Better in their words…

MSM not reporting? Hiding? Trying to keep their heads in the sand? Hoping ‘it’ goes away?  MSM is pathetic. But, I’m sure the Dems and Never-Trumpers will get things under control. Oh, wait: it’s Russia’s fault!  Oh, yes…  mrossol

Source: COMPLICATIONS ☙ Sunday, August 4, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🚀🚀 It was a tumultous news week delivering more inexplicable details about Trump’s assassination attempt. But even those Earth-shaking revelations, which in normal times would have consumed all the media’s oxygen, were outpaced by the rush of events. These included two morepolitical assassinations, successful ones, a major stock market correction, ginned-up outrage over Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s plea deal, a shady prisoner exchange with Russia, and thunder booming loudly from the Middle East as the region begins preparing for a wider war.

All this chaos landed amidst a vacuum of leadership in the U.S. and the surreal, anti-democratic nomination of Kamala Harris. But the Middle East was surely the main event. This morning, CNN ran a story headlined, “US sending aircraft carrier, warships and fighter squadron to Middle East as region braces for Iranian retaliation.”

The U.S. is replaying October’s moves, after Hamas launched its barbaric attack in southern Israel. CNN reported that another U.S. carrier group, the USS Abraham Lincoln and its warships, is steaming for the Middle East, where it will join or relieve the current carrier group staged in the region, the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

The current conflict comes after April’s contretemps, when Israel and Iran risked plunging into a regional war after Israel bombed an Iranian consular building in Damascus, killing two Iranian generals. As you probably well remember, Iran retaliated with an unprecedented direct strike on Israel, which was nearly completely contained. Diplomatic efforts managed to prevent wider escalation, that time.

But this time is different. From Iran’s point of view, the two new assassinations prove April’s heavily negotiated retaliation obviously failed to curb Israeli attacks. In other words, Iran must surely think Israel didn’t learn its lesson. Not only that, but this week’s high-profile assassination in Iran’s capital was even more provocative than April’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Syria.

For that reason, it seems likely Iran will feel compelled to respond much more forcefully than it did in April. And that’s not all. In the broader context, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has been publicly threatening to broaden out the Gaza war to include the well-armed Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which piled on Israel following the October 7th attacks. Two weeks ago, Netanyahu delivered a fiery anti-Iran speech to Congress, further provoking the mad mullahs.

And it looks like Russia, smarting from Biden’s decision to help Ukrainian strike Russian civilians inside its national boundaries, is getting involved. Yesterday, rumors emerged of Russian weapons shipments to Iran, alongside reports that Iran will back Russia’s BRICS currency. Back in April, following Israel’s strike on Iran’s embassy, Russian President Putin immediately and publicly urged Iran to avoid escalation. This time, Putin has remained silent.

It’s hard to imagine how this fractious situation could be negotiated away like April’s dispute was. Maybe.

Corporate media’s description of this precipitous moment has been uncharacteristically muted or subdued. It’s not clear whether the media is trying to avoid embarrassing the floundering, leaderless Biden Administration during an election season, or maybe it is trying to avoid inflaming regional passions. Either way, media isn’t reporting about all these various factors.

As for the leader of the free world, Biden has only mumbled short comments that don’t indicate whether or not he even knows what’s really going on. It’s one of his latest tricks; he barks an ambiguous, nonsensical one- or two-word response to a reporter’s question, like “just stop!” or “don’t!” It communicates nothing at all, but it hypnotically baffles confused reporters and then Biden can wander off or walk onto an empty airplane or something.

From what I can see in various Jewish blogs (like Amir Tsarfati’s YouTube channel), most ordinary Israelis assume they are headed for war with Iran, with an almost religious conviction. They are stockpiling groceries and tidying up their bomb shelters. The Jerusalem Post ran a story Friday headlined, “Iran plans to attack Israel on Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of disaster – report.” Citing “Western intelligence,” the story reported rumors that Iran plans a massive attack on Israel on August 13th, which is a dire day in Israel’s history, kind of like our September 11th (the 9/11 attacks) or December 7th (Pearl Harbor day), but with even deeper historical roots.

August 13th is the ninth of the month of ‘Av’ on the Hebrew calendar. Jews call the disastrous day ‘Tisha B’Av,’ a day of mourning and fasting. The Ninth of Av is the calamitous historic date when enemies destroyed the First and Second Temples (586 BC and 70 AD).  Many other horrible things in Israel’s history also occurred on that date, including key events during the Holocaust and even the Old Testament, like when God punished the Hebrews with 40 years of wandering in the desert.

So it is quite telling that the Jews are fretting about this date, and it would be logical for the Iranians to attack then, for maximum psychological impact. Who knows what the Iranians are thinking? Or the neocons in Biden Administration, who’ve always wanted a war with Iran? All we know for sure is corporate media is dishonestly under-reporting the dire potentialities.

Various geopolitical commenters have observed, probably correctly, that only the United States could stop a larger war from breaking out at this point. But who is going to do it? Cabbage? Cackle?

Events, as they say, are overtaking us. We’ll know soon, and probably sooner rather than later.

📉📉 As another terrific example of media malfeasance over looming war prospects, Forbes ran a moronic story on Friday headlined, “Dow Plummets Nearly 1,000 Points—How The Stock Market Plunge Could Impact The Job Market.”

Thursday and Friday were ‘brutal’ for the stock market. It was indeed the worst two-day decline since the covid crash in March, 2020. But it wasn’t catastrophic, or even close, since a -1,000 point drop is just a pinprick on the whalish, inflated Dow Jones Industrial Average, which closed just under 40,000.

But the plunge sure got everyone’s attention, since it was sudden and unexpected, not to mention distracting, and investors were quite reasonably fretting the markets will keep falling when they open on Monday morning.

Mockingbird media, including Forbes, has soberly informed readers that the ‘real reason’ for the drop was a combination of a bad jobs report (thanks, Joe), high interest rates, and irrational hedge-fund day-traders. Reading these stupid stories causes one’s eyes to glaze over and one’s numbed brain to stop asking questions, which is exactly what they intended.

Left out of all these expert financial articles was the two-ton orangutan in the room, throwing rotten bananas at financial media reporters who were pretending to ignore the manic monkey. No “combination” of reasons is required to understand what happened. There is an obvious explanation for the suddenly bearish market, a gigantic dot that could be connected with a short pencil stroke.

The markets reacted to Israel’s assassinations. Duh.

Aside from military contractors, war is generally bad for business. Big wars are even worse for business. The stock market rationally responded to the threat of a regional Middle Eastern war, and that is all. But pointless corporate media stubbornly refused to account for that most obvious explanation. I cannot fathom why anyone bothers listening to them at this point.

🔥🔥 A combination of headlines began telling the story of why Biden’s prisoner swap deal was so ‘complicated.’ The first story appeared in the New York Times on Friday, headlined “Russian Dissident Says He Was Traded Against His Will in Inmate Swap.”  It turns out most of the released prisoners weren’t even Americans.

Apart from reporter Evan Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan, the Times reported that several folks in the trade —the exact number still isn’t clear— were Russians who opposed the Proxy War or otherwise protested against the Russian government. Dissidents, in other words.

The story described most of them as largely being bemused. The last thing they expected was to be released as part of an American prisoner exchange. As the headline suggested, at least one of the Russian releasees is furious; he didn’t want to leave Russia, and he resents being traded for the eight spies and assassins that Russia received in return.

But the story gets even more awful when you combine it with yesterday’s story in the Wall Street Journal headlined, “The Americans Left Behind in Russia After Historic Prisoner Swap.” It also turns out that Russia holds around 20 American citizens — but Biden didn’t get any of them out. He took Russian dissidents instead.

As the Journal described things, it doesn’t sound like it would have been too hard to get back some of our fellow citizens. One, Marc Fogel, is a high-school teacher who is serving fourteen years in Russia for trying to smuggle in 17 grams of marijuana (purely for medicinal purposes). He was sentenced in 2022.

Another, David Barnes, traveled to Moscow in 2021 pursuing his Russian ex-wife, who absconded with the couple’s two boys without court approval. David’s ex filed a police report against him in Russia, alleging he molested the children, and he was arrested and sentenced to 21 years. The Journal reported the ex-wife had made the same allegations back in Texas, but U.S. authorities found them lacking merit.

The article continued, naming several other Americans who were not included in Biden’s “complicated” prisoner deal. Some of them, but not all, are dual US-Russian citizens.

The more we learn about the prisoner swap, the more obvious it becomes why the media is gaslighting us about how “complicated” it was. It wasn’t complicated. It was the kind of terrible deal that you might expect a cognitively impaired person to negotiate.

🔥🔥 It was another flash of Trump’s political genius. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “Trump Floats End to Taxes on Social Security Benefits.” And not just social security benefits, either.

This week, President Trump announced two terrific tax cut proposals, on Social Security and on tips. The Journal and the rest of corporate media thought it was the worst idea they ever heard, because it would reduce tax revenues.

But instead, it was brilliant.

First of all, it completely flummoxed Democrats. The best rejoinder they could come up with was arguing that not taxing tips and Social Security somehow only helps billionaires:

I blame the public schools. The Journal quickly pointed out that Social Security taxes kick in as low as $25,000 in annual income:

Not only that, but the article ended by noting that Trump, a billionaire, doesn’t even draw Social Security, presumably because he’s never applied. I’m a lawyer, not a mathematician, but my best guess is that if a billionaire did draw social security, they wouldn’t even notice the miniscule extra income from waived taxes anyway.

How billionaires could possibly benefit from untaxed Social Security is a mystery that only Congressional Democrats could fathom.

In one fell swoop, with two commonsense tax cut proposals that Democrats cannot hope to match, Trump made a compelling case to giant groups of service employees and seniors. Why people who’ve paid into Social Security all their lives should have those ‘benefits’ taxed again after they retire —when they aren’t even working— has never made any sense. Plus, Social Security isn’t a ‘benefit,’ it’s their money.

As for servers’ tips, those are nearly impossible to tax anyway.

Corporate media obviously doesn’t care about ‘lost revenue’ when it comes to forgiving student loans, so what on Earth is the problem with letting seniors and servers go untaxed?

What do you think? Were Trump’s tax-cut proposals a great idea, or was he just buying votes? Let me know in the comments.

Have a blessed and happy Sunday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow morning to kick off another delightful week of Coffee & Covid.

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