Have you read Margot Kidder's piece at CounterPunch?
I loved it.
Here's a section:
I just got back from a rather fierce walk beside the Yellowstone River here in Montana, trying to let the mountains in the distance reconnect me to some place of goodness in my soul, but I couldn’t find it. The scenery was as exquisite as ever, but it just couldn’t touch the rage in my heart. The visions of all the dead children in Syria that Hillary Clinton helped to kill; the children bombed to bits in Afghanistan and Pakistan from Obama’s drones, the grisly chaos of Libya, the utter wasteland of Iraq, the death and destruction everywhere caused by American military intervention. The Ukraine, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, you name it — your country has bombed it or destroyed its civilian life in some basic way.
Again, a strong piece of writing. Go read it.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Thursday, July 28, 2016. Chaos and violence continue in Philadelphia as
petty grudges sideline a speaker, the sell out in the convention hall
continues, consultants work overtime to make Hillary prime time ready
tonight ("Shrill Hill" is what Bill's telling her to avoid), in Iraq
Nouri wants back in as prime minister, and much more.
What might a President Hillary Clinton in office look like?
If you're paying attention, you're seeing clues.
Take Ohio state senator Nina Turner. She endorsed Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton.
And Clintons carry two things -- cellulite and grudges.
Which is why Nina Turner is not speaking at the DNC convention as planned.
What might a President Hillary Clinton in office look like?
If you're paying attention, you're seeing clues.
Take Ohio state senator Nina Turner. She endorsed Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton.
And Clintons carry two things -- cellulite and grudges.
Which is why Nina Turner is not speaking at the DNC convention as planned.
- .@NinaTurner who was supposed to speak at convention, was pulled from the lineup by the DNC last minute. #ImWithNina
#SeeYouInPhilly
Want to know why #imwithnina & the #DNC isn't? Listen to her speak. She empowers, leads, & stands tall in the face of adversity. @ninaturner
Green Party US
.@ninaturner is a truth teller. She deserves a revolutionary party that encourages that. We would welcome her.
Kendrick Sampson
One of many #ImwithNina protests at the DNC love you @ninaturner
David Corn (MOTHER JONES) reports:
As the press conference was winding down, Turner showed up. She was immediately mobbed by delegates and reporters. Initially, she only spoke to thank her supporters for their backing and talked about how the Clinton campaign had to demonstrate its willingness to accept more of the progressive agenda. Eventually, security guards appeared to escort her out of the public space in the media tent. As she walked away, she did speak to Mother Jones.
Turner said that prior to Tuesday she had been asked by Sanders to be part of the nominating and seconding speeches for Sanders before the roll-call vote on Tuesday. "I was told it was going to be me and Tulsi," she said, referring to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), another top Sanders supporter. But when she arrived at the convention on Tuesday afternoon, she saw that nobody from the Democratic Party was there to greet her or help her prepare for her appearance. She then heard from Sanders: The Clinton campaign did not want her on the stage.
And Bernie wasn't apparently powerless (or spineless) and unable to demand that she speak.
This is what a Clinton presidency will look like, petty grudges played out on a national stage.
Rania Khalek
The DNC has its reps ripping up signs that support Palestinian rights so ppl can't take them out of the trash. #DemConvention
The DNC has also informed Sanders delegates that they will have their credentials taken away for holding up anti-TPP signage as well
You're silenced, in a Clinton presidency, if she disagrees with your causes or you're rendered invisible if you're on her enemies list.
Unity was what some wanted the theme to be but Hillary settled on petty.
While war criminals dance around her.
Unapologetic
She also starved half a million Iraqi children thru sanctions. Fun fact about Madeline Albright #TheMoreYouKnow
Madeline Albright, war criminal who bragged about murdering 500K+ Iraqi children, now speaking at DNC. #DemsInPhilly
Josh Ruebner
Sorry, Madeline Albright. I don't trust a character witness who thinks it's fine to kill Iraqi children through sanctions. #DemsInPhilly
Remi Kanazi
Madeleine Albright on the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5 by sanctions: "We think the price is worth it" #DemsInPhilly
Aura Bogado
A lot of people don't know her full name, but I think it's Madeleine It's Worth It To Kill 500,000 Iraqi Children Albright #DemConvention
Mad Maddie Albright, one of Hillary's closest pals -- right up there with Henry Kissinger. War Hawks of a feather flock together.
Wednesday night saw US President Barack Obama speak.
Presumed presidential candidate for the Green Party (they hold their convention next month in Houston) Jill Stein Tweeted:
Dr. Jill Stein
I have to agree with President Obama on this. To the millions of Americans disenfranchised by the rigged primaries: don't boo, vote!
Before you tell people to vote for "lesser evil," stop to think. Voting for evil is what got us into this crisis. It won't get us out.
No one is entitled to your vote. Candidates have to earn your vote, & your trust. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
Writer Liza Featherston (author of FALSE CHOICES: THE FAUX FEMINISM OF HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON) already found the best Tweet on Barack's speech:
Christopher Hayes
The President of the United States is literally making the case for democracy over authoritarianism. In 2016.
Chris may see that as an insult to Donald Trump. I'd see it as an insult to this convention and how pathetic the messaging is and how hollow any plan to move forward actually is.
Barack knows a thing or two about authoritarianism after all. He's got the kill list, he carries out The Drone War, he goes after journalists and whistle-blowers. On the last one, CODEPINK's Medea Benjamin ReTweeted:
- "What about the l whistleblowers?" Code pink protestors removed in Obama speech #DemsinPhilly @ltomei @pritheworld
Leo Hornak 
CODEPINK
CODEPINK Disrupts Pres. Obama's #DNCinPHL Speech to Demand Justice for Whistleblowers #DemsInPhilly
Ed is whistle-blower Ed Snowden who exposed the NSA's illegal spying on Americans. Some may remember Shrill Hill Clinton snarling Ed should be in prison for his leaks of classified information. She doesn't say that much these days due to the fact that she's now been exposed -- liars always will be -- of sending at least 3 classified e-mails on her non-protected e-mail server and, of course, there was her fit when they couldn't fax her classified information so she told them to use a regular fax and just strip off the classified warnings. Shrill Hill, what a leader.
Chelsea is whistle-blower Chelsea Manning who served in Iraq and leaked to WikiLeaks and remains in prison for what he did with classified information. Shrill Hill, of course, didn't have to go to prison -- but when your husband can meet with the Attorney General on a plane -- with the FBI telling the press "no photos" -- you don't have to go to prison.
Rules are for regular people, not Shrill Hill.
And Julian Assange is the head of WikiLeaks who brought down Debbie Wasserman Schultz with his e-mail leak. (Wasserman Schultz had been the Chair of the DNC until the e-mails showed that the DNC conspired to bury Bernie Sanders in the primaries while elevating Debbie's gal pal Hillary.)
Poor pathetic Bernie.
Kids, I could have told you.
But, as Carly Simon once sang, "You have to hurt to understand."
And you're hurting now.
But this is the man who held a hearing, a VA hearing, chaired it in fact, the week that the VA's fake lists on time waits were exposed and while the press was reporting on the denial of care and how it may have led to deaths. And how did Bernie start that hearing? Insisting that the topic not be mentioned in his hearing because he wanted to talk about . . . acupuncture.
Bernie the eternal failure.
Only running against Shrill Hill could Bernie ever look like a savior.
WSWS continues their coverage from Philadelphia:
Our reporting team spoke to Kate and Meira, who had driven to Philadelphia from New York to support Sanders and protest the nomination of Hillary Clinton. Kate told us, “Hillary is such a warmonger and it really scares me. The two candidates are loathed by so many people.” Speaking further about Clinton, she said, “I think she’s a puppet, and they’ll get a new puppet. There are a lot of agents and actors, it’s a machine.”
When asked about the leaked emails exposing the DNC, Meira said, “We were saying it all along, and it is outrageous, scandalous and awful. Their apology doesn’t mean anything because they are apologizing and not doing anything. If they meant it they would say, ‘Wow, this was awful, let’s vote again.’ They’re not saying that. They’re saying, pardon my language, ‘We screwed you over, sorry! We’re going to take the results we dictated and run with them.’ We knew that our votes were stolen. We know what happened, and it’s kind of insane.”
Wynn and Heather drove all the way from Iowa. Wynn said that “WikiLeaks basically validates everything we’ve been thinking since the beginning. The things that have been going on are unfair, unjust,” at which point Heather added, “corrupt!”
Let's go to Shrill Hill.
Someone's going to whine, "Sexism!"
Just sit your tired ass down already.
It's not sexism, we've called many men "shrill" (including Eric Alterman).
Second, Shrill Hill is Bill's name for her this week.
As she's working with consultants to come across tonight in her big moment.
Shrill Hill?
She's yelling too much in rehearsals of her speech.
She's being coached repeatedly that the crowd is on her side, she doesn't need to lecture them.
What's the problem?
Her voice.
There's no music to it.
If she were a singer, she'd have one note and that's it.
Have you ever watched someone try to sing who has no range of notes?
They sing the same note over and over but they do it louder and softer thinking that makes a difference.
With her flat voice, with no vocal range, all Hillary knows to do is to get louder or softer.
And all the coaches they've brought in have not been able to fix that yet -- the speech is still hours away, a miracle could happen.
("mining many mines . . . mining many mines . . . mining many mines," by jove, she still doesn't have it!)
But for now she's being told she's coming off "shrill" and Bill's telling her to lose "Shrill Hill" before the speech.
We shall see if that's possible.
Bernie tried to herd his supporters over to Hillary this week as the presidential nominee for the Socialist Equality Party Jerry White (WSWS) observes:
Confronting skeptical supporters among his own delegates—including many who had booed him earlier in the day for calling for a vote for Clinton—Sanders tried to argue that his “political revolution” had pushed the Democratic Party and Clinton herself to the left. Later Sanders worked the convention floor with DNC officials—who had waged a dirty tricks campaign against him—to whip his delegates into line before Tuesday, when he moved for the nomination of Clinton by acclamation.
In a convention speech laden with demagogy, Sanders deliberately concealed the actual record of the Democratic Party. He said nothing about the criminal wars conducted by Obama and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, which have destroyed Iraq, Libya, Syria and other countries.
While claiming the Democrats have adopted the “most progressive platform in history,” Sanders avoided any mention of the platform’s insistence that the US “continue to have the strongest military in the world” or its criticisms of Trump from the right for failing to confront “Russian aggression.” The platform marries the Democrats’ identity politics with imperialist aggression, declaring that the US will militarily intervene anywhere in the world to protect “the rights and opportunities of women and girls” (left unsaid, of course, is that this excludes US allies).
Instead, Sanders focused on the questions of social inequality that had won him widespread support. The election, he said, was about “ending the 40-year decline of our middle class” and the “grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that we currently experience, the worst it has been since 1928. It is not moral, not acceptable and not sustainable that the top one-tenth of 1 percent now own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, or that the top 1 percent in recent years has earned 85 percent of all new income. That is unacceptable. That must change.”
Sanders skipped over the fact that in these “recent years” it is the Obama administration that has been in power. Obama’s pro-corporate policies—from the Wall Street bailout and “quantitative easing,” to the halving of autoworkers’ wages and the shifting of health care costs onto the backs of workers under Obamacare—have resulted in the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in US history.
Instead, Sanders thanked “President Obama and Vice President Biden for their leadership in pulling us out of that terrible recession,” which Sanders said was the product of “eight years of Republican trickle-down economics.”
The rest of his comments consisted of sycophantic praise for Clinton, who according to Sanders “understands” that no one working 40 hours a week should be living in poverty; that “we must raise the minimum wage to a living wage” and that “we have to invest in education and jobs for our young people, not more jails or incarceration.”
In fact, the Clintons have championed the destruction of the federal welfare program, law-and-order measures that have filled the jails and encouraged police killings, and embraced “school reform,” which has been used to destroy public education and promote for-profit charter businesses.
While Sanders sought to paint the Democratic Party as the “inclusive” pillar of opposition to the neo-fascistic Trump, the truth is that the billionaire demagogue is exploiting the political disaffection generated by the anti-working class policies of the Democrats. The fixation on race, gender and other identity politics by the self-satisfied upper middle class base of the Democratic Party, and their insulting claims that things are “pretty darn good” (Obama), have created the conditions for the rise of Trump.
William Rivers Pitt (TRUTHOUT) offers his reflections after viewing the convention on TV, "However, when it was over, I realized something. I don't like Hillary Clinton or her husband. She does not have my vote. I voted for Bill twice, and he went on to sign NAFTA, GATT, the Telecommunications Act and the Defense of Marriage Act into law. That's on my conscience. I voted for John Kerry, who voted for the Iraq War, because I believed a second Bush term was intolerable, and that vote is on my conscience. I voted for Obama, his drones, his fracking enthusiasm, his TPP and his Keystone pipeline, and all that is on my conscience as well. Not this time. I intend to sleep at night come November."
Also weighing in is Richard Moser (COUNTERPUNCH), "The corporate elites and the Clinton machine have no idea how deep the divisions go. Trump not Clinton will most likely be the beneficiary of the election fraud, voter suppression and discontent. The DNC has made a historic blunder and it’s not going to be pretty either way. Fighting Fascism with the corporate power seems a doomed project since it is precisely the merger of the corporation and government that sets the conditions for the rise of fascism. That is the historical moment we are in and paradox we face."
And Bernie wasn't the only one trying to herd people over to Hillary. Glen Ford (BLACK AGENDA REPORT) calls out my friend Ben Jealous (and, Ben, you deserved it):
Jealous got to the convention as one of Bernie Sanders’ high profile Black supporters, a position he took to ensure that the Black Misleadership Class was represented everywhere within the Democratic Party – including its insurgent wing. The NAACP, which Jealous led for four years, is a virtual annex of the Democratic Party. But, since Jealous was no longer president of the organization, it was safe for him to temporarily join the Sanders camp, with confidence that Bernie would at some point capitulate, and they could all be welcomed back into the bosom of corporate power, personified by Hillary Clinton.
You could see the utter joy in Jealous’ face, like he was coming in from the cold. One of his next stops was the studios of Democracy Now! where he flaunted his utter subservience to the Democratic Party in a debate with the Green Party’s presumed presidential candidate, Jill Stein. Jealous sneered at the very idea of challenging the Democrats at the presidential level. “We cannot afford to end up with having an Iraq War because we narrowly lose the White House...as we did with Bush,” said Jealous, repeating the old canard that Ralph Nader threw the 2000 election to the Republicans, and ignoring the fact that Hillary Clinton supported Bush’s war in Iraq – and that Clinton and Barack Obama have since set the whole of the Middle East and much of Africa on fire. Jealous said his mission is to keep the “madman” and “neo-fascist” Donald Trump, out of the White House, to which Jill Stein replied: “Hillary Clinton’s finger on the button is as dangerous as Donald Trump. And it’s Barack Obama himself who initiated the new nuclear arms race, spending a trillion dollars.”
Gary Johnson is the presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party and he's Tweeted:
Gov. Gary Johnson 
Melissa Joan Hart
I wanna hear more from @govgaryjohnson and see if he might be my horse in this race. Let's help… https://www.instagram.com/p/BIYqkaBBGQf/
Honored to be winning more and more votes from all kinds of Americans
Gov. Bill Weld 
Something wicked this way comes.
No, not Hillary.
Nouri al-Maliki.
Forever thug and former prime minister of Iraq, he's responsible for the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq due to his persecution of the Sunni people.
When we speak and go over this -- with hand outs -- to various groups, they often ask why this isn't discussed in the press?
It's begun to be.
Part of the reason is the US press covered it up -- to benefit the White House.
Another reason is Americans haven't yet taken responsibility for our part in the Iraq War which goes way beyond the start of it.
Admitting that the Iraqi people rejected Nouri in 2010 but he remained prime minister due to a US-brokered contract (The Erbil Agreement) forces a number of people to admit just how much the US messed up Iraq.
And no one's rushing to take ownership -- which is why an ongoing war is still blamed -- in the US -- pretty much solely on Bully Boy Bush -- who left the White House in January 2009 to make way for the candidate elected on the promise to end the Iraq War in 16 months.
Barack finally had to face that Nouri could not remain prime minister so, in the summer of 2014, after Mosul had been seized by the Islamic State, Nouri was finally forced out as prime minister.
And Nouri wants back in.
Nouri's been all over the KRG recently. Histyar Qidard (NIQASH) reports:
He apparently came to the semi-autonomous northern region of Iraqi Kurdistan to “bless” the new union of two of the major political parties there. However, the visit by former Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, may well cause more trouble than blessings.
The former Prime Minister, who is regularly blamed for a lot of Iraq’s current troubles, visited Sulaymaniyah, the area in Iraqi Kurdistan where the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Goran, or Change, movement are based, on July 18.
In mid-May the PUK and the Change movement issued a statement saying they had signed an agreement that would see them unite their two blocs in the Iraqi Kurdish Parliament.
Given the current constitutional crisis in Iraqi Kurdistan that has seen splits deepen between the two major political parties in the region and all parliamentary business suspended, the new union looked likely to make the PUK and the Change movement stronger. It seemed that al-Maliki also saw some advantages in this. The PUK and the Change movement also have seats in the Iraqi Parliament in Baghdad. If al-Maliki could woo them, it would give him more leverage in Baghdad and possibly the parliamentary majority he has publicly been wishing for.
Although the current Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, is also a member of al-Maliki’s Dawa political party, the two men are often opposed; many believe that al-Maliki wants the job back, or at least, the sanctioned power that comes with it.
Nouri back in power is a possibility.
How would Hillary respond?\
On the plus side, she publicly called him a thug.
That was in April of 2008.
And yet she played footsie with him as Secretary of State.
And if that meant leaving Iraqi women stranded, too damn bad for them apparently.
Because Hillary is not a feminist.
She's a woman who wants to do what she wants to do and she confuses that with feminism.
Feminism is about equality.
For Hillary it's all about her and her advances.
Shrill Hill, tonight? Will she show up or will the consultants have fixed the problem? Tune in to see. (And she's the only person I've ever heard of who gets more nasal when she's forced to do exercises to open up the resonators.)
Iraq
