Senate Where do you go for your news?

Read your top stories. You're doing well.

 

Thanks!

I think it helps when one of the main writers is more left leaning and the other is more right leaning. It makes us both look at each other's stories with healthy skepticism.

 

I look forward to esoteric nonsense that praises centre-right former President Obama.

On the topic, the Economist has this to say about Rouhani's second term:

http://www.economist.com/news/middl...box-irans-president-begins-his-battle-control

Hard times for hardlinersHassan Rouhani wins a second term
Having won at the ballot box, Iran’s president begins his battle for control of the unelected bits of state

Middle East and Africa

May 20th 2017
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IF HE had intended to clip President Hassan Rouhani’s wings, Iran’s reactionary supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will be disappointed. Far from the knife-edge of an election analysts had anticipated, Mr Rouhani won a resounding 57% of the vote with his rousing reformist rhetoric, and secured a second term without the need for a run-off. His main rival, an authoritarian former judge, Ebrahaim Raisi, who had the backing of the hardliners, trailed badly with 38%.

Traditionally, Mr Khamenei has found second-term presidents, whatever their hue, to be troublesome. Gaining in confidence and anxious to leave a legacy, they have fought to claw back some of the supreme leader’s powers, resulting in acrimonious showdowns. Thanks to his superior constitutional and extra-constitutional powers, Mr Khamenei has always emerged on top. But at 78, he is, perhaps, tiring. Mr Rouhani, ten years his junior, will feel empowered by a popular mandate the unelected supreme leader lacks. He won 23.5m votes, almost 5m more than he did in 2013, and more than any previous president (with the exception of the election in 2009, which is widely reckoned to have been rigged).

Mr Rouhani, say his advisers, will continue to shy away from confrontation, for now. He could make job-creation, a major problem during his first term when unemployment increased, his uncontroversial centrepiece policy. The inward investment he promised but failed to deliver in his first term might, he hopes, now materialise. Foreigners investors, relieved that the hardliner was defeated, could make good on deals that they put on hold. The question is whether his “path of engagement with the world”, as he put it in his victory speech, might induce America to reconsider its sanctions against companies using its banking system to invest in Iran. But Donald Trump’s antipathy towards Iran is likely to prove an obstacle here. The choice of Saudi Arabia as the first leg of his first foreign visit is far from auspicious.
But having presented himself as a reformist bent on sweeping aside the deep state, many voters will be expecting more from Mr Rouhani. He drew Iran’s disengaged cosmopolitan middle classes, women, Iranian exiles and marginalised ethnic and religious minorities to the ballot box with denunciations of his opponents as people who “shame freedom” and “only executed and jailed, cut out tongues and sewed mouths shut...and banned the pen and banned the picture”.

His post-election statements and actions will be closely scrutinised. Will he champion the release from house arrest of the defeated reformist candidates in the election of 2009? Will he defend civil liberties and unfettered access to Twitter? Will his new cabinet includes his first female minister, or the Islamic Republic’s first Sunni minister? Having won his vote, says an exiled journalist, Iranians are waiting to see whether Mr Rouhani remains the regime stalwart who served for 16 years as Iran’s national security adviser or the promised harbinger of change.

While trying to meet his supporters’ aspirations, Mr Rouhani must also balance the risk of a backlash by the very forces he lampooned in his campaign. Previous second-term presidents fell victim to their machinations. Mr Khamenei’s men thwarted an earlier reformist president, Muhammad Khatami, and his promises of a fully-fledged democracy by disqualifying thousands of parliamentary candidates and shutting down newspapers. Mr Rouhani recalls, too, how the Revolutionary Guards flexed their muscles after his election victory in 2013 and the signing of the nuclear deal with the world’s major powers, launching open criticism of him on both occasions. Though defeated at the ballot box, the hardliners are far from out of the picture. More than 15m Iranians voters opted for their candidate, Mr Raisi. And their powers remain formidable. Backed by a million basijis, or volunteer paramilitaries, they can arrest journalists, muzzle the media and, through their foreign operatives across the Middle East, continue to inflame relations with America.

Prolonged polarisation, of the kind created in the last days of the campaign, is unlikely to serve Mr Rouhani well. But while toning his rhetoric down, advisers expect Mr Rouhani to use his electoral mandate to chip at the power that the unelected Mr Khamenei and his cohorts have amassed after 30 years at the helm. “He doesn’t like the concept that the supreme leader is above the law,” the adviser continues, and expects Mr Rouhani to target Mr Khamenei’s long list of “illegal” prerogatives, while leaving the constitutional ones intact. Mr Rouhani, he says, will seek oversight of Mr Khamenei’s “shadow government”, “transparency, accountability and monitoring” of the vast clerical and paramilitary holdings amassed under Mr Khamenei’s auspices, promotion of the armed forces over the Revolutionary Guard, and government control of the state media. It could be a lively four years.

 

This is what I have been reading. My thoughts on the article are mixed.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...esident-isnt-a-reformer-hes-an-enabler-215171

Don’t be fooled by Hassan Rouhani. He’s deeply complicit in an evil system.
By RAY TAKEYH
May 22, 2017


Hassan Rouhani, the newly re-elected president of Iran, is a creature of the Islamic Republic’s establishment, an apparatchik with much guile and little imagination. And yet Rouhani’s subversive political campaign may do lasting damage to the Islamic Republic. In the process of reclaiming his office, he shed light on the regime’s dark past and made fantastic promises that he has neither the ability nor the intention of keeping. Rouhani’s campaign alienated the regime’s power brokers and his tenure will inevitably disillusion his constituents. The Rouhani presidency will once more remind the Iranian people that the theocratic state cannot reform itself.
In one of his rallies, Rouhani assailed his conservative rival Ibrahim Raisi by stressing that “the people will say no to those who over the course of 38 years only executed and jailed.” Here Rouhani was obliquely referring to one of the regime’s most contentious acts. In the summer of 1988, the aging founding leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in one last act of vengeance against his secular detractors, ordered the mass execution of political prisoners. The judiciary was to discharge its obligations and established a panel of judges soon known as the “Death Commission” to carry out the killings. Raisi first came to national attention as a member of that commission, which put to death thousands of prisoners in short order. Most of the executed were denied a proper burial and had their bodies dumped in mass and undisclosed graves. In the Islamic Republic’s cruel lexicon, these were called “cemeteries for the dammed.”

​

This was Raisi’s justice, but the burden was not his alone. The prison genocide was overseen by two officials—the then-president of Iran, Ali Khamenei, and the speaker of the parliament, the late Hashemi Rafsanjani. As a member of parliament at that time, Rouhani was well aware of what was taking place in the prisons. He chose silence. For the past three decades, the regime has sought to whitewash its past by making it taboo to publicly discuss this episode. Still, rumors abound, and that demented summer is enshrined in the collective memory. By invoking that episode, Rouhani challenged the core legitimacy of a theocratic state that insists on its religious pedigree and its concern for dispensing justice. Khamenei and the ruling elite who are implicated in that massacre are unlikely to easily forgive their newly reelected president for his opportunism. Not only must Rouhani have been aware of that episode, but his political ally and current minister of justice, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, was one of the more aggressive judges on the Death Commission.
Throughout his campaign, Rouhani cleverly played to the crowds by criticizing the regime’s security organs and warning “those of you who cut out tongues and sewed mouths shut. Those of you who over the past years only issued the word bane, banned the pen and banned the pictures. Please don’t even breathe the word freedom for it shames freedom.” The president on occasion also warned the Revolutionary Guards not to interfere with the election process. This was an act of political genius—as an insider of more than 30 years, Rouhani suddenly appropriated the language of dissent and seemingly presented himself as a critic of the system. And now the system is ready to strike back. Khamenei still controls all the relevant institutions and the Guards hold sway over much of Iran’s economy. It is hard to see how even Rouhani’s most modest policy ambitions can be implemented.
Still, Rouhani holds some advantages for the regime. As a politician who spent decades as the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, he has been intimately involved with the regime’s terror apparatus. He built up much credit with the guardians of the state by remaining quiet in summer of 2009 as the Green Movement leaders were dispatched to prison on fantastic charges. And his presidency was devoted not to human rights and economic reform but beguiling the United States into an arms control agreement that put Iran on a steady and legal path to the bomb. These are not inconsiderable achievements, but in the vengeful politics of the Islamic Republic, they may not be sufficient to redeem him.
And then there are Rouhani’s pledges to the public. The president’s rallies, as indeed with most commemorative occasions in Iran, were transformed into protests against the state with the chanting of Green Movement slogans. Rouhani cleverly encouraged this, offered vague promises of restoring freedom and even hinted at the rehabilitation of those languishing in prison and exile. He was to stand against the forces of repression, despite the fact that he has a history of indifference to human rights. Rouhani was never part of the reform movement that exhilarated the Iranians in the 1990s with its claim to harmonize religion and pluralism, and he stood with the regime when the Green Movement shook the foundations of the state. The Islamic Republic cannot use its own constitutional provisions to broaden its parameters. Aggrieved Iranians will learn once more that they can gain no political relief from another Islamist president.
So it would be inaccurate to call Rouhani a reformist. He has always been part of a pragmatic cohort of Iranian leaders attracted to the so-called China model of offering citizens economic rewards in exchange for political passivity. During his campaign, he hinted at better times to come by claiming that he would succeed in lifting all the remaining sanctions on Iran. This is impossible, given Iran’s penchant toward terrorism, its human rights abuses and its imperial ravaging of the Middle East. The fact is that Iran has never been able to emulate China’s economic trajectory. A state drowning in corruption, with a history of mismanagement, Iran has always been plagued by the twin forces of inflation and unemployment. It is hard to see how the regime can meet the basic financial demands of its people as it insists on spending vast sums sustaining the Assad dynasty in Syria and menacing Sunni monarchy.
Rouhani has reclaimed the presidency with his usual mixture of cunning and cynicism. He will now confront Khamenei and other hard-liners disturbed at his indictments of their regime and its history. All of Iran’s re-elected presidents have limited room for maneuver given the imbalance of power between elected and nonelected institutions. But Rouhani even less so. Perhaps more problematic for the president and his republic is a disillusioned citizenry that will gain neither political freedom nor financial relief.
Iran is today what it has been since the outbreak of the Green Revolution in 2009, a regime marching steadily toward its demise. The bonds between state and society have long been severed and cannot be healed by another Rouhani presidency. Iran today resembles the Soviet Union of the 1970s, where appearances of strength concealed the reality of institutional decay and popular disenchantment. In one of the ironies of Iran, a president widely celebrated in the West has only further divided the elite and is bound to disappoint the public.
During his speech in Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump spoke of the need to confront and “isolate” Iran. But the Iran challenge confronting Trump is more intricate and perplexing than the one faced by his predecessors. This is no longer about imposing interim restraints on Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, but how to erode the unsteady foundations of the Islamic Republic. This will require disciplined application of both American power and rhetoric. The task at hand is to shrink Iran’s imperial frontiers while stressing its economy. The Trump team must reconstitute the shattered sanctions architecture while making human rights and the plight of dissidents one of its foremost priorities. In Riyadh, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered the first salvo in what needs to be a systematic campaign of delegitimizing the theocratic regime. America’s declarations have always mattered, none more so than in Iran, a country whose history has demonstrated an unusual degree of sensitivity to our words.
The Islamic Republic was an ideological experiment born in a century that witnessed so many attempts to bend human will to whims of vanguards of history. The revolution has now exhausted itself and cannot meet either the material needs or the political aspirations of its constituents. The theocratic regime insists on marching toward the dustbin of history and the only question remains whether America can hasten that march.

 

Well, that was a wall of stupid. I agree that the Iranian regime cannot be reformed. But reformist presidents are not for domestic consumption, where they can do very little. I think most people who vote for reformist candidates know this also. They are for foreign consumption, to put a friendlier face on the regime, to normalise relations so that people can breathe a little, without the constant shadow of war looming above their heads. And perhaps, if they're lucky, attract some foreign investment.

The Iranian regime, autocratic as it is, is no worse to its population than any of the Arab autocracies of the region that the author feels no similar need to "isolate, confront and deligitmize". You could no doubt write a similar hit piece about staying silent about political executions, and oppression that they knew about, about any of the other leaders of the region who are now lovingly embraced as allies against extremism. The only difference is that Iran acts against US interests, while they are clients to US interests.

Those sanctions he is so eager to pass, supposedly to break the regime's back and liberate its people, will only hurt Iranians further, to the benefit of the regime as the people's dependence on it increases. I am confident that he is well aware of this himself too. Any Iran-watcher must have noticed how previous rounds of sanctions have crippled steadily more sectors of the economy, allowing the Revolutionary Guard, which safely operates with state funds in its back, to swoop in and monopolise them one by one to become the all-encompassing economic octopus it is today. Who does that benefit? US interests, or Iranian interests? Who is empowered by this? The people or the state? But if you want to have a boogeyman with which to scare regional neighbours with to keep buying US arms ($100b arms deal with KSA just announced over the weekend) for as long as you can, and when it outstays its purpose, to invade, carve up and get oil contracts out of, then it's squarely in your interests, yes.

That the relationship between state and society is deteriorated is not news. It was from the start. Nobody wanted this. The revolution was led by leftists, as was in vogue worldwide in the late 70s, until it was hijacked in the 11th hour by Khomeini and Islamists, who later used the cover of war with Iraq to turn around and kill the leftists who helped get them to power in the first place. Tellingly, many of the presidents and PMs of the interim provisional government and early Islamic Republic are now exiled, dead under suspicious circumstances, in house arrest or otherwise ostracised.

Whatever the state tells people to do, they do the opposite without fail. People have stopped having kids, we have negative population growth, because the state wants them to procreate. People turned out to the streets in the millions to 'mourn' the passing of the late Rafsanjani, a fatcat opportunist politician universally hated by liberals and conservatives alike, because the state told people to stay home. The pre-Islamic festivity of 'chahar shanbe suri', which precedes Nowruz by a week and is not that popular and is observed mostly by kids, had record attendance this year because authorities told people to stop celebrating it due to its 'pagan roots'. It usually involves kids lighting firecrackers, this year people sent up fireworks.

 

I like to watch DemocracyNow!
In US standards it's far left, but I like most of the guests they have. They have often invited people like Noam Chomsky, Robert Reich and Joseph Stiglitz. Also, Amy Goodman is a good journalist in my opinion.

Then, The Real News Network is also quite good. I don't agree with everything Paul Jay says, but in most cases he makes very good points that are not made in mainstream media.

 

I read and have subscriptions to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Daily Progress.

 

What is the Daily Progress?

 

It's actually my local paper here in Charlottesville, that has occasionally gotten some national exposure & a Pulitzer since the Unite the Right rally (or, as we residents call it, "the events of August 11th and 12th").

 

Wow. What a brainwashed moron I was.

 

New York Times, Guardian, BBC, Washington Post, Boston Globe, my local newspaper, Politico

 

Reading back through this thread and yeah... still can't get Al Jazeera English in the US. And now the Roku channel I used to stream it has been shut down.

So yes, I still use BBC News as my primary source. And the Kansas City Star for local.

 

I have reduced my sources to New York Times and Democracy Now! for news.

(By the way, my perplexity toward leftist YouTubers and YouTube left-wing shows has grown stronger in the last year. They keep showing the dumbest segments of cable media just to mock them and make the case that they are better. Half of the time they are giving useless news about elections, even when they are still very far away, and very often they aren't capable of making substantive analysis of many progressive legislations, because they just give for granted that those solutions are the right way to go a priori. )

 

Right now: Local alerts. Dr. Fauci, Dr. Blix and Cuomo. That's it.

 

mainly PBS Newshour and NPR (including local programming).

also, scan headlines from WaPo, NYT, and the BBC for particular stories of interest

 

Primarily WHO, CDC, and Michigan.gov, and for local stuff I rely on things like a county mutual aid resources page and individual hospitals’ COVID-19 info pages. Reddit’s r/Coronavirus and Twitter can be useful for finding very new stuff, so long as you look for links to reputable news sources and ignore all the blather.

And of course any conspiracy theory endorsed by One America News Network.

 

Twitter

 

Still BBC..watching World News right now..also watch the local news.

 

Right here.

 

Local news and https://www.livenewsnow.com/american/msnbc.html