What are the top news stories in America as Erdogan seizes 90 nuclear warheads at Incirlik?

I've done my morning review of the mainstream news. The two stories vying for top headline news status are, in no particular order;

- Is Donald Trump insensitive? Has he finally gone too far in hurting the feelings of the Khan family?

- Is Hillary dishonest? Were her Sunday media interviews an exercise in creative bullshitting?

Yes, those are the stories the American public must grapple with today.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the wily Erdogan has for all practical purposes had a lock on some unknown number of US nukes since July 15. Oddly enough, a number of fighter aircraft involved in the short-lived coup attempt on that date flew in and out of Incirlik that night.

Coincidence?

And let's not forget that Erdogan, and Erdogan alone, decides how many Syrian refugees will walk to the EU this year.

Seems to me that should be a way bigger story than Trump's insensitivity or Clinton's dishonesty.

The closed loop of the military-industrial-media complex

That pre-DNC dump of hacked emails should have been a game changer. After all, those hacked emails removed all doubt about whether or not the Clinton camp resorted to skankery and slime to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders.

Of course they did!

So what was the fallout in America's mainstream news sites? Did they say anything at all about the skankery and slime?

Nope. Instead, mainstream screens were overflowing with speculation about how Putin engineered the hack to help his good buddy Trump.

That story originated with Hillary campaign guru the Mookster, and by God, it was a stroke of genius! This little episode is gonna be a case study in Polysci classes for decades. Beautiful work, Mook!

You succeeded in taking the eyeballs of the electorate off your corrupt candidate, who the emails reveal as doing dirty by Bernie, and making the discussion about Trump's cosy and totally imaginary relationship with the evil dictator Putin!

Alas, there are some major challenges ahead for the ABCNBCCBS wankers who truly believe re-cycling press releases equals news reporting.

First of all, it looks like America's formerly reliable bum-boy Erdogan has gone completely off leash. As of right now, he's holding hostage a number of American nuclear weapons, variously reported as anywhere from 50 to 90.

He's also holding hostage hundreds of US troops who are supposedly guarding those nukes at a Turkish air base.

The Turkey situation right now is the biggest crisis of US foreign policy since the Cuban missile crisis. What is the media establishment telling you about it?

Nothing.

But they've got lots of theories about Putin's support for Trump.

General John Allen (retired) takes crap in "love trumps hate" celebratory punch bowl at DNC

Things have been a little tense around Falling Downs the last couple weeks. The Farm Manager insists on watching the conventions on CBSN, aka "the HRC network."

She's largely fallen for the mewling pro-Hillary propaganda that CBS has smothered us with this week.

So thank God for General John Allen!

Suddenly all that "indispensable nation" shit seemed to roust her out of her stupor.

Yup, General John showed us why all those PNAC types have been defecting from the GOP to the Hillary camp. If you wanna make sure that America remains the most indispensable and most special and most powerful nation in the family of nations, you gotta vote for Hillary!

Gotta go... Chelsea Clinton is making her speech...

Why are all those noxious neocon turds aligning behind Hillary?

The mainstream "liberal" Toronto Star saw fit to run an opinion piece by neocon turd supremo Robert Kagan the other day, the gist of which was that America is flirting with fascism.

Yup, it's that Trump thing.

Trump is the Pied Piper of populism - the American Hitler. Yessiree, America today is just like Germany in the thirties.

There are of course innumerable reasons why America today is nothing whatsoever like Germany in the thirties.

Today, America remains the world's only super-power.

In the thirties, Germany was just digging itself out of failed-state status.

Alas, those parallels are not the ones that Kagan et al would like us to focus on. Whereas Germany was digging itself out of failed-state status in the thirties, America in 2016 is digging itself deeper in.

You see the signs of it everywhere.

The decaying infrastructure.

The student loan crisis.

The failed health care system.

The ninety million working-age Americans not "participating" in the workforce, because if we counted them as unemployed the unemployment rate would be at crisis levels.

America is fucked.

But if you've noticed, it's been salad days for big pharma, the weapons purveyors, and the prison-industrial complex, among others.

That would be the crowd Robert Kagan shills for.

Yes, business has never been better for that tiny elite who have been profiting from America's decline!

That's why Donald J. Trump is such a threat to the status quo.

Trump might, and "might" is the key word here, just upset the apple cart. What a disaster it would be for the Kagan crowd if Trump actually did make peace with Putin. What, no more reason to outspend Russia on bombs and bullets by a factor of ten to one?

That would absolutely cripple the bombs and bullets complex and the dozens of Washington think tanks they fund, wouldn't it?

That said, I fear that the more mainstream advisers Trump takes on, the more likely it is that he will be co-opted by the prevailing DC geist.  Nevertheless, there remains a sliver of a chance that Trump "might" overturn the status quo.

After all, he's said "you're fired" before, and maybe those are the words a lot of those establishment advisers could be hearing right after Cleveland.

Which is why those noxious neocon turds are stampeding to the safety of Hillary Clinton.

Corruption in American politics is so deeply embedded that we barely notice the ripples on the surface

It was a busy day. In between planning home renovations and napping, I had occasion to peruse a few of my favourite news sites.

I like the Guardian. Nice middle of the road perspective, generally speaking. One of the first stories to catch my eye was a missive by Kevin Watkins about corruption in Africa.

Kevin built his story around certain revelations revealed in the "Panama Papers." Seems a whole lot of those African despots are crooks out the ying-yang. Yup, same old same old. African leaders are crooks... no news there! Hey, even my hero Dan Gertler got a passing mention in the story!

Elsewhere in my day, I read a story that Junior forwarded, about HRC's collusion in the Honduras coup of 2009. Not only does Hillary compromise the entire USA intelligence apparatus with her private (as in wide open to every semi-competent intel service in the world) e-mail accounts, but then she posts in her e-mails all the back-stabbing anti-democratic shenanigans that America's Secretary of State is conniving in!

Heck, that's corruption and incompetence on a scale that would leave those African despots wide-eyed with wonderment!

But wait, we're not finished yet...

A little further on in the Guardian, I come across this American crime thriller. Seems a certain Guerrero Chapa has been the de facto leader of the Gulf Cartel since 2003. As I'm sure you appreciate, Cartel leaders have many enemies; the law (but maybe not so much), rival cartels, ambitious underlings, and so on. Ten years after becoming the de facto leader of the Gulf Cartel, our man Chapa gets rubbed out in true gangster fashion while shopping with his wife in Dallas Texas.

But here is the sentence, dropped incongruously many thousands of words into our story, that caught my eye;

Guerrero Chapa lived legally in the US and was an informant for American authorities.

Say what?

The leader of the Gulf Cartel lived legally in the US and was an informant? The leader of a Mexican drug cartel is allowed to live legally in the US and continue running his cartel in return for what? Information on rival cartels? Which would make the entire "War on Drugs" infrastructure complicit in the drug trade they have allegedly been doing battle with, would it not?

How far up the hierarchy do you figure that rot has spread?

No wonder that after forty years of a supposed "war on drugs" your kids can still buy dope at their school playground.

And we're not done yet. Those drug cartels are small fry compared to the big dogs like Lockheed Martin. Here's a story from Sputnik about how the military-industrial complex has been cleaning out the US treasury while lining its own offshore accounts to the tune of billions while fobbing off unworkable crap like the F-35.

And it's all done in the name of the flag and patriotism and defending our freedom, don't ya know! Hell, they'll be lucky if they get approval to fly those duds over a NASCAR invocation, nevermind taking on an actual enemy.

But we see none of that. We're too busy rooting out corruption in Africa!