Bits & Pieces #69

 

The President went to Cuba. The opponents of his trip, mostly Batisteros from the Florida Cuban community and Right Wing fanatics, still carry on about the communist threat to our country and love to whine about human rights violations by the Castro’s. These complaints are ludicrous.

If human rights violations kept us from doing business with other countries we wouldn’t be trading with any countries in the world except those in Europe. Can you imagine calling China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, almost any nation in Africa and many in Central or South America on anything like that? So let’s not get all bent out of shape over Cuba?

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Once again George Stephanopoulos proved on national TV what a gutless punk he really is. Conducting a discussion on the Senate’s avoidance of a vote on Obama’s Supreme Court nomination he was faced by the chief turd clogging the Senate drain, in the person of Mitch McConnell. McConnell as he has done from the beginning of this issue babbled on about the upcoming election and the people needing a choice. Not once did George have the stones to ask him the obvious questions or state the obvious point. The people spoke when they elected Obama to a four-year term as president in 2012. Not once did Stephanopoulos ask this nauseating excuse for a human being how he can logically make the statement about a man who beat his brains out in 2012 after McConnell wasted four years of his tenure in the Senate trying to stop him from achieving what he achieved.

McConnell is so wrong on so many points and so completely without logical reasons on which to base his premise that it is unbelievable that even a moral coward like Stephanopoulos couldn’t nail him down to admitting that he has nothing on which to base his refusal to do his job.

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I always thought Jews were, as a general rule, smarter than most. Then I saw an arena full of Jews listening to the biggest load of bullshit I ever heard from a phony con man named Donald Trump, screaming and cheering like a roomful of redneck morons. I’m speaking of course about AIPAC the big Jewish convention.

Now we all know that Trump is a whore but I have never known whores sell themselves so cheaply or so enthusiastically as Trump did at AIPAC. As has been standard procedure in all of his Nazi speeches Trump made nothing but empty promises and baseless statements. He obviously hasn’t read the treaty with Iran, he knows nothing about military capabilities of either Iran or Israel and yet he vomits out volumes of nonsense, punctuated by sticking out his Mussolini chin and pandering to every Israeli backer in the room, even as he denied that he was pandering. It is amazing that a group that has never let go of their hatred for Adolph Hitler would buy the same crap Adolph was selling, from another Nazi hiding behind the American flag.

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Quo Vadis the Kurds? Here we have a group of almost thirty million people who don’t have a country. They live in parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. They are probably the biggest and most organized ethnic group in the world without a country. They have been loyal to us, who knows why, and now it’s time we abandoned Turkey and help these people get a homeland that is all their own.

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Watched Mike Hayden talk about the Apple versus Government fight over the encryption of the phone used by the terrorists who shot up San Bernardino. Hayden is smart enough to see both side of the picture.

First fact; the most serious threat to this country is cyber not bombs or bullets. That is very important to this argument. What the government is saying is that they only want Apple to open this one phone. What Apple is saying is that there is a principal that must be adhered to, which is if they can be forced to open one phone they can be forced to open every phone. Both positions are hardening like grim death.

Of course if Apple voluntarily opened the phone they wouldn’t be bowing to the government’s authority but would be helping it, in a one off action to find out who a couple of dead terrorists were talking to.

There’s also the technical aspects of whether the opening of one phone could somehow lead to outsider’s ability to get into all phones but I am not even close to having the knowledge to get into that discussion. It seems to me, however, that men of intelligence should be able to solve this philosophical dilemma very quickly. Yes, there are aspects of privacy, that are of paramount importance but there is also an aspect of safety that must be considered. No, we shouldn’t open up everything to the spy boy’s. They have already proven that they don’t know how to handle that sort of freedom. Snowden proved that.

The FBI has finally solved the problem by hiring hackers to solve the encryption, thereby making Apple and its hubristic genius babies who had gloried in the knowledge that their secret was inviolate, look like a bunch of rank amateurs.

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The mass of Republican establishment pundits have already given up on beating The Donald and now those who put party above country are willing to sell themselves out to him because he looks like a winner in the primary. Just look at Carly Fiorina or Chris Christie if you don’t believe me.

We all agree that people can change their minds over a period of time as new information surfaces and world events change but Christie has put a new slant on this entire process. One month ago he was ranting about what a clown Trump was and how we didn’t need entertainers in the White House. It seems that Chris has decided that he needs a couple of more laughs in his life, so a week after that statement we have the picture of two fat bullies hugging on the stage like a pair of copulating rhinos and congratulating each other on their new and bizarre partnership. Christie obviously sees the need for a new job when his term as New Jersey’s governor is over. He obviously thinks that if he can stay out of the can over Bridge Gate, maybe he can get to be Trump’s Attorney General.

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American or Republican?

Sure, it’s exactly the kind of question that all the super patriots would go crazy over. After all, the GOP followers have traditionally been the ones who wrapped themselves in the flag and pointed fingers at everyone else but the more one looks at the political scene, the more that question seems a righteous one. There are two parties in this country but only one of them seems more interested in helping the country than advancing its own agenda. The GOP would rather accept a candidate they think would be bad for the country than hand over the leadership of the party to Donald Trump, a man they hate.

All you hear from the Republican politicians is the “Republican Brand”; is this clown or that clown conservative enough and will they hurt the party. They have concentrated on this so much that they have forgotten that their job is to run the country and that the party is just a means to that end. It’s time they understood that being a Republican must take second place to being an American and that if they can’t make that adjustment they should get the hell out politics and do something constructive like run drugs.

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We’ve all listened, ad-nausea to the GOP pundits telling us how Hillary Clinton has put the country in grave danger by the way she used her emails. She has been called lazy, unpatriotic and anything else that the likes of Joe Scarborough can conjure with their limited vocabularies.

Now, in an interview, Michael Hayden former head of the CIA, the NSA and a Republican, explains why Hillary is a better security risk than either Trump or Cruz. He said, that in the narrow alley of security he favors Clinton as the best-prepared candidate to be President. Every time Hayden’s comments come up in a discussion, the GOP pundits jump to another subject. It’s funny how some people just can’t face the truth.

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The Republicans keep screaming for bigger military spending. I say; not until we fire everyone in the Pentagon responsible for procurement. Why do I say this? How about a plane that has cost over eighty billion in 8 years of development and still can’t fly? How about building thousands of tanks for which we have no use; that we drive directly from the factory to the desert to be left there until they rot, just because we aren’t fighting anywhere that tanks are effective, yet we still keep building more? Why do these things happen? They happen because the military/industrial complex spends millions in lobbyists to make them happen.

But these are expenses with no loss except for the money we throw away on them. Now, however, we have the L-3 Communications Company, a corporation of slimy creeps that manufacturers the gun sights on weaponry used by various Special Forces groups. It’s the biggest thing in modern technology and guaranteed to miss its target. It seems that a glitch in the L-3 gun sight prevents it from sighting accurately in any kind of extreme temperature so our guys are in combat and missing the bad guys, thereby leaving them exposed to enemy fire. How many of our boys have been killed because their guns do not shoot straight?

L-3 admits that their sights don’t shoot straight and they have paid a $25.6 million fine but they still keep pushing this defective crap out, and worse the Pentagon keeps accepting it. That’s why this column says, no more military spending until we get someone in the Pentagon who has some idea of what the hell they aredoing, someone who is not on the take from the military suppliers. The first job should be to find out who is buying this junk and put him in the stockade until he rots. The second job should be to prosecute the owners of L-3 Communications and the third job should be to find some one who can make a functional gun sight. Until then, no money for military suppliers.