This is the one guy from that Redneck Tour thing who could bring it without needing any victim other than himself.
Plane Crash --Ron White
Plane Crash --Ron White
WASHINGTON — In a major shift of focus in the battle against the Islamic State, the Obama administration is planning to establish a new military base in Anbar Province, Iraq, and to send 400 American military trainers to help Iraqi forces retake the city of Ramadi.
The White House on Wednesday is expected to announce a plan that follows months of behind-the-scenes debate about how prominently plans to retake Mosul, another Iraqi city that fell to the Islamic State last year, should figure in the early phase of the military campaign against the group.
The fall of Ramadi last month effectively settled the administration debate, at least for the time being. American officials said Ramadi was now expected to become the focus of a lengthy campaign to regain Mosul at a later stage, possibly not until 2016.
The additional American troops will arrive as early as this summer, a United States official said, and will focus on training Sunni fighters with the Iraqi Army. The official called the coming announcement “an adjustment to try to get the right training to the right folks.”--and today's Understatement-That-Makes-It-Sound-Like-Ya-Really-Don't-Give-A-Fuck award goes to:
The United States Central Command’s emphasis on retaking Mosul depended critically on efforts to retrain the Iraqi Army, which appear to have gotten off to a slow start. Some Iraqi officials also thought the schedule for taking Mosul was unrealistic, and some bridled when an official from the Central Command told reporters in February that an assault to capture the city was planned for this spring.A slow start - from 2003. 12 years. That's not a slow start. That's not a start of any kind. That's an ending, and it's called "petrification"; or "putrefaction"; or some other term we use to indicate that it's over.
It doesn't matter how many people climb into the Republican clown car or how close Bernie Sanders is polling in Iowa. The deep-seated rot that has been injected quite deliberately into our elections is the story from which all others flow. The primary and fundamental debate must be between those who profit from the corruption, those who simply accept it and opt out, and those people who want to reverse the slow suicide of democratic government. God help us all if the latter group doesn't win.At the risk of being just the tiniest bit too fucking obvious, the results of an election literally mean nothing if the process itself is crooked.
Rick Perry. Because America needs a leader who talks about quitting America.
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) June 4, 2015
Rick Perry, the governor who signed off on the most executions in American history, asks voters for a second chance.
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) June 4, 2015
Hats off to @LindseyGrahamSC for building a foreign policy using only 100% recycled Neocon crazytalk: http://t.co/sgwfrmKNJ1 @SMShow
— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) June 4, 2015
Most of the poll-related buzz today has to do with the new CNN numbers that are alleged to be bad news for Hillary Rodham Clinton (and for Jeb too, truth be told). But The New York Times has another poll that is both a cause for great optimism, and a source of some dread. Simply put, the numbers in the poll show that an overwhelming majority of Americans of all ages, and of both parties, realize that the Citizens United decision and its progeny have deformed American politics almost beyond recognition.
So what the polls shows is the country knows that its elections largely are a rigged business, but that the country also rather has given up on the only mechanism through which the problem can be corrected. At a fundamental level, this should surprise nobody, since we've had 30 years of successful propaganda about how politics and politicians, and the government they inhabit, is some sort of alien beast, rather than something we all create, over and over again. We've had almost a decade now of efforts to make it more difficult for people to vote, a campaign run by the people whom the tidal wave of campaign money have swept into office. So what we have now is a citizenry that realizes the corruption that the Supreme Court has embedded in the political life of the country when it legalized influence peddling. And it has convinced itself that there are no remedies. So what we end up with is a WWE democracy -- rigged as hell, but entertaining. All that's missing is somebody getting hit with a ladder.