Shucks and awe

Turks are such a bunch of assholes. It appears that the hard bargain they struck with the United States is that they would allow the Americans to use their airbase and even would help in the fight against the Islamic State if they were permitted to go after the Kurds in Iraq too. And so they did.

Once again the United States sells out the Kurds. This goes way back. But why does this President have to mess with them at every turn?

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Mike Huckabee engaged in a little hyperbole the other day when he suggested that the President was leading the jews back to the ovens. That got a lot of people hot under the collar including the Obama himself and one Deb Wasserman Schultz, who suggested that he apologize to the jewish people for his overcharged rhetoric. You don't owe me an apology, Mike. He just might be opening up the gates of hell with this agreement, even if it will be ten years down the road. I guess we will all see.

Obama says 99% of the world is down with this deal, I presume that is everybody but Iran's neighbors but I was never too good at math. Our president seems to steer around any potential icky effects this deal might have on Israel and the Gulf States. And now news that nobody is ever going to get to see the newly disclosed side deals, which just might be illegal.

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Obama gave a little lecture to Kenyatta and the Kenyans where he felt the need to once again preach sensitivity towards those fragile souls who might be predisposed to reinstalling the caliphate by any means necessary.

 ...if in reaction to terrorism you are restricting legitimate organizations, reducing the scope of peaceful organization, then that can have the inadvertent effect of actually increasing the pool of recruits for terrorism and resentment in communities that feel marginalized.

You know, it takes a village to raise a terrorist. We're all guilty. He also felt the need to bring up the terrible racial history of the United States.

And as an African-American in the United States, I am painfully aware of the history of what happens when people are treated differently, under the law, and there were all sorts of rationalizations that were provided by the power structure for decades in the United States for segregation and Jim Crow and slavery, and they were wrong.  

Pardon me but I don't get this. You are talking about slavery in Africa, the place that practically has the patent on the practice? Read a little about slavery and africa. Who do you think enslaved many of our African American's ancestors? Why it was a combination of African blacks, Berbers, arabs and the occasional european thrown in. In fact it is still going on today, in Mauritania and the Sudan amongst other places.

African states played a key role in the slave trade. Slavery was a common practice among Africans. There were three types: those who were slaves through conquest, those who were slaves due to unpaid debts or those whose parents gave them as slaves to tribal chiefs. Chieftains would barter their slaves to European buyers for rum, spices, cloth or other goods. Selling captives or prisoners was common practice among Africans and Arabs during that era. However, as the Atlantic slave trade increased its demand, local systems which primarily serviced indentured servitude expanded and started to supply the European slave traders, changing social dynamics. It also ultimately undermined local economies and political stability as villages' vital labor forces were shipped overseas as slave raids and civil wars became commonplace. Crimes which were previously punishable by some other means became punishable by enslavement.

Slavery was quite rampant in West Africa in the 1990's, in the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast.

In 1998, UNICEF reported that Ivorian farmers used enslaved children—many from surrounding countries. A 2000 BBC documentary described child slavery on commercial cocoa farms in Côte d'Ivoire. In 2001, the US State Department estimated there were 15,000 child slaves in cocoa, cotton, and coffee farms in Côte d'Ivoire, and the Chocolate Manufacturers Association acknowledged that child slavery is used in the cocoa harvest.

This week of course, news of slavery in Thailand, many of the slaves enslaved Rohingya, forced to supply the pet food industry. But talking about slavery in Africa is like traveling to Rome to talk about Catholicism.

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Interesting article yesterday about the Republicans new scripted tone on abortion. No more macabre signs of fetuses, they are going to baby-fy the message per the new consultants who don't want another round of that War on Woman thing. I am going to do a matrix on the GOP abortion issue, show you what they think in their own words as soon as I have time.

Don't know where the frontrunner, Trump, is on the issue but all the other guys have lost me, the matter being between a woman and her doctor, as according to her personal beliefs, faith and even lack of same. Nobody else's business. My personal red line.

Abortion opponents hope the videos will provoke people to consider the humanity of the unborn, much like discussing ultrasounds can — albeit in a much more jarring and graphic way. Conway, the Republican pollster, calls this a “shock the conscience, warm the heart” approach.

I respect your sincere feelings. I wish that you would respect mine and stay out of other people's business.

At an abortion clinic protester training at the Texas state capitol last week, anti-choice leaders told their trainees to write down the license plate numbers of abortion-providing doctors and abortion-seeking patients, so that they could track which doctors have admitting privileges at local hospitals and which patients did or did not ultimately choose abortion.
“This way, you can track whether or not a client comes back,” said Karen Garnett, the director of an anti-choice Catholic group in North Texas, in an audio recording made by NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, members of which attended a “Keeping Abortion Facilities Closed” training event held last week.

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Jonathan Pollard has spent nearly thirty years in the slam for giving United States secrets to the Israelis. His term is due to end at the end of the year. Over the last few days several stories have intimated that the United States has been floating the prospect of an early release if the Israelis will play ball on the Iran treaty. If this is true and we have been dangling Pollard in such a way, it is despicable to use somebody like this as a bargaining chip with an ostensible ally. Especially since we know that the United States has been essentially spying on everybody in the world, including all of its supposed allies. (Shocked, I'm shocked that gambling is going on...Your winnings, sir.)