Politifact and Jon Stewart- A match made in heaven?

 First off m'dear reader, I consider Jon Stewart to be a comedian first and foremost. His less than stellar history of lobbing softball questions at guests whom he has previously, viciously and deliciously satirized is the reason I consider him a gifted and hysterically funny comedian/satirist, nothing more. Some folks like to consider him more than a comedian, a truth-teller of sorts or even a journalist at times..not moi.

There are three places I look when refuting rightwingers on Faux Noise, specifically Glenn Beck lies and Faux's general and usually completely untrue, bullshit rightwing nutterville, talking points: Politifact, FactCheck.org and MediaMatters.  All three are quite good reference sites that back up what they say with ..well, facts.

So, when Politifact said Stewarts premise that Fox News viewers are the most consistently misinformed was a lie, I had to agree w/them..although it wasn't easy. The night after that article went up at Politifact, Stewart apologized for saying what he did about the idiots...I mean viewers that tune in regularly to Faux. He then went on to use the site to point out 21 separate, but equal lies told repeatedly on Faux and two that actually won Lie-of-the-year awards from Politifact. It's a great segment..watch it below:

                   

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Craig, m'dear friend and daily reader, who has become more moderate with age,(also, I hope, because you read my bitchfests daily) this post is for you. You are not a troll, you are always a gentleman, you provide links to why you believe as you do and even though I do not usually agree w/your pov..I enjoy our back and forth on issues that matter to America. Both of us need some humor in our lives..it can not be all anger, all the time..at least on my end..correct?  ;>)

Van Jones sends NewsCorp & Beck a cease and desist letter.

He also wants an on-air apology. With all the fuckery foisted upon us by Glenn Beck w/regard to Van Jones..all I can say is..what took you so long Mr. Jones? From HuffPo:

After challenging Glenn Beck to a debate over the weekend at Netroots Nation and in a MoveOn.org-sponsored ad Monday, Van Jones may have taken his beef with Beck a step further.

Jones, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who resigned from his job as White House “green jobs” czar following the conservative host's repeated claims that he was a subversive and a Communist, is considering legal action against Beck-employer Fox News.

Jones’ attorney sent a cease and desist letter Monday to Dianne Brandi, the network’s executive vice president for legal & business affairs, claiming that “a series of sensational and inflammatory charges” have been made against Jones on Fox News shows. The statements, his attorney Joseph Sandler argues, are “demonstrably, unequivocally and absolutely false.” 

Faux Noise's only comment was that they were reviewing the letter.  Van Jones' response, again from the HuffPo writeup:

"I thought that FOX TV or Beck's producers would take note of the facts and rein him in, without me having to take legal action. They didn't," he said. "Then [Rep.] Gabby Giffords was shot. I talked directly to Beck's producer for about an hour, setting the record straight. We had a friendly conversation. But rather than stopping his smear campaign, Beck chose to double down on the crazy. I was shocked. Then out of nowhere, he attacked the American Dream itself - and the growing movement of people who want to defend and rebuild it. That was the last straw. Even my patience has a limit."

Rip them apart if you are able to Mr. Jones. They deserve it and much, much more. With Glenn Becky's tenure at Fox coming to an end..I am sure that was part of the reason for the letter at this point, as Jones wants an on-air apology from the jerkwad prior to him leaving Faux Noise. 

Below is a recent MoveOn ad that features Van Jones talking about Beck's bullshittery. Accompanying article here.



It's all about painting the left, or anyone that isn't an extreme right wingnut, as liars, communists and jailbirds for Beck and the fuckwads at Fox. I wish more people would take them to task for their lying and obsfucation.

The Grifter from Alaska quits bus tour.

Guess the crowds weren't turning out for her as she expected and unloading all those lousy books weren't going as planned. RealClearPolitcs broke the story, however this version is from RawStory:

Amid diminishing media interest, Sarah Palin has quit her high-profile bus tour halfway through and returned to Alaska with her family, according to RealClearPolitics.

The move puts a damper on widespread speculations that Palin's "One Nation" bus tour, which launched on Memorial Day, was a potential precursor to a potential White House bid for 2012. Palin never made it to her scheduled stops in the key primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

RealClearPolitics, which originally broke the story about the bus tour, reported Wednesday on Palin's "extended hiatus." The remaining legs of her trip, according to Scott Conroy, are "in limbo" as "Palin and her family have reverted to the friendly confines of summertime Alaska."

I am so glad the press has abandoned her ass. They took up with the idiot from TX, Rick Perry and then Jon Huntsman announced yesterday.  As the article points out, the Palinator was jerking out the press: But after being ignored and mislead and denied interviews or access, reporters' attention fizzled.

Head on back to your compound you worthless bag of batshit. So you can do your Faux News..cough..commentary about things you don't know and will never know anything about.

Walmart ruling favors The Corporatocracy.

Once again, SCOTUS has failed the people and in this case, women specifically. From SCOTUSblog's analysis of today's opinion:

For large companies in general, the ruling in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes, et al. (10-277) offered a second message: the bigger the company, the more varied and decentralized its job practices, the less likely it will have to face a class-action claim.  Only workers who have a truly common legal claim may sue as a group, the Court majority made clear — and, even that claim will require rigorous proof that every single worker suffered from exactly the same sort of bias.  Sample statistics and anecdotes won’t do, it said.

The Court split 5-4 in shutting down, entirely, a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart that could have affected the legal claims of perhaps as many as 1 million women.  The Court’s four most liberal members, including the three women Justices, dissented.  The Court also ruled — unanimously — that the women could not bring a claim for backpay, as a remedy for discrimination, under the legal theory their lawyers had used.  The ruling was based primarily upon how the Court interpreted a federal court rule — Rule 23.  But there were overtones of constitutional protection for companies facing money claims in a class-action case, ensuring that they must be able to mount a full defense in trying to fend off such claims.

The main opinion, controlling both the 5-4 and 9-0 results, was written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court’s most dedicated skeptic about the class-action approach to litigation — a method that allows a large group of individuals, whose own claims may not be worth enough to justify a lawsuit, to join forces as “a class” to pursue grievances that all of them share.  Almost certainly the most significant part of the new ruling was the stress it put on the Rule 23 demand that all of those in the class must have a “common” legal claim — in a workplace bias case, each must show, up front, that the bias they claim was targeted at each of them.

Ah yes, Justice Scalia. He got it right about the recent Westboro Baptist ruling..but not this case regarding institutionalized discrimination in the workplace.

The courts four most liberal jurists, three of whom are female, dissented against several of the key parts of the ruling. Again, from SCOTUSblog:

The part of the ruling dealing with the commonality requirement was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.   Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented on that facet of the ruling, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

The dissenters argued that the evidence the women’s lawyers had offered “suggests that gender bias suffused Wal-Mart’s company culture.”  Their evidence also indicated that the differences in pay and promotions between women and men workers could only be explained by bias, not “neutral variables,” the dissenters added, leaving the clear impression that the dissenters agreed with that assessment.

Repeatedly, the dissenting opinion offered positive reactions to the women’s claims of how the Wal-Mart “corporate culture” actually worked to bolster discretion at the store level, with that discretion exercised predominantly by men influenced by a culture of discrimination.

It's pathetic, to me, that the liberal judges actually found common ground, with the rightwing jurists, that provided them with an out and to rule for the 'corporate culture' of discrimination:

Because of the Court’s ruling on the “commonality” question, closing the class-action claim against Wal-Mart, this second part of the decision had little practical impact other than clarifying when a class-action lawsuit could pursue a money remedy.  The dissenters said they would have left the Wal-Mart women with a further opportunity to try a different section of Rule 23 for their backpay claim, but the majority had scuttled that by ending the class-action case altogether. (emphasis mine)

Letting the rightwing protectors/judges of all things 'corporate' win on this case and at every level, is bullshit.

UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi had some..cough..harsh words for SCOTUS today, with regard to this ruling:

 The Supreme Court's decision to block a class action lawsuit on gender discrimination against Wal-Mart sets back the fight for gender equality, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said.

“Today’s Supreme Court decision sets back the cause of equality for women and for all Americans in the workplace and in our society. And it will make it more difficult for workers to come together to fight claims of gender discrimination," Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement on Monday.

Damn skippy sista woman. It's bullshit and bravado at our expense.  Read her entire statement on The Hill website here.

NYT article shows SCOTUS Justice Thomas has no ethics.

Sunday's NYT had a writeup about the most corrupt of all SCOTUS justices currently sitting on the bench.

Harlan Crow is a name that needs to be remembered as well as his ties to Thomas. He is a major player in all things/causes that are popular w/the rightwing nutter's. From the NYT article:

Clarence Thomas was here promoting his memoir a few years ago when he bumped into Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery that employed Justice Thomas’s mother as a crab picker.

Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery where Justice Clarence Thomas's mother worked, on the site of the old cannery. Mr. Varn said Justice Thomas put him in touch with a buyer to restore the property and build a museum.

Mr. Varn lived at the old cannery site, a collection of crumbling buildings on a salt marsh just down the road from a sign heralding this remote coastal community outside Savannah as Justice Thomas’s birthplace. The justice asked about plans for the property, and Mr. Varn said he hoped it could be preserved.

“And Clarence said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with,’ ” Mr. Varn recalled, adding that he was later told by others not to identify the friend.

The publicity-shy friend turned out to be Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Mr. Crow stepped in to finance the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of the cannery, featuring a museum about the culture and history of Pin Point that has become a pet project of Justice Thomas’s.

The project throws a spotlight on an unusual, and ethically sensitive, friendship that appears to be markedly different from those of other justices on the nation’s highest court.

Thomas and his wife are up to their eyeballs in rightwing causes. Favors always get 'paid back' and to that end, Crow's association not only with Justice Thomas, but his wife, the queen of the rightwing nutters, Virginia Thomas should be challenged. Again from the NYT writeup:

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.(emphasis mine)

There are more instances in the four page article. The light now being shed on the previously unknown cannery site project and Thomas' involvement, just adds more fuel to the fire when it comes to Clarence Thomas' glaring lack of ethics.

Both Justice Thomas and Scalia have close ties to the Koch Brothers. Very close. So close in fact that they both attended a rightwing nutterfest held by the Koch Brothers recently. After that little rightwing love-in, the article states: A month later, more than 100 law professors asked Congress to extend to Supreme Court justices the ethics code that applies to other federal judges, and a bill addressing the issue was introduced.

One glaringly obvious question: Why doesn't the ethics code apply to the highest court in the land? 

It's absolutely fuckwitted that it doesn't. I couldn't believe what I read within the last few months when it comes to SCOTUS and ethics not being connected.

Back to Mr. Crow, one of the big time players in lies and obsfucations against Democratics running for office:

...Among his contributions were $100,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group formed to attack the Vietnam War record of Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate....

That group did a hachet-job on John Kerry. More on Mr. Crow from the NYT writeup:

Mr. Crow has not personally been a party to Supreme Court litigation, but his companies have been involved in federal court cases, including four that went to the appellate level. And he has served on the boards of two conservative organizations involved in filing supporting briefs in cases before the Supreme Court. One of them, the American Enterprise Institute, with Mr. Crow as a trustee, gave Justice Thomas a bust of Lincoln valued at $15,000 and praised his jurisprudence at an awards gala in 2001.

The institute’s Project on Fair Representation later filed briefs in several cases, and in 2006 the project brought a lawsuit challenging federal voting rights laws, a case in which Justice Thomas filed a lone dissent, embracing the project’s arguments. The project director, an institute fellow named Edward Blum, said the institute supported his research but did not finance the brief filings or the Texas suit, which was litigated pro bono by a former clerk of Justice Thomas’s.

How does Justice Thomas keep his feelings in check when ruling on an issue his BFF Crow supports? Since Mr. Crow has given plenty of  'gifts' to Virginia and Clarence Thomas that can in no way be construed as 'cheap' or inexpensive:

There are a number of reasons Justice Thomas might be thankful to Mr. Crow. In addition to giving him the Douglass Bible, valued 10 years ago at $19,000, Mr. Crow has hosted the justice aboard his private jet and his 161-foot yacht, at the exclusive Bohemian Grove retreat in California and at his grand Adirondacks summer estate called Topridge, a 105-acre spread that once belonged to Marjorie Merriweather Post, the cereal heiress.

Christopher Shaw, a folk singer who said he had been invited several times to perform at Topridge, recalled seeing Justice Thomas and his family “on one or two occasions.” They were among about two dozen guests who included other prominent Republicans — last summer, the younger Mr. Bush stopped by.

“There would be guys puffing on cigars,” Mr. Shaw said. “Clarence just kind of melted in with everyone else. We got introduced at dinner. He sat at Harlan’s table.”

Mr. Crow’s $175,000 donation to the library in Savannah in 2001 started out anonymous, but it was eventually made public amid opposition to the project by some local black leaders who did not like Justice Thomas’s politics. Similarly, Mr. Crow sought to keep his role in the museum quiet. 

Kinda makes you go..hmmm..don't it? Well, it makes 100 law professors question his ethics, so why shouldn't the President and the Congress do the same?

Or don't they give a shit about the ethics of the highest court in the land and the rightwing nutters that sit on the bench and rule in favor of The Corporatocracy over the rights of individuals in these United States.

If you wish, please sign the CREDO petition that questions Justice Thomas' ethics here. Already, they have received over 35,000 signatures...just since this morning when they sent out the email.

We know he is a crooked, unethical sumbitch. It's time for him to be publicly outed for his role in favoring rich folks over the other 98% of us.  

The Seth Walsh Project. Its about friggin time.

The ACLU announced the creation of the Seth Walsh Project today. Seth was an 8th grade gay student in Tehachapi, a small town in the mountains east of Bakersfield, that hung himself when the bullying finally got to him. His family alerted the school administrative staff and the school board many times, prior to Seth's suicide, of the obvious and overt bullying by other students,but to no avail.  I wrote about him here, in a post entitled Bullied to Death-Seth Walsh's last words, and included the video at the end of this post.

The ACLU project's goal is to combat bullying of gay students in California schools. From their website:

All students have a right to attend school in a safe learning environment, and their parents have a right to know their children will come home unharmed. But sadly, that is not the reality in California. Far too often, teachers and administrators discount--or worse, ignore entirely--incidents of violence happening right under their noses.

Today, the ACLU of Southern California announced the launch of the Seth Walsh Students' Rights Project -- a major new initiative aimed at combating bullying and discrimination in California schools, particularly harassment directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning students.

Prompted by the September 2010 suicide of Seth Walsh, a 13-year old student at Tehachapi's Jacobsen Middle School who endured years of anti-gay harassment at school, the Project will investigate incidents of harassment and discrimination; educate administrators and teachers of their responsibilities under both state and federal law to make sure all students have a safe learning environment; and work closely with LGBTQ students and their parents to ensure they have the same educational opportunities as their peers.

It's about fucking time. As the ACLU states, schools have an obligation to protect their students from bullying..of any type. They are obligated to provide a safe learning environment.

They failed Seth. The fuckers in charge failed this child miserably and to that end..my hope is that the ACLU will be a beacon in the fight for a safe learning environment for all children in California's schools.

I just wish it was a nationwide project..because we know it happens all over these United States of America, at all levels of education...and it has to stop. NOW. 

Howard Stern's tool Benjy Bronk

Photo of the moron from the Slate article

Bronk is the asshole that kept yelling and  interrupting Anthony Weiner's resignation speech this morning. His lewd and totally fuckwitted outbursts were rude and uncalled for. The presser was held in a senior citizen center with elderly residents in attendance.

I am not someone that gets uptight w/suggestive, vulgar or lewd language, as witnessed by my heavy use of profanity here on my personal blog. What pisses me off is that Rep. Weiner, once again, tried to own his mistakes that have cost him his career and cost progressives a much-needed voice within the House of Representatives, but he was interrupted and screamed at, multiple times, by a loser, who is not a journalist, and has no business being at a presser if he doesn't know how to act like an adult. 

Rep. Weiner could of mailed it in..as in releasing a statement like most elected officials do when they have been caught doing something considered wrong, immoral or criminal.

But he didn't. He took to the stage for one last mea culpa and several times he was drowned out by the idiot that works for Howard Stern. Stern himself is, in my humble yet vocal opinion, a misogynistic bag of shit..but Benjy..well he is merely a rude, ignorant bag of batshit that should keep his stupid ass in the office, as he has no clue how to act in certain situations that require an IQ above that of a dandelion.  

House Progressive Caucus launches national listening tour.

 The mission of the CPC (Congressional Progressive Caucus) with this nationwide event is two-fold. To listen to the public and their needs AND to let them know that as far as the CPC is concerned, Jobs is the number one issue in our nation, and they plan to shift the debate in DC and specifically the House of Rep's to that important national problem and find a resolution for it in this recessive economy that affects all of us in one way or another . From TPMuckraker, the leader of the caucus, AZ Rep Raul Grijalva:

Republicans have pulled off a neat trick since taking over the House back in January -- they've repeatedly attacked President Obama on the languishing job market while shifting government focus away from job creation and toward the deficit and debt.

Now, the House Progressive Caucus is planning to turn the government's attention back toward eliminating unemployment. Starting Wednesday, caucus members will fan out across the country on a summer tour that will attempt to push the focus away from spending reduction and toward using government resources to create jobs.


"The media and the right wing and, of course, some Democrats have been talking about intangibles like the debt ceiling or the job picture," Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) told TPM in an interview previewing the announcement. "We wanted to do a tour that really talks about what matters to people."

This tour will run through the summer and hit 14 cities. The leader of the Caucus doesn't mince words when it comes to taking Obama, the House and Senate to task. Again from the TPM writeup:

To Grijalva and the CPC that means discussing a government that makes "a commitment to the middle class" and pushes for an economic package that focuses on middle and working class people -- "not just the wealthy and not just the CEOs," Grijalva said.

Earlier this year, the CPC put forward their own federal budget proposal that raises taxes on the rich and corporations (as well as ends the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and plows the increased revenues into new education, health care and other middle class-focused domestic spending.

That's the kind of government Americans want, Grijalva said. He faulted the White House and other Democrats for veering away from the kind of solutions the CPC intends to highlight on the tour and driving the national agenda headlong into the Republican-friendly territory of tax decreases and spending cuts.

"I think it comes from being timid," he said. "It really does. Part of job creation, historically how we've gotten the economy back on its feet is that the federal government stepped in and supplemented job creation...and here we're sitting around, still talking about the possibility of job creation in some amorphous way."

Timid..he hit the nail squarely on it's head with that one, although my word for their lack of action is harsher: spineless. The Democratic Party and Obama left their balls in their other suit pants when it comes to pushing their agenda the last two plus years. When they had control of both houses, they got nothing that they wanted for the most part..and spent too much time dickering over Health Care Reform..completely eliminating Universal Healthcare as an option from the get-go.

The stops will feature members of the CPC sitting down with workers to hear about the employment situation and how it can be improved. Some events will be town halls, some will be rallies, some will be hearings and all will be open to the public. The caucus has been planning the tour in secret for months, and say that it could help shift the focus back to job creation and away from the federal bottom line.

Get out there and then get back to DC and fix it..it's a goal we all want, party lines be damned. 

To see if they will be in your vicinity the name of the tour is Speak Out for Good Jobs Now. Their website is here with all the info you need.

Below is Rep Keith Ellison talking to Dylan Ratigan yesterday about the national listening tour. I really admire Keith Ellison, the man isn't afraid of speaking truth to power. 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

That was two hours I will never get back....

Watching the R's that want to sit their asses in the Oval Office last night was an exercise in patience and laughing my brown ass off at their ignorance.

If I had to pick a winner...or loser in this case..it would be..drum roll please...

All of them. Cain sounded stupid..Eye of Newt lied his ass off, Batshit Bachmann was her usual screwed-up self but if I had a buck for every time she mentioned her 23 foster kids and the ones she 'gave birth to' I could fly to Paris for a week.

But Ricky Santorum was his usual dumb as a box of hammers. His IQ rivals that of a dandelion..seriously.

Not one of those fuckwits went into how to fix the economy. None. Nada. Zilch. They were all good at bashing Obama, Social Security and of course Medicare. None gave any indication on how they would create jobs..other than the usual GOP talking points about how tax cuts for the rich creates jobs..

Oh holy fuckamoly..I am stressing out just thinking of this fuckery all over again. MotherJones has a decent read up about the debate that wasnt' really a debate here. Down w/Tyranny has a great piece about the whole idiot bullshit they all bought into about Muslims and how dangerous they are..and how we must get rid of them, refuse to let them work in our nation and all kinds of happy horseshit. He says Joe McCarthy would of loved last nights fuckwits..they made him proud.

Sadly..he is so spot on about that.

40 years ago today. Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, today the fed govt did the same.

PBS is allowing us to watch gratis online, for two days, the documentary entitled, The Most Dangerous Man in America. Ellsberg has written an OpEd  for The Guardian on this historical day, which is titled: Why the Pentagon Papers matter now.

Irony Alert: Today the Federal Government formally declassified and released The Pentagon Papers. From Ellsberg's OpEd:

The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version of the Pentagon Papers – the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of US decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 – comes 40 years after I gave it to 19 newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)

In other words, today's declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That's because we're mired again in wars – especially in Afghanistan – remarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don't have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it's likely to go.

What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). We're not likely to get them; they probably don't yet exist, at least in the useful form of the earlier ones. But the original studies on Vietnam are a surprisingly not-bad substitute, definitely worth learning from. 

The Documentary is an hour and 55 minutes. I suggest watching it if you have the time, it's well worth it, especially if you are too young to remember the Vietnam War and all that went down in what became known as "The Livingroom War". Below is a 20 minute clip of the Documentary, courtesy of PBS. You remember PBS, the R's in Congress want to de-fund that institution.More from Ellsberg's OpEd:

As for Washington, the accounts of recurrent decisions to escalate in the Pentagon Papers read like an extended prequel to Bob Woodward's book last year, Obama's War, on the prolonged internal controversies that preceded the president's decisions to triple the size of our forces in Afghanistan. (Woodward's book, too, is based on top secret leaks. Unfortunately, these came out after the decisions had been made, and without accompanying documentation: which it is still not too late for Woodward or his sources to give to WikiLeaks.)

In accounts of wars 40 years and half a world apart, we read of the same irresponsible, self-serving presidential and congressional objectives in prolonging and escalating an unwinnable conflict: namely, the need not to be charged with weakness by political rivals, or with losing a war that a few feckless or ambitious generals foolishly claim can be won. Putting the policy-making and the field realities together, we see the same prospect of endless, bloody stalemate – unless and until, under public pressure, Congress threatens to cut off the money (as in 1972-73), forcing the executive into a negotiated withdrawal.

To motivate voters and Congress to extricate us from these presidential wars, we need the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East wars right now. Not 40 years in the future. Not after even two or three more years of further commitment to stalemated and unjustifiable wars.

Yet, we're not likely to get these ever within the time frame they're needed. The WikiLeaks' unauthorised disclosures of the last year are the first in 40 years to approach the scale of the Pentagon Papers (and even surpass them in quantity and timeliness). But unfortunately, the courageous source of these secret, field-level reports – Private Bradley Manning is the one accused, though that remains to be proven in court – did not have access to top secret, high-level recommendations, estimates and decisions.  

Watch the 20-min clip at least...Because, for those that do not learn from history they are surely doomed to repeat it.

 

Watch the full episode. See more POV.