become Truly Free

There comes a times in the lives of men When the ruthless and the criminally insane... more

Vierotchka
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5 months ago
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13 comments

Early Morning Show

My hope is that Current TV will build out full evening line up of commentary shows,... more

Windsurf
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6 months ago
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Keith Olbermann's Current TV ratings drop to new low

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) - Current TV has had a busy few weeks between the departure of... more

Warren_Merrill
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6 months ago
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Super Frat: Google Extinction

MPH watches and not watches CNN.

TonyDiGerolamo
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7 months ago
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One Man's Tweet Is Another Man's Bleat

When I saw her face, slanted jaw open in the common ‘I’m dancing at a... more

StrawberrieGonzoCake
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7 months ago
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Newstalgia Reference Room - The Wetbacks - 1954 | Newstalgia

an age-old problem with an age-old shrug of shoulders.

Gordonskene
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7 months ago
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A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100

I've had several conversations with people over the years that assume either... more

Schnookums
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8 months ago
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39 comments

Pakistan-’An Army in Search of A Country’-Wiki Leaks. « Ramani's blog

One can only... more

ramanan50
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9 months ago
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Keiser Report: Blind Cult of America (E142)

This time Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, report on downgrades, gold bars and... more

Vierotchka
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10 months ago
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Looking at news through 'The Big Picture'

infoMania is proud to introduce our new investigative news segment, "The Big Picture," in which Sergio Cilli digs deeper into the week's top stories with the aid of revealing photographs. That was the plan, anyway. Instead it turns out that Sergio sticks to pictures because he hates reading. This week, the likes of President Obama and the Easter Bunny, Queen Elizabeth and Katie Couric fall victim to Sergio's "analysis."

infoMania is a half-hour comedy show that airs weekly on Current TV. Picture the ultimate office water-cooler, only with funnier co-workers who willingly stay up late imbibing all forms of media so you don't have to. Caveat: Bring your own water. Hosted by Brett Erlich and co-starring Sergio Cilli, Erin Gibson, Ben Hoffman and Bryan Safi, infoMania airs on Thursdays at 11/10c on Current TV.

Go to http://current.com/infomania for more, and make sure to check out our Facebook profile for special features at http://facebook.com/infomania.

Current Media, the Peabody-and Emmy Award-winning television and online network founded in 2005 by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, engages viewers with smart, provocative and timely programming -stories that no one else is telling in ways that no one else is telling them. Current's programming shines a light where others won't dare and boldly explores important subjects -- opening minds, sparking conversations and forming deep connections with its viewers. The channel's audience is comprised of affluent, curious, social and connected adults who crave the kind of entertaining, enlightening, witty and informative programming found on Current's TV and online properties. Current is now available via cable and satellite TV in 75 million households worldwide - 60 million households in the US - through distribution partners Comcast (Channel 107); Time Warner ; DirecTV (Channel 358 nationwide); Dish Network (Channel 196 nationwide); Verizon and AT&T. In the UK and Ireland, Current is available on BSkyB (Channel 183) and Virgin Media (Channel 155), and in Italy, Current is available on Sky Italia (Channel 130). Viewers can also find Current online at www.current.com.infoMania is proud to introduce our new investigative news segment, "The Big... more

Brett_Erlich
added this
10 months ago
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4 comments

Space Shuttle Hoax -Astronaut Admits Faking Spacewalk in a Massive Water Pool -Walt Disney Bullshit For All Mankind

Astronaut Admits Faking Spacewalk in a Massive Water Pool -Walt Disney Bullshit For... more

ArcAngel4Myke
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10 months ago
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