Saturday, January 23, 2010

"Poor " "Immigrant" Moulitsas Family Moved to Super-Wealthy Suburb

Where did they get the money?

One of the questions that has long perplexed those media covering MAMZ critically is, "Where did he come from?"

A reader who insists on anonymity tells me:
( . . . )

Anyway here is an address for Markos Moulitsas in 1982

Markos Nmi Moulitsas
515 Huntington Lane
Schaumberg Illinois
Phone 759 8379...Prefix would have been 773 or 847 as it is currently

Previous address 123 Limerick Lane Schaumberg il 1981
And ....202 Gettysberg Dr. Bolingbrook Ill. ( I don’t know if there was a date)

I don’t know what the Nmi stands for...but it was there...
I'm not sure how this particular bit of information moves the story along, but I do know that in the past simply making a transcript of a speech MAMZ recorded prompted members of the public to analyze the time lines and make major discoveries that might not have been discovered without the written transcript.

What the above biographical information proves is that the "humble" and "uninfluential" family of MAMZ moved from El Salvador to one of the wealthiest suburbs in America. Where did they get the money?

Sometimes you just have to keep putting pieces of the puzzle together until you have the whole picture. It's the action of putting the pieces together that eventually results in seeing the whole puzzle clearly.

So, why bother to investigate Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) so minutely? The same question was asked of the National Inquirer's investigation of the John Edwards/Reille Hunter story. Sometimes, when a blogger smells something fishy, s/he has to keep gathering the facts until what smells fishy to a few people ultimately is shown to be fishy to everyone.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Can You Trust ANYTHING that Present and Former CIA Agents Say?

I have to admit that my emotional reaction to the Washington Post story about how seven CIA agents died in Afghanistan is more a reaction of mirth and amusement. According to the WaPost story, the CIA encouraged a Jordanian man to gather information for the CIA surreptitiously. After what seemed like one good bit of information, these hotshot CIA administrators admitted this Jordanian guy into their inner-geographical-sanctums, where he promptly blew himself and seven CIA smart-asses to hell.

That's what the WaPost reports, anyway, but who is their source for this information? Their sources are "former U.S. government officials":
. . . the new evidence points to a carefully planned act of deception by a trusted operative from a country closely allied with the United States in the fight against al-Qaeda. U.S. and Jordanian officials had come to regard Balawi as trustworthy, former officials said, despite a history of support for Islamist extremism -- a point of view he appeared to endorse in an interview with an al-Qaeda-affiliated publication as recently as this past fall.

"He was someone who had already worked with us," said a former U.S. counterterrorism officer who discussed the ongoing investigation on the condition of anonymity. The official said Balawi had been jointly managed by U.S. and Jordanian agencies and had provided "actionable intelligence" over several weeks of undercover work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The CIA declined to comment on reports identifying Balawi as the bomber, first posted by al-Jazeera television on its Web site. A U.S. intelligence official said only that the agency is "looking closely at every aspect" of the attack on the facility known as Forward Operating Base Chapman, in the province of Khost near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan.

Well, this is just unthinkable! The CIA has fallen victim to a "carefully planned deception" when they are supposed to be masters of "carefully planned deception". Aside from the account, to the press, by someone who admits that he was an intelligence officer (and therefore trained to lie, dissemble, and invent cover stories), how can we know that this WaPost version of events is true? The WaPost says,
In September of last year, Balawi gave an interview to Vanguards of Khorasan, a magazine associated with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, according to SITE. His handlers presumably were aware of the interview but may have regarded it as part of his cover.
Oh, so an agent needs a "cover"? That can't be true! That's a "conspiracy theory" of the sort that gets people banned from DailyKos. But, let's think about Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) again for a just moment and ask ourselves jypothetically what part of his public personna and histrionics might be "as a part of his cover," if in fact he still works for the CIA, which he has said he would have "no problem" doing.

Isn't it logically just as likely that the seven CIA agents were blown up by a pizza delivery man, or a prostitute with a heavy handbag, and now the CIA needs a cover-story that will not leave them looking like perfectly incompetent jackasses?

Is it possible that the next country the US plans to overthrow, invade, or supply massive arms to is Jordan, and therefore the CIA is preparing the public to believe that something very serious needs to be done about Jordan? Or is this whole story for the purpose of getting the US public angry enough at "perfectly planned deceptions" that kill US Government employees, so that the public will show more support for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Jordan?

I don't have any way to answer these questions. I offer them only as several alternatives to the stories that the paid liars at the CIA and other "intelligence officials" are telling us, through the ever-willing reporters and editors at the Washington Post.

And that brings us, of course, back to Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga. He says he spent two years at the CIA, training to be a secret agent, at the same time when he started "leftist" DailyKos. Does the CIA really permit legitimate leftists to start legitimately left-wing blogs while training at the CIA? Or is it possible that the CIA just didn't KNOW that the Markos Moulitsas they were training was a left-wing bloggers? Or did the CIA know with utter certainty that the Markos Moulitsas they were training was NOT a "left-wing blogger", but was instead preparing a cover story that would be helpful as he pretended to be a left-wing blogger?

Certainly, these are all convoluted questions (not assertions) but then MAMZ's account of starting a left-wing blog while training at the CIA to be a secret agent is the most convoluted and irrational proposition that the public has even been asked to accept. It's more preposterous than the Weapons and Mass Destruction stories of the Bush Administration. It only makes sense if MAMZ was training to be a secret agent who would infiltrate the US Left. Then, it makes sense!

Why are the two years MAMZ spent at the CIA invariably omitted and excluded from biographies of him, whether he writes them (autobiography) or someone else does? When he made a public confession in a June 6, 2006 appearance at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, in which he stated facts that can only mean that he was at the CIA from 2001 to 2003, didn't that fact become an obligatory and highly relevant part of his biography, if only because his "training" at the CIA to be "a secret agent" allegedly lasted for TWO YEARS?

Now, let's suppose that he is lying. How can we possibly trust anyone who would like about how he spent two years of his life, when his activities are of obvious relevance to his present credibility when he claims to be a "liberal," "leftist" "progressive"? A man who would lie in public about two years t at the CIA would lie about just about everything else, wouldn't you agree? And so NOTHING Markos Moulitsas says can be taken at face value, either because he is a dilettante sophomoric amateur liar, or because he is a Government-trained liar, just like the "former US Counter Terrorism Office," to whom the WaPost anonymously attributes the "facts" it reports about the alleged deaths of several CIA officials in Afghanistan.

When asked to tell how you have spent your professional life and what experiences have led you to where you are today, isn't it lying to omit two years of training in Washington, DC with the Central Intelligence Agency?

To my knowledge, no mainstream news agency has reported what MAMZ, himself, has confessed to, or even reported his confession as a story that needed further definition. That's why we cannot automatically believe what the Washington Post tells us about how seven CIA employees ended up dead in Afghanistan. When they don't tell us the truth that we already know, how can we trust them to tell us truths about which only they have gathered information, and even that information has been gathered from the same sort of "counter-terrorism" officials who were paying Iraqi reporters to write positive stories about the US Armed Forces?

Sunday, January 3, 2010

What Distinguishes MAMZ from other Retired Military Propagandists?

MAMZ,Markos Moulitsas,Kos,DailyKos

I'm recovering from a near-fatal bike crash, so I'll make this short and quick, leaving out supporting links because of my accident and because they can be found elsewhere in this blog by using key words in the search bar above, or simply referring to the links in the right sidebar.

A lot of what I learn comes from watching my Site Meter and researching the issues in which my readers express interest, i.e. readers search at Google and find their way to this blog looking for specific information about its subject. Today, I believe one of my readers was asking himself, "What distinguishes ex-military, CIA-trainee Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) from others right-wingers who have left paid jobs with the military to accept paid jobs as media talking heads?

In an April 20, 2008 New York Times article entitled, "Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand, Times writer David Barstow tells us how retired military (like MAMZ) have been used by the White House and the Pentagon to covertly shape our views of reality with respect to the Iraq War (and probably quite a lot of other issues):

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

How the Pentagon Spread Its Message

Audio, video and documents that show how the military’s talking points were disseminated.

Talk to the Newsroom

Q & A on Pentagon’s ‘Message Machine’

Message Machine David Barstow answers questions on his article about the Pentagon’s use of military analysts to create favorable news coverage.

Dining with Donald H. Rumsfeld, second from left, during his final week as secretary of defense were the retired officers Donald W. Shepperd, left, Thomas G. McInerney and Steven J. Greer, right.

“Meet the Press”

Appearing with Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” in 2005 were Wesley K. Clark, center; Wayne A. Downing; Montgomery Meigs, right; and Barry R. McCaffrey, foreground.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Of course, the New York Times is unlikely to be blameless in this farce. They may well have known about it in real time and only divulged the information when President Bush had already achieved his strategic goals.

The objective of this program was to covertly use ex-military people who were, in fact, still working for the Government, to influence US public opinion. Isn't that the MAMZ story? He's ex-military, ex-CIA-trainee, and then he's in the media telling us what to think about the Iraq War (don't resort to civil disobedience); Democratic candidates (ex-military like himself are the best candidates, says MAMZ) and myriad other issues.

What does the Government gain by this. First of all, there is no need to invite real leftists to represent the progressive opinion on television when you can present an ex-military, CIA-trained fake leftist instead. The public believes it is hearing a range of views when all it is hearing is the gamut of Pentagon propaganda.

Why should they invite the US Ambassador from Cuba or Venezuela to represent leftist views when they have an in-house "leftist" who will reliably not say anything illuminating?

Of course some of the public, right and left, was convinced that MAMZ is a wild leftist because he said he didn't give a damn about US contractors who were burned on a bridge in Iraq. But that head-fake was merely for the purpose of gaining street credibility as a "leftist".

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd prefer to hear from the leftist view from Ambassador of Venezuela or Cuba rather than from an ex-military CIA-trained propagandist. MAMZ says that he doesn't care about issues and only about electing Democratic candidates. With the Republican and Democratic parties in basic agreement to pursue control of Iraq as well as war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Yemen, how much difference does it really make to Pentagon military-industrial goals whether the Democrats or Republicans are in office? The paradigm is the same regardless of its spokesmen.

Has "leftist" MAMZ ever presented and argued for an alternative paradigm about anything? Is he a socialist? No! Does he advocate for the Venezuelan view of Latin America? Of course not! By claims not to care about issues. How can the Left of any nation be led by someone who doesn't care about political issues and is only interested in political parties? If you don't care about political issues, then how do you choose between political parties?

MAMZ says he left the Republican Party because of its position on "states' rights". States' rights is an issue and a relatively obscure one, except to those who know that it's a code word for anti-gay, anti-Black, anti-women and anti-disabled. States rights was and remains the rallying cry of the Klu Klux Klan and the most conservative members of the US Supreme Court.

All this is to say that the only thing that distinguishes MAMZ from the Pentagon generals above is that MAMZ claims to be a leftist while being a-political enables him to support the status quo and be acclaimed by the mainstream media as a radical. It must be fun to be a radical who never has to actually say or do anything radical.

I don't read DailyKos, but I read the New York Times and the Washington Post. I've seen MAMZ attack Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post, but I've never heard him attack the expansion of US wars to from Iraq to Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Yemen. If he's really a leftist, then why doesn't he join forces with Hugo Chavez or at least President Lula Ignacio Lula da Silva of Brazil. In fact, most of Latin America has heard nothing at all about MAMZ, except perhaps that he is the wealthiest and most influential blogger leftists in a country that has no other wealthy and influential ex-military, ex-CIA (?) leftists.

The truth is that leftists don't get much play in America, if they are real leftists. When was the last time you saw Congressman Bernie Sanders or Kucinich on Meet the Press? MAMZ never 'crashed any gates'. He was born and bred within the gates of the Salvadoran oligarchy, his brother went to that great bastion of leftism called Yale University; MAMZ supported Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, as well as arch right-wing Henry Hyde; he trained at the CIA and then crashed the gates of the Establishment with the most right-wing credentials of any leftist in the history of American politics.

MAMZ never was outside the gates. He pretended to be so, between the end of his training at the CIA (2003) and his first article attacking Hillary Clinton for the Washington Post (2006). He crashed the gates of a warm and wet vagina, which was yearning for an already familiar penis.

Friday, January 1, 2010

Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) Disavows Membership in Any Ethnic Group other than White Men


If you want to learn about and understand a public figure and find his "macaca moments", there is no better place to start than the articles s/he wrote for his college newspaper. Yet, to my knowledge, no "mainstream" media outlet has ever reported a single word from the college newspaper writings of Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas ZÚÑIGA (MAMZ). For instance, no mainstream newspaper has reported that the would-be dean of leftism wrote a hateful screed against gays while he was in college, advocating that ALL participation by gays in the military was "inherently uncomfortable" to MAMZ.

Instead of printing MAMZ's own words from the time, and his earthshattering confessions of his CIA training while starting DailyKos, which confession comes 2006, the mainstream media has been content to rely on MAMZ's own account of what was in MAMZ's articles and letters.

For example, One biographer wrote:

His focus changed after he read a negative column about Mexican-American students in the school newspaper, the Northern Star. Moulitsas felt the need to write a column of his own in response; a few semesters later, he not only had a regular column but was also the editor in chief of the paper . . .

However, having read every single article that MAMZ published at his alma mater, I cannot find any evidence that he wrote and published "his own response" to the negative column about Mexican-Americans. I encourage readers to look at the archives and see if perhaps I have missed something. I cannot find any articles at all in the student newspaper by or about MAMZ being Latin American or engaged in Latino advocacy.

There is no evidence that MAMZ was a Latino leader in college, but there is plenty of evidence that he was not. If you actually read what MAMZ published in his college newspaper on this topic, you discover that MAMZ explicitly disavowed being a Latino or Hispanic. Instead he insisted that, by virtue of being a white man, and not a member of any ethnic or religious group that suffers persecution, MAMZ was never subjected to prejudice of any kind.

After writing a four-part series on "racism" for his college newspaper, on Thursday, September 2, 1993 MAMZ wrote and published the following letter in his college newspaper. The letter is remarkable and embarrassing in that MAMZ disavows all participation in any ethnic group (including Latinos and Hispanics) and other such groups as might be targeted based on their apparent membership or participation in any ethnic group.

MAMZ says in the letter,
I could always talk against racism, fight ignorance and prejudice wherever I ran into it, yet I would always be looking in from another room and I could always close the door. My life, in my world, in my own detached selfishness.
Are progressives and liberals really people who look upon "racism" with "detached selfishness? Keep in mind that he published this in the college newspaper immediately after interviewing many minorities on campus about their experience. And then he declared that he could and would turn his back on the experiences others had shared with him and about which he had written.

Moreover, he asserts that he did "pass" for a white man, saying:
And as I left the ugly reality of racism behind, it struck me that what was such an easy and trivial exercise for me would be impossible for anyone whose skin color or religious persuassion (sic0 made them the target of bigotry and discrimination. They would never be able to escape who they were. (Emphasis added.)
Clearly, MAMZ was disavowing participation in any ethnic group whatever and and feeling the relief that comes from knowing that racism only effects "them", not us white men.

Read the entire letter. It helps to explain why DailyKos is 97% white, 2% Black and zero percent Latino. After you read the letter, you will understand that Markos cannot be counted as an Hispanic or Latino because, with the benefit of white skin, he has verbally and explicity disavowed participation in any ethnic group besides white men. Keep in mind that the editor of the newspaper often writes the title and not the author of the article.
Student opinion: Escape will only breed ignorance

By Markos Moulitsas

Today the Star ran the last of my four-part series on racism at NIU. Having been a project that dominated my life for the last couple of weeks, I was more than glad to have it finished and over with so I could return to the mundane world of Faculty Senate meetings and other reporter stuff.

Yet as I gathered the last interviews and typed the final words of the final story, I was overcome by a strange, uneasy feeling.

I was terribly happy to escape the ugliness of a racist world for the safety of my every day-to-day life. Sure, I could always talk against racism, fight ignorance and prejudice wherever I ran into it, yet I would always be looking in from another room and I could always close the door. My life, in my world, in my own detached selfishness.

And as I left the ugly reality of racism behind, it struck me that what was such an easy and trivial exercise for me would be impossible for anyone whose skin color or religious persuassion made them the target of bigotry and discrimination. They would never be able to escape who they were.

Nor should they ever have to! It truly is a sad commentary on our society when this debate is even necessary.

There is so much that people from different cultures could learn about each other. The benefits would be incalcuble, yet they remain unattained.

Many of you know or have read Pete Schuh, a reporter and columnist here at the Star. He has occular albanism, which makes his eyes perpetually wander from side-to-side, something over which he has no control.

When I first met him last summer, his eyes were the feature that most stood out about him. I would sit and talk to him, but since I couldn't make true eye contact with him it made me feel very uncomfortable. Finaly (sic)I got my courage up one day and asked him about it.

We spent a few hours discussing it, and I don't know about him, but I felt better for having been educated about something about which I didn't understand and felt uneasy about.

And this is the part that gives me hope that our species will someday be able to get along:

A few days ago, I overheard Pete talking to somebody else here at the newsroom, and during their conversation, he made a casual reference to the problem with his eyes.

I was stunned. As I got to know Pete for who he was, and not what he was, such trivial differences such as his eye problem became so irrelevant to our friendship that I had forgotten it even existed. I could keep eye-contact with him and I wouldn't even notice his eyes!

Now why couldn't the same thing happen between our races (sic)? There are truly no physical differences or gulfs in beliefs between any of us that can form a permanent barrior (sic) to better understanding.

And to achieve this understanding we all need to enter the ugly world of racism and intolerance I so much wanted to escape. Sitting in the room with the closed door will never solve anything, only breed further ignorance.

But to open that door to the knowledge and understanding that currently sits on your doorstep can accomplish nothing but let in the solution.
So, there you have it: MAMZ took the position that "racism" and religious persecution are problems for victims to confront, but not for white men (such as himself), who can simply ignore "racism" and "religious persecution" and go about their daily lives as if these realities did not exist.

It's not hard, then, to understand how Moulitsas C. Alberto Moulitsas ZÚÑIGA ended up with Gina Cooper as the coordinator of Netroots ("Whiteroots") Nation, the annual gathering of the white-skinned part of the blogospher During the 2007 gathering Gina Cooper told Washington Post writer Jose Antonio Vargas , "I hate to use the word diversity."

Meanwhile, the Washington Post interviewed some of the few non-white participants and wrote:
Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, who is part Latina, attended a panel on Friday called "The Changing Dynamics of Diversity in Progressive Politics," organized by Cheryl Contee, an African American woman. Ancona works for Vote Hope, a California-based activist group, and said one reason she came to Yearly Kos was to get an answer to this question: "Why is the blogosphere, which is supposed to be more democratic, reinforcing the same white male power structure that exists?"

The clearest direct evidence of discriminatory intent comes from mouths of Markos Moulitsas and Gina Cooper themselves. MAMZ says,

I would always be looking in [at colorism] from another room and I could always close the door. My life, in my world, in my own detached selfishness.
Gina Cooper expresses a similar aversion to discussion and participation of minorities, saying to a WaPost writer,
"I hate using the word 'diversity.' I don't know what we use there.
So, as the Red Alerts blog characterized it at the time, "Surprise! DailyKos is All White (and Full of Racists)."

I don't think it should surprise us that during the same period MAMZ wrote and published a letter opposing ALL gay participation in the US military, whether "out" or "in the closet." Today, you can sign a petition (as over a hundred other people have) opposing MAMZ's effort to exclude all gays from the military.