Week in Review: U.S. Troops in Iraq Home by Holidays, Cain Declares Homosexuality a Choice, American Cities Face Bankruptcy
President Obama announces U.S. troops in Iraq will be home by the holidays, Herman Cain declares homosexuality is a choice, Qaddafi dies, last moments captured in a riveting & revolting video, Europe struggles to staunch economic bleeding while American cities seek bankruptcy relief.
International
Obama Announces U.S. Troops in Iraq will be Home by the Holidays                                                                                     
President Barack Obama announced Friday that he was ordering all American soldiers currently stationed in Iraq to return to the U.S by the Christmas holidays. The Iraq War has been fought for nearly 9 years, the second longest war in American history that resulted in 4,400 U.S. deaths and 103,000 to 112,000 civilian fatalities, according to Iraq Body Count. Obama’s decision, which he called a “promise kept” was made much easier to deliver as the Iraqi government refused to extend immunity to American soldiers, a non-starter for the Administration. A contingent of military trainers could be in the offing, however.
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 Qaddafi Captured Alive, Likely Executed by Libyan Rebels in the Sands of Surt
Reports that Muammar Qaddafi had been shot and was injured began breaking around 8:15 a.m. EST on Thursday morning. During the next 20 minutes, media reports indicated that Qaddafi had been captured and was perhaps mortally wounded. A photo taken via a mobile phone began moving on the wires, depicting a ghostly looking and bloodied Qaddafi, surrounded by raucous Libyan rebels. By 9 a.m. Reuters and BBC were reporting Qaddafi was dead. The Qadaffi “dead’ video was initially broadcast by Al-Jazzera, to the consternation of some media critics. But this writer believes the American media, in particular, has gone to such lengths to not offend Americans, that  it has in effect wrongly sanitized the depravity of war. Perhaps it was the right time to show war’s dehumanization. This video portrayed, perhaps, the last minutes of Qaddafi’s life and reflects the deep well of pent-up rage, unleashed in retribution upon him by those who suffered beyond any measure, during his 42-years of despotic rule.
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NATO Announces the End of the Libyan War on Facebook
After Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril of Libya’s National Transitional Council confirmed Qaddafi’s capture, who Jibril later said was killed in a cross fire, NATO wasted no time in announcing it would be winding down its air campaign effort, by the end of October, including an announcement to recommend its end, by Admiral James Stavridis, its chief military officer on Facebook, arguably a first in world history.
Doubts About Account of Qaddafi’s death; UN Human Rights Chief Calls for Investigation
Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights announced on Friday that its special committee on Libya would investigate the circumstances of Qaddafi’s death due to conflicting reports on how he died. The video, which he called “disturbing” showed Qaddafi alive and in the custody of Libyan rebels, who were roughly pushing him around. Libyan NTC member Waheed Burshan, echoed UN doubts over the exact circumstances of Qaddafi’s death and supported an investigation, raising questions over earlier claims by Prime Minister Jibril, that the deposed leader had been killed in crossfire.
UN Human Rights Special Rapporteur Denounces Use of Unmanned Drones and Targeted Killings
As the Libyan war reached its final moments on Thursday, Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extra Judicial Killings, made veiled allegations against the United States for its stepped up use of unmanned drone aircraft, in Pakistan and Libya (indeed Spencer Ackerman, aka “Attackerman,” reported that the Pentagon dropped bombs on Qaddafi’s convoy on Thursday, before he was killed.) In his presentation on targeted killings to the General Assembly, Heyns said the “current use of drones and raids into countries where there is not a recognized armed conflict to kill an opponent, as in Pakistan or Yemen, is highly problematic…The use of such methods by some States to eliminate opponents in countries around the world raises the question why other States should not engage in the same practices. The danger is one of a global war without borders, in which no one is safe.” Drones have been used by the U.S. in Yemen as well, which targeted and executed Anwar Al-wlaqi and Osama Bin Laden was executed by a U.S. Navy Seal Team in Pakistan. These tactics have been defended by Attorney General Eric Holder and Harold Koh, the State Department’s Legal Advisor. His full statement can be read here.
U.S. Deploys 100 Special Forces Troops to Uganda to Confront Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army
While Uganda is currently known for its pursuit to legally execute known homosexuals, it’s long history of violence, perhaps unknown to many Americans, is epitomized by the banal, destructive actions of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) against children in Northern Uganda. The LRA originated in Uganda in 1987 as an armed resistance to the government, but has since become a violent ridden militia that operates not only in Northern Uganda, but also in South Sudan. The Christian and animist African theologically based militant group  has terrorized Uganda’s neighbors, including the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kony has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. This past week, President Obama ordered 100 Special Forces into Uganda to assist the government in confronting Kony and his thugs, an action that many human rights advocates and groups are quietly applauding.
Eurozone Crisis Continues, Leaders Fail to Achieve Self Imposed Deadline Today
European leaders met in Brussels today, marking its 13th summit in 21 months about the European sovereign debt crisis due to Greece’s fiscal insolvency that began in 2009, claiming they moved forward on addressing the crisis, yet deciding not to tap funds from the European Central Bank, ultimately to aid in the bailout of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain (known as the PIIGS), preventing a global economic calamity.  The meeting has generated new pressure on Italy’s Prime Minister Silvia Berlusconi to cut debt, enabling Italy to receive bailout funds. The bailout fund is expected to reach 1.2 to 1.4 trillion Euros, according to Irene Finel-Honigman, a financial expert and faculty member at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.
National
Republican Presidential Contest Low lights: Herman Cain’s Declares Homosexuality is a Choice –Dan Savage Challenges Cain: “Prove it!â€
This writer has stubbornly resisted reporting on the Republican presidential contest, but could not resist this week when Herman Cain announced his intolerance and bigotry toward LGBT Americans during an appearance on CNN’s Piers Morgan, when he declared that homosexuals choose to  be gay and thus can revert to being heterosexuals, just like changing one’s clothing.  He retorted by stating his race as proof of bona fide minority status: “I was born Black… this doesn’t wash off” during his offensive remarks. The New Civil Rights Movement forum reported it all, including Dan Savage’s public challenge to Cain in a letter demanding he prove it. Thus far, no response from Cain. Perhaps GetEQUAL may take up the task of following Cain around on the campaign trail?
Republican Party Finalizes Early Primary Caucus Dates
The Republican Party’s primary and caucus schedule that has been expected to begin in January 2012 had been, until recently up-in-the-air, until Nevada finally conceded the first Republican  primary date back to New Hampshire by announcing it would hold its primary on Feb. 4. New Hampshire will remain the first primary in the nation when the Granite State voters go to the election polls on January 10. Iowa Caucuses are scheduled for January 4, the first ones in the country. South Carolina will be the second primary on January 21. Florida’s primary’s date was recently set for January 31, defying Republican Party rules.
Michelle Bachmann’s New Hampshire Staff Quits on Friday
Michelle Bachmann’s New Hampshire staff quit in a unified walk-off, including the state director on Friday, although Bachmann feigned ignorance of their departure. Reports from Politico.com indicate that they had not been paid in a month. The Bachmann Southern New Hampshire director Caroline Gigler, jumped to Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign, according to a report in the National Journal. Bachmann had difficulty explaining the disarray in her campaign from the stump in Iowa today.
Rhode Island Going Bankrupt, while other U.S. Cities Struggle with Insolvency                                                                                                    
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During the past year, three U.S. cities have become increasingly insolvent, due to short falls in their budgets as tax revenues have dramatically dropped due to long-term unemployment. In late August, Central Falls, Rhode Island applied for bankruptcy and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, joined them last week, as both cities have been unable to cover payroll and pension costs for retirees.
Rhode Island is facing a steep downturn in tax revenues, saddled by 10.5 percent unemployment, and perhaps poor management, it is now challenged to cover a  $14.8 billion pension system that demands payment of ten cents from every state tax dollar to cover the outlay of pension checks.
Hamtramck, Michigan asked for permission to apply for bankruptcy in November 2010, when it had a cash short-fall and would not be able to cover the salaries of its 155 employees. But the Michigan State Treasury department forbid it to file, despite its serious cash short fall. It has continued to struggle since then, finally applying for a $2.5 million loan from the state that can cover its expenses through June 2012.
Just last week, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the state capital, filed for bankruptcy, which follows Central Falls, Rhode Island, who became the first city in the United States to apply for bankruptcy in August 2011, due to pension outlays that the city decided it just could not cover.   However, Harrisburg’s mayor, the state’s governor and a state senator, declared the capital city’s action illegal and unlawful. Nonetheless, the city attorney filed papers in federal court. Harrisburg has turned to the State of Pennsylvania for relief several times in the past year, including a $4.3 million bailout.
Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University who teaches about human rights in Eurasia and is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi worked internationally for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.
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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.
“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”
“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”
NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).
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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.
38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”
“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”
62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”
NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”
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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”
Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.
“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.
But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”
A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.
Watch the video below or at this link.
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News
Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won
Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.
In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”
“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.
The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”
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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.
In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.
“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”
Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.
“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”
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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”
“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”
He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.
Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.
After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”
“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.
“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter
One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.
Watch the video above or at this link.
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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.
“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”
“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”
Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”
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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”
“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”
Biden on campus protests: “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. The people are heard. In fact, peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to controversial issues. But neither are we a lawless country.” pic.twitter.com/1HYLVmbN2D
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 2, 2024
America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”
“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”
“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”
Biden: Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It is against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, none of this is a peaceful protest. pic.twitter.com/0Nkttggsy4
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 2, 2024
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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”
“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”
The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.
Watch the videos above or at this link.
Noem Insists 14 Month Old Dog She Shot Was ‘Not a Puppy’ Sparking New Backlash
Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won
‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism
Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report
Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report
Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won
‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism
Noem Insists 14 Month Old Dog She Shot Was ‘Not a Puppy’ Sparking New Backlash
‘Antisemitism Is Wrong, But’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Pilloried for Promoting Antisemitic Claim
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