Paris Gun Traced to Syrian CIA ISIS/L/Da'esh Training Camps (Israel Supports - and Helped to Create - Islamic Terrorist Groups?) Can Republicans/Neolib Warmongers Buy the Next Election? (Yemen Crisis: One More Reason to Re-evaluate the Toxic U.S.-Saudi Alliance)

The United States' Secret African Drone War Against ISIS

Well, what did you expect?
A tattooed woman?

- Melvyn Douglas to Irene Dunne in "Theodora Goes Wild"

So, one of the guns used in the Paris attacks has been traced to the CIA-trained Syrian Islamics - the same crowd, essentially, who worked with the Cocaine (or was it Heroin?) Contras (just kidding, I remember that it was converted for better saleability into crack cocaine, especially for distribution to the Los Angelenos gangs, with a few special drop-offs in Miami), who were instrumental in the routing of weapons (paid for by the drug sales) to Iran?

It's a small world after all.

These reports further undermine the official presentation of the Paris attacks by governments, media, and pro-imperialist “left” parties. They insisted that the attacks were an act of Islamist terror in which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) alone was involved and bore full responsibility.

This presentation was always a political fraud, insofar as the NATO powers were undoubtedly politically implicated. The attacks were led by Islamist fighters trained in Syria — where the CIA, European intelligence and Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms have given financial and military backing to such Islamist forces to topple President Bashar al-Assad. Though placed on watch lists and monitored by intelligence services, these fighters were somehow allowed to prepare highly complex, coordinated attacks in Paris.

Revelations of a concrete link between Century Arms and the Paris attacks, however, raise specifically whether elements in the intelligence services aided the attackers — either inadvertently, due to their reckless war policy, or deliberately, to shift the political atmosphere far to the right.

The ruling elite reacted to the November 13 attacks, predictably, by aligning policy on war and democratic rights with the views of the most aggressive sections of the military-intelligence complex. France is now preparing to impose a permanent state of emergency, effectively abrogating key democratic rights and boosting the political fortunes of the neo-fascist National Front (FN). NATO is ramping up support to its proxies in Syria, though this threatens to trigger an all-out military clash with nuclear-armed Russia.

While it remains unclear how the Paris attacks were organized, the link to Century Arms strongly suggests that elements acting for the intelligence agencies, in an official capacity or otherwise, were involved. Century Arms has had close ties to US foreign policy for decades.

In 1987, John Rugg, a former police officer and Century Arms employee, testified to the US Senate that the firm had run weapons to the Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This illegal operation, led by the CIA in defiance of the Boland Amendment passed by the US Congress cutting off aid to the Contras, had exploded in the Iran-Contra scandal.

In 2004, according to the Palm Beach Post, Italian authorities halted shipment of 7,500 AK-47 rifles to Century Arms from Romania, where the firm had developed commercial ties since before the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe.

In 2007, according to a US diplomatic cable published by "WikiLeaks", Century Arms worked with Israeli arms dealer Ori Zeller to illegally recover and sell off American M-1 rifles shipped by Washington to the bloody Guatemalan regime during that country’s civil war. The cable also states that Zeller’s associates were convicted of money laundering in Belgium in 2003, and suspected of laundering $20 million in Al Qaeda funds via West African diamonds.

Nonetheless, the cable called Zeller a “valuable source for the USG [US government] in Guatemala.” It added that the US government used him to obtain information on Guatemala, Israel, Russian arms sales, and Mexican drug cartels.

Century Arms’ relationship with Mexican narco-traffickers apparently goes beyond providing information. The US  Center for Public Integrity reported in 2011 that Romanian WASR-10 rifles sold by Century Arms had “become a favorite of the Mexican drug cartels, and in recent years hundreds of them have been traced to crimes in Mexico.” This is not the first indication that connections existed between state forces and Islamist groups that carried out terror attacks in France.

On Wednesday, French police detained Claude Hermant, a former member of the FN’s security detail who is active in far-right circles in northern France and serves as an informant for police and customs officials, for questioning over the January attacks on "Charlie Hebdo" and the Hyper Cacher. Officials confirmed that he was being held for questioning as to whether he had trafficked weapons to Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman at the Hyper Cacher.

This confirmed earlier reports that Lille prosecutors were investigating a link between Hermant and the January attacks. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve subsequently invoked the state secrets privilege in an attempt to block the investigation. However, this decision and more details of the investigation of Hermant were leaked to the press. 

The Lille investigation is now apparently considering the possibility that Hermant himself was simply playing the role of middleman in a larger network involved in arming the gunmen. Officials close to the investigating team told "La Voix du Nord," “In such trafficking, there is always one intermediary, or more. Claude Hermant did not necessarily know the final destination of the weapons. It would show, in any case, the links between certain Islamist circles and organized crime.”

The paper also reported that a customs official had been placed under investigation in the Hermant affair.

Epochalypse Apocalypse?

Epocalypse Soon: The Great Economic Collapse is Happening

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Israel Supports Islamic Terrorists

Posted on December 14, 2015 

by WashingtonsBlog 

Israel claims that it’s in a mortal struggle with Islamic terrorists …

But as we reported last year, the Israeli military has admitted to supporting Syrian Islamic jihadis. And see this.

Last week, Daily Mail journalists embedded with Israeli troops reported:

Almost every night, Israeli troops run secret missions to save the lives of Syrian fighters, all of whom are sworn enemies of the Jewish state.

***

Analysts suggest the Jewish state has in fact struck a deadly ‘deal with the devil’ – offering support to the Sunni militants who fight the Syrian ruler Assad in the hope of containing its arch enemies Hezbollah and Iran.

***

Many of the casualties rescued by Israel belong to Salafist groups …. Some may be members of Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian group affiliated to Al Qaeda that has kidnapped scores of UN peacekeeping troops in this area, and has massacred Christians deeper in Syria.

***

In the three years that Israel has been running these operations, it has saved the lives of more than 2,000 Syrians – at least 80 per cent of whom are male and of fighting age – at a cost of 50 million shekels (£8.7 million).

***

‘Above all, Israel wants to prevent Hezbollah from gaining control on the other side of the border,’ said Michael Stephens, Research Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

‘The Sunni militants are fighting Hezbollah, so for now they share the same objectives as Israel. That’s why we’re seeing this odd cooperation between people who would be enemies under any other circumstances.

***

Significantly, an Israeli spokesman confirmed that no medical support has been provided to any militants from the Shia alliance.

‘From an Israeli viewpoint, it’s a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ said Kamal Alam, research analyst at RUSI and an expert in Syrian affairs.

‘There is no one they can trust in the Syrian quagmire, but if you get rid of Hezbollah, that’s the end of Iran in the region. Israel’s main aim has to be to eliminate Hezbollah – and whoever takes on Hezbollah is an uneasy but necessary ally.

‘In giving medical support to these fighters, Israel has done a deal with the devil.’

Indeed, Israel has made no secret of the fact that it prefers ISIS and Al Qaeda to the Iranian backed terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah:

In September 2013, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post in an interview: “The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. … We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

In June 2014, Oren expanded on this thinking at an Aspen Institute conference, extending Israel’s preference to include even the hyper-brutal Islamic State. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.

But it’s not just Iran or Shias … Israel decided long ago to break up Syria and Iraq into numerous mini-states. And Israel wants a compliant government in Syria to allow its pipelines to win out over competing pipelines.

No wonder the Israeli air force has bombed near the Syrian capital of Damascus, and attacked agricultural facilities and warehouses (the Syrian government is the main opponent of ISIS in Syria).

We noted last year:

The "Times of Israel" reported Wednesday:

A Free Syrian Army commander, arrested last month by the Islamist militia Al-Nusra Front, told his captors he collaborated with Israel in return for medical and military support, in a video released this week.

In a video uploaded to YouTube Monday … Sharif As-Safouri, the commander of the Free Syrian Army’s Al-Haramein Battalion, admitted to having entered Israel five times to meet with Israeli officers who later provided him with Soviet anti-tank weapons and light arms. Safouri was abducted by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front in the Quneitra area, near the Israeli border, on July 22.

“The [opposition] factions would receive support and send the injured in [to Israel] on condition that the Israeli fence area is secured. No person was allowed to come near the fence without prior coordination with Israel authorities,” Safouri said in the video.
***
In the edited confession video, in which Safouri seems physically unharmed, he says that at first he met with an Israeli officer named Ashraf at the border and was given an Israeli cellular phone. He later met with another officer named Younis and with the two men’s commander, Abu Daoud. In total, Safouri said he entered Israel five times for meetings that took place in Tiberias.

Following the meetings, Israel began providing Safouri and his men with “basic medical support and clothes” as well as weapons, which included 30 Russian [rifles], 10 RPG launchers with 47 rockets, and 48,000 5.56 millimeter bullets.

Also on Wednesday, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency – a 97-year old Jewish wire service – reported:

A senior employee of the Dutch Justice Ministry said the jihadist group ISIS was created by Zionists seeking to give Islam a bad reputation.

Yasmina Haifi, a project leader at the ministry’s National Cyber Security Center, made the assertion Wednesday on Twitter, the De Telegraaf daily reported.

“ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It’s part of a plan by Zionists who are deliberately trying to blacken Islam’s name,” wrote Haifi ….

In March, Haaretz reported:

The Syrian opposition is willing to give up claims to the Golan Heights in return for cash and Israeli military aid against President Bashar Assad, a top opposition official told Al Arab newspaper, according to a report in Al Alam.
***
The Western-backed militant groups want Israel to enforce a no-fly zone over parts of southern Syria to protect rebel bases from air strikes by Assad’s forces, according to the report.

Perhaps that’s why ISIS, Al Nusra and the other Islamic terrorists in Syria haven’t tried to lay a glove on Israel?

This isn’t an isolated dynamic …

• Israel has also been arming Islamic terrorists in Iran

• Israel was instrumental in creating Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda (and see this)

• Israel has admitted that it has a long history of carrying out false flag attacks … where its soldiers dress up as Arab terrorists

• If you think that the real dynamic is Muslims versus Jews and Christians, you’re being played

• Israeli Military Admits to Supporting Syrian Jihadis
• Syrian Rebels Slit Throat of Christian Man Who Refused To Convert To Islam, Taunt Fiance, “Jesus Didn’t Come To Save Him”
• Israel and the U.S. CREATED Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda
• How the U.S. Is Allied with ISIS & Al Qaeda
• Allegations: U.S. Allies Back ISIS Islamic Terrorists
• New York Times Acknowledges that Syrian Opposition Is Targeting Christians and Other Minorities

(This entry was posted in Politics / World News.)

Working under the assumption that they can support a campaign better themselves, donors are building their own organizations, staffed by operatives who report to them. “A lot of people who felt betrayed in 2012 set out to build political structures,” says Kellyanne Conway, president of the pro–Ted Cruz super-pac Keep the Promise I, which is backed by hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer. Mercer is a prime example of the new breed of activist donor. This presidential cycle, he has donated more than $30 million to a quartet of pro-Cruz super-pacs. A computer scientist by training, Mercer is also part owner of a political data firm called Cambridge Analytica, which boasts on its website that it employs “psychographic profiling” to recruit voters. As a result, Mercer’s pacs have shunned the traditional strategy of saturation TV coverage. Instead, Mercer is focused on targeted radio buys, digital outreach, and field organizing.

So, Citizens United needs to be expanded? Completely re-judged so that Republicans CAN'T LOSE this time?

Well, Rove is currently lacking some funds (not receiving as many mail orders (donations) from widows and orphans as he used to), so something must be done.

And soon!

Rove’s 2012 crash is having profound effects on the 2016 Republican primary. To begin with, George W. Bush’s Brain is no longer considered much of a brain.

“I gave Rove $500,000. What did I get for it? Nothing!” Langone told me. Two of Rove’s most generous 2012 funders, Texas billionaires Bob Perry and Harold Simmons, have since passed away, and their heirs have turned off the cash spigot. “Everyone is still shocked Romney lost,” says Simmons’s widow, Annette. “I haven’t committed at all.”

So far this year, Crossroads has raised just $784,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Rove insists he’s still a player. “We’ll be involved in the Senate races,” he told me. “Depending on who the presidential nominee is, we may be involved in that, but that’s a long way off.” What Rove is not is anywhere near the center of the Republican Party. “But for his perch on Fox News, Karl would be in political Siberia,” says a top Republican strategist. “The going joke is that he must have a picture of Roger Ailes in his underwear to keep his contract.”

It’s not just that Rove is personally marginalized. Donors have awakened to the realization that topflight consultants can earn millions from campaigns regardless of whether they win. “It bothers a lot of people that politics has become a cottage industry. Everyone is taking a piece of this and a slice of that,” says California winemaker John Jordan, a former Rove donor. “Crossroads treated me like a child with these investor conference calls where they wouldn’t tell you what was really going on. They offered platitudes and a newsletter.”

Working under the assumption that they can support a campaign better themselves, donors are building their own organizations, staffed by operatives who report to them. “A lot of people who felt betrayed in 2012 set out to build political structures,” says Kellyanne Conway, president of the pro–Ted Cruz super-pac Keep the Promise I, which is backed by hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer.

Mercer is a prime example of the new breed of activist donor. This presidential cycle, he has donated more than $30 million to a quartet of pro-Cruz super-pacs. A computer scientist by training, Mercer is also part-owner of a political data firm called Cambridge Analytica, which boasts on its website that it employs “psychographic profiling” to recruit voters. As a result, Mercer’s pacs have shunned the traditional strategy of saturation TV coverage. Instead, Mercer is focused on targeted radio buys, digital outreach, and field organizing.

The savviest GOP candidates have capitalized on this shift. In fact, Cruz’s campaign fund-raising apparatus seems designed to let donors roll up their sleeves. Cruz contributors can specify how they want their money spent, much in the way universities allow benefactors to earmark their donations for a new science wing or aquatics center. “If you’re a donor, you can say, ‘I want to see this money used for Iowa,’ ” one strategist told me. “It’s a way to entice donors. They look at it like fantasy football.”

The new billionaire-backed operations style themselves as models of superior sophistication. During the last Republican primary, Sheldon Adelson bankrolled Newt Gingrich’s campaign essentially by writing blank checks with little or no oversight. Compare that to the super-pac funded by Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts, who has his own political staff and demands accountability. “I’m used to saying the Ricketts’ spend their super-pac money like it’s their own money — because it is,” the family’s political adviser, Brian Baker, told me.

Or look at the network being built by Elliott Management founder Paul Singer. In 2014, Singer created the American Opportunity Alliance, a group of roughly 40 Republican financiers who gather regularly for secret meetings with candidates. This fall, Singer threw his weight behind Marco Rubio and urged his members to do the same. In the general election, Singer will be a player with America Rising, the opposition-research firm headed by Romney’s dark-arts wizard Matt Rhoades. Instead of funding TV ads, Rhoades’s group offers Singer more predictable returns:  It is narrowly focused on digging up dirt on Democrats, for example by sending video trackers to events in order to build a library of unflattering material.

It’s all about retaining control. In October, billionaire investor Carl Icahn announced he was launching a $150 million super-pac to lobby for corporate tax reform. “At the risk of being immodest, we have one of the best records on Wall Street. And I like doing things myself,” he told me. “Too many cooks spoil the soup.”

John Jordan now supports Republican candidates through his own super-pac, which applies the lessons he’s learned from winemaking. He, too, is backing Marco Rubio. “I know really well how to sell things. I make my own ads,” Jordan said. “The quality of ads produced by most of the ad-makers is just so bad that they’re ineffective. Have you looked at Jeb’s ads? They’re terrible! It’s unforgivable.”

Perhaps Bush is the perfect case study:  The candidate who has underperformed the most is the one with a 2012-style campaign, who steered all his major donors into one super-pac. That organization, Right to Rise USA, is run by the grizzled strategist Mike Murphy, who succeeded in bundling a $100 million war chest and is now finding himself on the receiving end of donor backlash. Last month, for instance, a group of major Bush supporters held a conference call to vent about Murphy after he outlined his strategy in an interview to Bloomberg Politics. “These guys got rip-shit,” said one person briefed on the call.

But the most important lesson the billionaires are learning this year is that they aren’t much better at politics than Karl Rove. Well, not true. There is one billionaire who seems to have contemporary Republican politics figured out. “This is no longer a meteor going through the sky,” Langone told me, observing Donald Trump’s dominance over the race and sounding just shy of panicked. “He’s been in the lead 116 of 120 days.”

Republican Billionaires Just Can't Seem to Buy This Election

"Okay, but all this talk has gotten me thirsty."

"Straight whiskey!"

"Oh, Michael!"

Irene Dunne to Melvyn Douglas in "Theodora Goes Wild"

Gallup Chair Says Employment Number Hinky (How Citizens Can Stop American Empire Building) Adelson Election Bullying Pulpit (Ari Ben-Menashe States U.S. NeoCons/Israelis/Saudis Are U.S. Enemies; Russia/Iran Are U.S. Allies) Seeing Through the Fog Surrounding the Mysterious Links Between the U.S., Israel, Turkey, and the World’s Most Fanatical Terrorist Organization: ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State or Da'esh (There's No Upside Left/Only Downside)

Bernie Sanders Calls Fed Rate Hike Bad News for Working Families

"It was an accident!"

"An accident?

Were you on PCP?"

- Cameron Diaz to Leslie Mann in "The Other Woman"

They decided to raise the interest rate.

Because employment is up. The economy is on the upswing!

And there's no new war spending occurring now as we're getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and all those other bombing disaster theaters.

Or other huge spending increases (see latest budget deal).

Right?

Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, an iconic U.S. company dating back to 1935, told CNBC that he was worried he might “suddenly disappear” and not make it home that evening if he disputed the accuracy of what the U.S. government is reporting as unemployed Americans.

The CNBC interview came one day after Clifton had penned a gutsy opinion piece on Gallup’s web site, defiantly calling the government’s 5.6 percent unemployment figure “The Big Lie” in the article’s headline. His appearance on CNBC was apparently to walk back the “lie” part of the title and reframe the jobs data as just hopelessly deceptive.

Clifton stated the following on CNBC:

“I think that the number that comes out of BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and the Department of Labor is very, very accurate. I need to make that very, very clear so that I don’t suddenly disappear. I need to make it home tonight.”

After getting that out of the way, Clifton went on to eviscerate the legitimacy of the cheerful spin given to the unemployment data, telling CNBC viewers that the percent of full time jobs in this country as a percent of the adult population “is the worst it’s been in 30 years.”

Clifton drilled down further in his on line opinion piece, writing as follows:

“Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is ‘down’ to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.

“None of them will tell you this:   If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as unemployed. That’s right.

While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news — currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast ‘falling’ unemployment.

“There’s another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you’re an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager:  If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you’re not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this.

“Yet another figure of importance that doesn’t get much press:  those working part time but wanting full-time work. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find — in other words, you are severely underemployed — the government doesn’t count you in the 5.6%. Few Americans know this.” (Read the full article here.)

Another bold truth teller when it comes to the jobs data is Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. For years Roberts has written about the lack of attention to the measurement known as U6 – which covers the unemployed, underemployed and those who are not looking but want a job. That figure stood at 11.2 percent in December of last year, exactly double the official unemployment rate known at U3.

The fact that hourly earnings are not improving with the improvement in the official unemployment rate and that the labor force participation rate of working age men (ages 25 to 54) now stands at the lowest level since the BLS started keeping records more than 60 years ago adds further fodder to “The Big Lie” theory.

And the U.S. is getting out of all of those other screwed-up-beyond-all-belief hot spots (Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia and PAKISTAN!) right away.

Right?

Errrrr . . .

Actually, U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former National Security Adviser to the Reagan Administration, tells us in the video below that the U.S. will never leave Afghanistan for the next half century at least.

And very few other countries containing current U.S. military operations.

Speaking volumes about the operation and price of empire.

"Okay, okay.

I'll take one for the team."

- Cameron Diaz to Leslie Mann and Kate Upton in "The Other Woman"

Bush Military Official:  US Citizens Must Stand Up to Stop the Empire

Published on Dec 13, 2015

Abby Martin interviews retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former national security advisor to the Reagan administration, who spent years as an assistant to Secretary of State Colin Powell during both Bush administrations. Today, he is honest about the unfixable corruption inside the establishment and the corporate interests driving foreign policy.

Hear a rare insider's view of what interests are behind U.S. wars, the manipulation of intelligence, the intertwining of the military and corporate world, and why the U.S. Empire is doomed.

A few of the points made by Wilkerson:

US’s foreign bases are “colonial, imperial” stations over the globe.

‘The empire… is run by about one percent of the people, if not fewer, in this country, constituting essentially a plutocracy.’

Military officers retire from the military, go to arms manufacturers and media jobs to make the media ‘want war’.

US is ‘oriented towards first what increases its power, and second what makes it rich.’

US military ‘isn’t an all volunteer force. It’s an all-recruited force, because we’re spending billions of dollars to entice these people, who feel that they don’t have many other prospects, into the armed forces.’

What made Wilkerson speak out?  Bush and Cheney both personally encouraged heinous acts like torture and other violations of the Geneva Conventions.

‘Empire never has enough. That’s the nature of imperial power. It never has enough. It never has a stable status quo. It has an increasingly unstable status quo.’

To stop the empire, ‘a powerful minority, or a majority’ of US citizens must ‘stand up … and say, I’ve had enough.  Does that mean revolution? It might.  It might indeed.’

And how can we ordinary citizens help to end that civilization-eviscerating American Empire?

Enforcing tough campaign finance laws would be a good beginning.

"Look for blind off-shore filings."

"If I were looking to lose money, that's where I'd lose it."

- Don Johnson to Cameron Diaz in "The Other Woman"

Though Rove Is Washed Up, Campaign Finance Will Do Far More Harm To Your Family Than ISIS Will

December 15, 2015

Do they look kind of normal? They're not. It's Robert Mercer and a Texas senator he purchased

The whole country watched Karl Rove make a fool of himself on election night, 2012, as he insisted that, despite massive Democratic turnout for Obama in the Ohio's most populous counties - Cuyahoga (69%), Franklin (60%), Summit (57%), Lucas (64%) and Hamilton (52%) - and a 2,697,260 (50.1%)- 2,593,779 (48.2%) statewide edge, Romney had won Ohio's 18 electoral votes. Many people wondered if he had lost his mind. But it was desperation we were watching. Rove had nearly as much riding on that election as Romney and Ryan did. His entire business was on the line.

In 2012, Rove's various Crossroads PACs and SuperPACs, spent $170 million attacking Obama and trying to bolster Romney. Fascist-front organizations like Harold Simmons' Contrain Corp ($23,500,000), various Adelson entities ($23,000,000), Bob Perry's Perry Homes ($8,500,000) and Robert Rowling's Gold's Gym and Omni Hotels ($6,000,000), to name a few, contributed enormous amounts of money to Rove's operations - which raked millions of dollars off the top in commissions of various sorts - after being assured by Rove that Romney could beat Obama, despite the all reputable polling, if they would just continue writing massive checks to Rove for his negative campaign ads. Some of these right-wing billionaires are still smarting. One idiot even tried suing Rove (and Fox News!).

Over the weekend, Gabriel Sherman, writing for "New York Magazine" explored, among other things, why Rove can't raise the kind of money this cycle that he's raised before and why so many right-wing billionaires are more reticent about spending big money so far when they hear Rove's siren song.

Right-winger Kenneth Langone, for example, isn't a genius; far from it. He's a ruthless dullard who had a good idea and a lot of luck - Home Depot. He wasted half a million dollars of Romney last cycle. "I had every expectation we would be the victors," he whined to Sherman, and he had that expectation because he was taken in by Rove's sweet talk and "top secret" baloney memos. When Romney didn't even come close - remember, Rove promised a "mandate" - gullible billionaires like Langone started to realize they had been duped. "It felt like a mugging," wrote Sherman.

Dan Loeb is another naive billionaire - a vulture capitalist/hedge fund predator - who has wasted millions of dollars on crackpot right-wing PACs and campaigns (including not just to the corrupt conservative NRSC and NRCC but also to the corrupt conservative DSCC and DCCC). Last cycle he gave Rove well over $100,000.

So how desperate are the owners to ensure that this cycle's election stays bought?

It's almost ridiculous to say that maybe they'll start acquiring the media personally.

As if they haven't already.

However . . .

"Yeah, I did say that.

But nothing I ever told you was true."

- Mark (the ultimate mark - husband) to Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton in "The Other Woman"

Shel Adelson, casino-owning multimillionaire, who buys elections, has just bought the largest newspaper in Nevada, and is promoting Marco Rubio.

“One of the first thoughts I had was:  Nevada is an early primary state. The "Review-Journal" is the largest newspaper in the state. Was it sold to a player in that event, or people who want to be players?,” asked media critic and New York University professor Jay Rosen.

The timing of this story couldn’t be more fortuitous as the GOP presidential candidates gather for a national debate at Adelson’s flagship Las Vegas hotel, the Sands.  One competitor stands out from all the rest in his relationship with Adelson, Marco Rubio.  Of one thing you can be sure:  Sheldon Adelson wants Rubio to be president so bad he can taste it.  And if buying a newspaper is a down-payment to achieve that goal, it’s small change as far as he’s concerned.

Adelson is especially sensitive to how he’s portrayed in the press. In fact, he’s sued or threatened to sue a number of Israeli TV stations which aired profiles he viewed as defamatory. One such incident resulted in an on-air apology to Adelson followed by the resignation of the news chief, mortified by his company’s capitulation to Adelson’s bullying. Having total control of the state’s leading newspaper would mean news perfectly tailored to Adelson’s taste.

Bill Engdahl enlightens us as to why we can't figure out the War Against ISIS/L/Da'esh from the mainstream media coverage (because they're on our side - yeah, it's tricky - but don't let your attention wander):

That Netanyahu’s Likud and the Israeli military work closely with Washington’s neo-conservative war-hawks is well-established, as is the vehement opposition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Israel regards the Iranian-backed Shi’a Islamist militant group, Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, as an arch foe. Hezbollah has been actively fighting alongside the Syrian Army against ISIS in Syria. General Allen’s strategy of “bombings of ISIS” since he was placed in charge of the operation in September 2014, as Russia’s Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have repeatedly pointed out, far from destroying ISIS in Syria, had vastly expanded their territorial control of the country.

Now it becomes clear that that was precisely the intent of Allen and the Washington war faction.

Since at least 2013, Israeli military have also openly bombed what they claim were Hezbollah targets inside Syria. Investigation revealed that in fact Israel was hitting Syrian military and Hezbollah targets who are valiantly fighting against ISIS and other terrorists.

Watching the Hawks

Deadlocked in Baltimore & America’s Friendly Enemies in the Middle East w/ Ari Ben-Menashe (E147)

16 Dec, 2015

© Eduardo Munoz / Reuters