SICKOFITRADLZ: Lil Nas X

NPR did a long profile on Lil Nas X and here's an excerpt:

MADDEN: Ooh, you got to hydrate. After all those outfit changes last night...

SHAPIRO: Last night meaning the Met Gala. Lil Nas X broke the internet with three different regal outfits on the red carpet - an ornate beaded cape, a suit of golden armor and a glittery, slinky bodysuit. The morning after all that, Lil Nas X joined NPR's Sidney Madden to talk about his debut album and how his approach to music is changing.

MADDEN: So you've gone back to the drawing board a lot. What's one song on the album that we can hear that metamorphosis?

LIL NAS X: I feel like all of them, but especially "Lost In The Citadel." I went back and wrote that, like, a million times, I guess 'cause the situation kept changing.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOST IN THE CITADEL")

LIL NAS X: (Singing) Tell me, are you feeling down? Are you happy? Do your dreams still seem inbound?

"Lost In The Citadel" is about this relationship that I kept going back to and, like, expecting, like, a different outcome when it was going to be the same situation over and over again. And it's called "Lost In The Citadel" because it's like you're in this place that you can't really get out of. You know, it's like a maze.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOST IN THE CITADEL")

LIL NAS X: (Singing) I need time to realize that I can't be yours. I need time to give up just like before. I love it how you know I'll only come right back for more.

MADDEN: You have so much exuberant confidence, but it's clear that you analyze your own output and your own creative process a lot. And I really like - I like the song "Dead Right Now."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEAD RIGHT NOW")

LIL NAS X: (Singing) Even though I'm right here by the phone, dawg (ph), you know you never used to call. Keep it that way now. I'll treat you like you dead right now.

Actually, for "Dead Right Now," as soon as I moved into my new house, I spent the entire day just kind of writing. And it was kind of hard because I'm still getting used to, like, writing personal stuff in songs and being open to people about my private life. But, you know, I really just want to be honest with fans, remind people that I am a human being and that we all have the same situations in different forms, you know?

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEAD RIGHT NOW")

LIL NAS X: (Singing) 2018, I was in my sister's house the whole summer. Songs wasn't doing numbers. Whole life was going under. Left school, then my dad and I...

MADDEN: And what allowed you to be more personal?

LIL NAS X: I thought about the people who I look up to the most, like, say, Kanye or Drake or Nicki. What really connects is when they're saying the things that are happening internally. So they're letting you, like, get a peek into their life and just humanize them more because people a lot of times see celebrities or anybody famous as just a being existing.

MADDEN: Not a real person.

LIL NAS X: Yeah.

MADDEN: Do you ever feel like you've been put in a box so far in your career?

LIL NAS X: Yeah, and I feel like it's going to happen over and over and over again. We unintentionally say people are exactly our first thoughts of them. Whatever I'm saying right now I may not agree with in a year from now, you know? Or things I'm doing right now, I may say, oh, maybe I should have did that differently because, you know, we change as people over and over and over again.

And here he is doing a cover of Dolly Parton's "Jolene."

Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"

Friday, September 24, 2021. No, the White House did not censor a transcript. And other topics.

Yesterday, at the White House press briefing, a reporter shouted a question at Jen Psaki as she was leaving the podium. An e-mail to the public account maintains that the official White House transcript is censored. No, it's not. She had concluded the press conference. She was still in the briefing room and walking away from the podium. I'm not trying to cover for her, I'm just trying to honestly note what happened.

Stream the video below, you can just go to 44:12, actually.

If the White House had censored the transcript, that would have been huge news. That's not what happened.

Jen Psaki has concluded the press conference and said thank you. She is picking up her briefing items when one man shouts something and a female reporter is overlapping with

"Question on Hunter Biden if" and by "if" she's already headed towards the door. The press briefing is over. She has said "thank you" and began her exit. Had she turned around and come back to the podium, the remarks would need to be part of the official transcript. But she doesn't.

The transcript isn't censored. If it were, I'd be noting it here. If it were I'd be horrified at what an administration had been done but, honestly, I'd be happy on one level because that would be news and it would force the outlets ignoring the story to actually cover it.

But that's not what happened. If you're being told it is what happened -- the e-mailer claimed he saw the report on FOX NEWS (which is why I have used FOX NEWS' broadcast of the press conference, by the way, so no one can claim that the briefing was edited by the White House) -- then you are being lied to at worst. At best? Someone unfamiliar with the procedures has made a faulty call and is repeating it without realizing that.

It's perfectly fine to say Jen walked away. The look on her face indicates she's not thrilled by what's being stated. I don't think it's fair to say she walked away from the question because she's walking away and has her back to the room before the "if" is spoken.

But, no, the White House did not censor the transcript.

I don't know who the woman trying to ask at the end is. I do wonder why she waited until then to attempt to ask a question? I would've interrupted many times before including during the ending nonsense about drive time and blah blah blah restrictions. I would've said something like, "Yeah, Jen, you've covered that and you've already told us you have nothing new so what about the revelations that Hunter Biden's laptop has now been confirmed and what about your Tweet back in October insisting that the whole thing was a lie and a smear and" blah blah blah.

And that's how I would've asked it.

Which is the other thing people aren't getting.

I'm going to mention Jill Biden. I know Jill and I try to make this an off limits space because Jill's always been kind to me and I like Jill. When she started defending Hunter -- she did it once -- after the election, I immediately called that out here and her by name. I stated she has every right to say, "Hunter's my son" (she raised him -- do not e-mail the public account telling me she's not his mother, I don't care for your attitude on that, that's a whole issue of stereotypes and nonsense re: Mom is only the birth mom b.s. that I thought we were beyond), she was perfectly in her rights to say "I love him" and either "I hope it's not true" but that was really it. Anything further needed her redirecting the question along the lines of, "What I can tell you about is . . ." and then sharing some memory.

I commented that's how she had to respond and if she did anything else she was opening the door to any type of question on Hunter and on the criminal investigation. She can't open the door a little and then slam it shut.

But, as we noted then, it's even more restrictive on Joe Biden. Joe's not allowed to speak if asked this question. He can say, "I love my son." He probably should say that. But he needs to immediately follow that with, "As the head of the executive branch, I can't comment on an ongoing criminal investigation." And he can't. It would be an ethical lapse and an abuse of his position and his power.

So if I wanted something from Jen, I would frame it around her Tweet last October.

Just asking her about the laptop is most likely going to result in, "I cannot comment on an ongoing criminal investigation that the FBI is conducting." That's accurate. But she can be asked about her Tweet. That's not part of the criminal investigation. That goes to her own judgment -- and if she's the White House spokesperson, questions about her judgment come with the territory.

She might blow off the question, she might try humor (something riffing on, ten months after I make a statement, I -- like most people -- know a little more than I did ten months before), she might try to stick to "I can't comment on an ongoing investigation."

It would be a mistake to fall back on that last one if she's being asked about her Tweet. Her Tweet goes to judgment, not to the investigation.

It would be great if the press could function. That does mean asking Jen about the new revelations regarding the laptop. And asking her about it? That means doing so during the press conference. That briefing lasted over 40 minutes. Stream the whole thing and realize how many times she's not answering a question despite speaking on and on. (That's not slamming her, that's the role of the spokesperson.) There were many times when someone could have jumped in and asked that question. They didn't need to be called upon. Just say, "Yeah, Jen, you've covered that, now about Hunter Biden's laptop --" And then you have a question asked during the briefing and on the record.

That's not what happened.

If it were, we'd be blasting the White House right now. We'd be asking who okayed the altering of the transcript.

If you're being told that happened, it's not what happened, that's not what happened.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the latest with Tucker Carlson below.

Just to recap, October 14, 2020, .THE NEW YORK POST, published a report by Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge:

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to e-mails obtained by The Post.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the e-mail reads.

An earlier e-mail from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the store’s owner.

Other material extracted from the computer includes a raunchy, 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who’s admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.

The press ignored the contents, Facebook and Twitter censored THE POST. If you go back to the way we covered it in October and November of last year, you'll note we refuted the claim of "hacking" over and over. And we did that because that was one of the lies being used. "We're not censoring the story, we just don't report the contents of something when it was hacked." First off, lie. Second of, it wasn't hacked nor was the laptop stolen. If I take one of my guitars in to be restrung (which I honestly do from time to time, I hate putting on new strings myself) and I don't pick it up, it's not my guitar. It's not someone's job to hold onto my guitar for six months or more. They have limited space and if I haven't paid for the work done, it's no longer mine. Hunter left his laptop to be repaired. He never paid the bill and he never picked it up. At that point, the computer repair shop owned the laptop. They were not 'hackers.' They were not thieves.

Those are basic facts and it felt like we were having to repeat that over and over here back then.

Glenn's compiled a video report of what the media did in terms of censoring the story.

He's also covered that terrain in text form:

A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.

But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation's oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden's son Hunter at a repair shop.

From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post's archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter's own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden's profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine before risking one's career and reputation by reporting them, it was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.

Despite all that, former intelligence officials such as Obama's CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was "Russian disinformation.” Note that this phrase contains two separate assertions: 1) the documents came from Russia and 2) they are fake ("disinformation"). The intelligence officials admitted in this letter that — in their words — “we do not know if the emails are genuine or not,” and also admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

The new discussion taking place (by some, many in the media remain silent) resulted from Ben Schreckinger's new book THE BIDEN'S: INSIDE THE FIRST FAMILY'S FIFTY YEAR RISE TO POWER. He discussed the book with Krystal and Saagar on BREAKING POINTS below.

Hunter Biden boasted of having "access to the highest level” in China, according to emails of his business contacts published on Thursday.

The alleged claim by President Joe Biden's adult son was discussed in a Jan. 28, 2015, email obtained by Business Insider from Democratic donor Sam Jauhari to Saudi business tycoon Sheikh Mohammed al-Rahbani, as the men tried to put together a plan to free Libya’s many billions in frozen funds.

[ADDED 9/24/21 11:34 PST, since this morning when this originally posted, Jonathan Turley has weighed in. Please read his analysis.]

Moving over to Iraq . . .

A piece of the ancient Gilgamesh tablet has been returned to Iraq.

It's interesting to read the coverage. Even just the headlines are revealing. Tori B. Powell offers a straight forward report at CBS NEWS which notes it's the Justice Dept doing the return. Joseph Wilkinson (NEW YORK DAILY NEWS) is also worth noting:

The tablet likely would have remained in the U.S. had the Hobby Lobby-owning Green family not put it in their Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. It caught someone’s eye while on display, and the feds began investigating. Authorities seized the tablet in 2019.

Meanwhile Dilan Sirwan (RUDAW) reports:

Iraq’s electoral commission aims to announce the results of the upcoming parliamentary elections on October 10 within 24 hours, they announced on Thursday following a voting simulation.

“The commission has committed itself to announce the results of the elections within 24 hours,” the head of the electoral commission Jalil Adnan Khalaf said at a press conference. “Yesterday's simulations were to ensure that.”

24 hours later? As opposed to the usual week or so? That would be something if it happened.

The early elections are only taking place because of the brave protesters. The October Revolution kicked off protests in the fall of 2019 and forced the prime minister to step down and early elections to be announced. As ARAB WEEKLY notes, "Tens of thousands of Iraqi youths took to the streets to decry rampant corruption, poor services and unemployment. Hundreds died as security forces used live ammunition and tear gas to disperse crowds." This is what forced the resignation of one prime minister and has led to national elections which are supposed to take place October 10th. (Members of the Iraqi military will vote October 8th. Two election simulations have been carried out by the IEC and the third and final one will take place September 22nd.) Charlotte Bruneau (REUTERS) notes that the candidates for Parliament include 951 women ("close to 30% of the total number of candidates") who are running for the 329 seats. Halgurd Sherwani (KURDISTAN 24) has reported Jeanine Hannis-Plasschaert, the Special Representiative in Iraq to the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, declared that Iraq's "Female candidates face increasing levels of hate speech, violence, and blackmail intended to force them to withdraw their candidacy."

Sinan Mahmoud (THE NATIONAL) counts 3,249 people in all seeking seats in Parliament BROOKINGS notes this is a huge drop from 2018 when 7,178 candidates ran for office. RUDAW is among those noting perceived voter apathy, "Turnout for Iraq’s October 10 parliamentary election is expected to be a record low, with a recent poll predicting just 29 percent of eligible voters will cast ballots." Human Rights Watch has identified another factor which may impact voter turnout, "People with disabilities in Iraq are facing significant obstacles to participating in upcoming parliamentary elections on October 10, 2021, due to discriminatory legislation and inaccessible polling places, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Without urgent changes, hundreds of thousands of people may not be able to vote. The 36-page report, “‘No One Represents Us’: Lack of Access to Political Participation for People with Disabilities in Iraq,” documents that Iraqi authorities have failed to secure electoral rights for Iraqis with disabilities. People with disabilities are often effectively denied their right to vote due to discriminatory legislation and inaccessible polling places and significant legislative and political obstacles to running for office." Another obstacle is getting the word out on a campaign. Political posters are being torn down throughout Iraq. Halgurd Sherwani (KURDiSTAN 24) observes, "Under Article 35 of the election law, anyone caught ripping apart or vandalizing an electoral candidate's billboard could be punished with imprisonment for at least a month but no longer than a year, Joumana Ghalad, the spokesperson for the Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), told a press conference on Wednesday." And there's also the battles in getting out word of your campaign online. THE NEW ARAB reported weeks ago, "Facebook is restricting advertisements for Iraqi political parties and candidates in the run-up to the country's parliamentary elections, an official has told The New Arab's Arabic-language sister site."

THE WASHINGTON POST's Louisa Loveluck Tweeted: of how "chromic mistrust in [the] country's political class" might also lower voter turnout. Mina Aldroubi (THE NATIONAL) also notes, "Experts are predicting low turnout in October due to distrust of the country’s electoral system and believe that it will not deliver the much needed changes they were promised since 2003." Mistrust would describe the feelings of some members of The October Revolution. Mustafa Saadoun (AL-MONITOR) notes some of their leaders, at the recent Opposition Forces Gathering conference announced their intent to boycott the elections because they "lack integrity, fairness and equal opportunities." Distrust is all around. Halkawt Aziz (RUDAW) reported on how, " In Sadr City, people are disheartened after nearly two decades of empty promises from politicians."

After the election, there will be a scramble for who has dibs on the post of prime minister. Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has 90 candidates in his bloc running for seats in the Parliament and one of those, Hassan Faleh, has insisted to RUDAW, "The position of the next prime minister is the least that the Sadrist movement deserves, and we are certain that we will be the largest and strongest coalition in the next stage." Others are also claiming the post should go to their bloc such as the al-Fatah Alliance -- the political wing of the Badr Organization (sometimes considered a militia, sometimes considered a terrorist group). ARAB WEEKLY reported, "Al-Fateh Alliance parliament member Naim Al-Aboudi said that Hadi al-Amiri is a frontrunner to head the next government, a position that can only be held by a Shia, according to Iraq’s power-sharing agreement." Some also insist the prime minister should be the head of the State of Law bloc, two-time prime minister and forever thug Nouri al-Maliki. Moqtada al-Sadr's supporters do not agree and have the feeling/consensus that, "Nouri al-Maliki has reached the age of political menopause and we do not consider him to be our rival because he has lost the luster that he once had so it is time for him to retire."

The following sites updated: