Rumors of Romney win greatly exaggerated

Editor's Note:  The Paul camp is the only one to blame for rumors of an early exit.  Paul's email indicating his plans for the remaining 11 states was probably the dumbest, costliest move in this campaign.

The Examiner

The New York Times, Politico, CNN, and most other big media outlets are reporting this morning that Governor Romney has secured the requisite number of delegates needed to gain the Republican nomination for President. There is only one problem with their reports. They are wrong. The GOP nominee will be chosen at the Republican National Convention in Tampa Florida in August.

Mainstream press outlets like to keep their stories simple because apparently their readers do not want to sift through a lot of complexity. Unfortunately, the real delegate selection process in the Republican Party is complicated. Candidates are not chosen at the popular vote beauty contests.

Some delegates are selected at primaries and caucuses and are 'bound' to a particular candidate depending on the party rules in particular states. However, the majority of delegates are selected at state conventions, and those delegates are free to vote for the candidate of their choosing at the national convention as long as one candidate does not receive a plurality on the first ballot. Even this last point in subject to debate as some experts believe that even the so-called bound delegates are free to vote for the candidate of their choosing on the first ballot. This interpretation of federal law is not well publicized by the party insiders that control American elections because it disputes the legitimacy of 'binding' voters to particular candidates.

It is highly unlikely that Governor Romney will have enough delegate votes to be nominated on the first ballot, so this race for the nomination is not over. Congressman Paul continues to rack up delegates even as GOP insiders attempt to adjust their own rules to keep that from happening.

Furthermore, as I reported yesterday, the Paul forces are still considering legal challenges to what they perceive as electioneering shenanigans committed by Romney forces and the Establishment GOP. Paul's supporters may go ahead with the legal challenges even if the Paul campaign is not on board. One such effort is below:

A new group known as Tools for Justice has formed to document voting rights violations and election abuses that may have occurred during the 2012 GOP primaries. This is from their website:

Tools For Justice is working in partnership with WatchtheVote2012.com, RonPaulVoteCount.org, and WTPNetwork.com acting as a private, secure, centralized clearinghouse to support all concerned citizens to enforce our voting rights and restore integrity to the election process by gathering evidence through our members in our private forum.

Therefore, rumors of Congressman Paul's exit from the race were incorrect and rumors of Governor Romney's Coronation are greatly exaggerated.

17 Year Old Honor Student Jailed for Missing School

Daily Bell

A judge threw a 17-year-old 11th grade honor student from Willis High School in jail after she missed school again ... Diane Tran, a 17-year-old honor student in Texas, was forced to spend the night in jail last week after missing too many classes, KHOU-11's Sherry Williams reports. The Willis High School junior, who helps support two siblings, has both a full time and part-time job. She said that she's often too tired to go to school. "She goes from job to job from school," Devin Hill, one of Tran's classmates, told KHOU-11. "She stays up until 7:00 in the morning doing her homework." In an interview with KHOU-11, Tran said she takes AP Spanish, college level algebra and dual credit English and history courses. Her parents divorced and no longer live near her, so she lives with the family that owns the wedding venue where she works on weekends. – Huffington Post

Dominant Social Theme: That'll teach 'er.

Free-Market Analysis: This is a sad story (see above), and one that has given rise to a petition and a good deal of outrage. Why a Judge threw a hard-working young woman into jail is clear enough, but the application of US law in this instance has finally resonated.

The US Justice System, in fact, carries the seeds of its own destruction. The more didactic, dishonest and corrupt it gets, the more it gives rise to this sort of "justice."

And such outcomes inevitably spark outrage.

Here at DB, we haven't been shy about calling for the return of private justice. A justice system in which the state makes the laws, enforces them, prosecutes them, hires the prosecutors, licenses the defense attorneys, pays the judges, builds the jails (and contracts them out to private entities), pays the wardens and the guards and eventually the parole officers ... is not a unbiased system.

The result (in the US): some six million behind bars at any one time and one-out-of-three individuals having some sort of interaction with the criminal justice system by the time they are 25.

“Militants”: media propaganda

Salon
Glenn Goldman

To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone"

Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.

This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing. I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of “militant” is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: “Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen”).

This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” I’m writing separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.


“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

For the moment, leave the ethical issues to the side that arise from viewing “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”; that’s nothing less than sociopathic, a term I use advisedly, but I discuss that in the separate, longer piece I’ve written. For now, consider what this means for American media outlets. Any of them which use the term “militants” to describe those killed by U.S. strikes are knowingly disseminating a false and misleading term of propaganda. By “militant,” the Obama administration literally means nothing more than: any military-age male whom we kill, even when we know nothing else about them. They have no idea whether the person killed is really a militant: if they’re male and of a certain age they just call them one in order to whitewash their behavior and propagandize the citizenry (unless conclusive evidence somehow later emerges proving their innocence).

What kind of self-respecting media outlet would be party to this practice? Here’s the New York Times documenting that this is what the term “militant” means when used by government officials. Any media outlet that continues using it while knowing this is explicitly choosing to be an instrument for state propaganda — not that that’s anything new, but this makes this clearer than it’s ever been.

Mainstream media calls this "hundreds of protestors" Montréal

12160

James Φοίνιξ



Some ten thousand protesters on foot, bicycle, skateboard or rollerblades, crossed Montreal late Saturday to the deafening din of pots, fog horns and whistles. 

MONTREAL – Perhaps it was the summer-like weather, or the prospect of a new set of negotiations between the government and student groups on the horizon.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Student+protests+weekend+peaceful+defiance/6687923/story.html

Perhaps it had more to do with the festive atmosphere created by the clinking and clanging of thousands of pots and pans that rang out through the city each night, or maybe Montrealers decided they had simply had enough of a handful of violent hooligans besmirching their city’s reputation.

Whatever the reason, the peaceful demonstrations that wound their way through streets across Montreal Island and beyond this weekend were a far cry from the violence and destruction witnessed in recent weeks. Tens of thousands of residents – people of every age, background and political stripe – took to the streets Friday and Saturday to protest both rising tuition fees and the controversial Bill 78 without a single major confrontation with police. Sunday night’s event ended the same way, with police reporting only a single arrest for mischief.

BBC News uses 'Iraq photo to illustrate Syrian massacre'

The Telegraph

The BBC is facing criticism after it accidentally used a picture taken in Iraq in 2003 to illustrate the senseless massacre of children in Syria.

Photographer Marco di Lauro said he nearly “fell off his chair” when he saw the image being used, and said he was “astonished” at the failure of the corporation to check their sources.

The picture, which was actually taken on March 27, 2003, shows a young Iraqi child jumping over dozens of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad.

It was posted on the BBC news website today under the heading “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows”.

The caption states the photograph was provided by an activist and cannot be independently verified, but says it is “believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial”.

A BBC spokesman said the image has now been taken down.

The Pentagon Contractor Behind Attacks On Reporters Is Embarrassed Now That Everyone Knows

Business Insider
Eloise Lee

After a posting a story today about Camille Chidiac — the man who just admitted he was behind the mysterious websites attacking two USA Today reporters — one of his spokespeople contacted me to talk about his side of the story.

The spokesperson said that Chidiac is embarrassed. 

But he's ready to take all the blame.

He was formerly the co-owner of successful Pentagon contractor Leonie Industries, which specializes in "strategic communications" and Information Operations — known to the public as military propaganda programs.

Earlier this year he registered websites and forums that claimed to be "unofficial fan sites" for two reporters, Tom Vanden Brook and his editor Ray locker, who had written critically about U.S. military information campaigns in the Middle East with which Leonie Industries was involved.

But the websites ended up hosting online discussions slamming the two journalists. Chidiac denies that this was his intention.

"Due to the un-moderated nature of the forums, some of these discussions quickly degenerated from legitimate criticism to immature and irrelevant rhetoric by unknown users," wrote Chidiac.
 
USA Today claimed the online activity was a smear campaign against its journalists.

His spokesperson pointed out that Chidiac did not publish false content; he just re-posted articles written by Vanden Brook to the "fan site" he created.

The thing is, it didn't seem to be much of a fan site.

One of the prominently featured articles was a story by Vanden Brook that contained inaccuracies — suggesting that the public should be wary of the USA Today reporter's credibility.

I asked Chidiac's spokesperson why his client labeled the anonymous websites as "fan sites" — that pretense has people wondering about Chidiac's motivation.

The spokesperson acknowledged they don't know Chidiac's motivation for doing that.
According to Chidiac, the sites were always "intended to create open dialogue in an open forum related to the reporters' past articles."

"I take full responsibility for having some of the discussion forums opened and reproducing their previously published USA Today articles on them.  Even though the USA Today articles written about my family included unfair personal attacks and false statements by the reporters, it did not motivate me to post anything personally nor did I encourage anyone to post anything that was untrue or defamatory in any way," he wrote in a statement.

He currently has a team of professionals representing him, from a defamation lawyer to media management.

The spokesperson asked not to be named, iterating that the story's not about him.

US envoy’s report on Iran

Russia Today

Top Israeli officials have refused to meet the US envoy to the P5+1 group, who arrived in Jerusalem with a report on recent talks with Iran. The diplomatic démarche comes as relations between the two countries strain over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

­Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman arrived in Israel on May 25, a day after the group of six (Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States plus Germany) ended their unsuccessful negotiations in Baghdad.

She had intended to brief Israeli officials about negotiations between Iran and the P5+1. But both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak became unexpectedly unavailable to meet her.

Sherman then delivered her report about the fruitless talks to National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror and Foreign Ministry Director-General Rafi Barak instead, the Debka news agency reported.

No agreement was reached between the world powers and Iran during the talks in Baghdad on May 23-24 because Tehran refused to meet their demands.  The P5+1 wanted Iran to suspend its 20 percent uranium enrichment program, which the group sees as vital to the negotiations process.

Tehran labelled the Western proposal ‘unbalanced’, rejecting it over what it called "unfair demands" which offer little in return.

Even though both sides still hope to hammer out the agreement at a newly-scheduled round of talks in Moscow next month, Israel remains less optimistic about the negotiations.


On the first day of discussions in Baghdad, on May, 23, Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the negotiations only allow Iran to buy time and drive a wedge between Washington and Tel Aviv.
Relations between Israel and United States have become more tense lately, with both countries having different solutions to the conflict with Iran.

While the US prefers warnings and sanctions to pressure Iran away from any suspected atomic weapon development, Israel threatens military action.

On the talks’ opening day, Ehud Barak reaffirmed Israel’s position, saying a military strike against Iranian facilities is not out of the question.

What’s more, a day later, a source in Washington DC said the Israeli leadership had backtracked on a promise not to attack Iran before America’s November presidential election, according to the Debka report.

The possible use of force against Iran has been discussed by Israel and its western allies for months. Israel insists on the right to strike if and when it sees fit, saying it will not seek anyone’s consent.
There is a fear that, if such an attack happens, Iran would retaliate against any forces it sees as enemies, which could result in a major regional war, dragging in other countries as well.

Israel will only accept Iran developing its civilian nuclear industry is if it shuts down all its uranium enrichment sites and uses imported fuel, Barak said. Essentially, that is what the P5+1 group offered Iran this time.  But Tehran still insisted it did not intend to create a nuclear bomb and, as "proof", agreed on the eve of negotiations to the resumption of UN nuclear monitoring at Iran’s sites, including Parchin.

Webster Tarpley: West Is behind Syrian Violence

More bombing in Damascus; Is Syria headed to a civil war in spite of the UN ceasefire. Clashes have erupted between pro and anti Assad groups in northern Lebanon and news of a group of Lebanese pilgrims abducted by anti-government armed groups in Syria. Is Syrian violence spreading into the neighboring country and is the a deliberate attempt to do just that?