Already mid-week and shit is still shit — yet it’s overcast and quiet here on California’s north coast, well away from the black soot of American life.

Yesterday, Bradley Manning was found “guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,” of 20 different counts of hyper-legal bullshit and could face up to 136 years in prison, but he did escape the worse of the nefarious charges, “aiding the enemy,” which is phoney as a three-dollar bill.

Ironically right-on, Manning was convicted on the 235th anniversary of America’s first whistleblower protection law.

(Illustration found here).

Via emptywheel (the link directlyabove):

The law passed by the Continental Congress on July 30, 1778, declared that it was the “duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other the inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by an officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”

So the Manning shit-storm is really all about covering the nasty ass of US action. Manning just reported crimes the US committed without any penalty, except becoming hypocritical, and in the real-world, reality, was itself ‘aiding the enemy’ — the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concluded US foreign policy aggravated the situation: “…the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.”
And along with that dumb-ass horrible war, torture, rendition, Gitmo, etc. contributed.
All this upchucked by Bradley Manning.
Douglas Rushkoff at CNN nails the shit-shingle in the Manning case:

In this one leaking incident, Manning exposed allegations of torture, undisclosed civilian death tolls in Afghanistan and Iraq, official orders not to investigate torture by nations holding our prisoners, accusations of the torture of Spanish prisoners at Guantanamo, the “collateral murder” video of Reuters journalists and Iraqi civilians as U.S. soldiers cheered, U.S. State Department support of corporations opposing Haitian minimum wage, training of Egyptian torturers by the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, U.S. authorized stealing of U.N. Secretary General’s DNA — the list goes on.
These are not launch codes for nuclear strikes, operational secrets or even plans for future military missions.
Rather, they are documentation of past activity and officially sanctioned military and state policy.
These are not our secrets, but our ongoing actions and approaches.
A thinking government — a virtuous one, if we can still use such a word — would treat this as a necessary intervention.
Things have gone too far.
But ours is a government in “present shock”: an always-on, always-connected population puts the administration in a state of perpetual emergency interruption.
It’s not the phone call at 2 a.m. for which a president has to be prepared, but the tweet at 3, the Facebook update at 4, the YouTube video at 5, and on and on.

The Manning case will be compared to the current similar dust-up with Ed Snowden, still at the Moscow airport, but it’s really politics of cover up and bullshit.
Maybe a look-see into the current US political atmosphere also came yesterday in a crazed, vulgar and nasty offshoot from the Tony Weiner campaign — the penis head of life.
Weiner’s communications director Barbara Morgan opened her yap about a former intern, Olivia Nuzzi, and Nuzzi’s tell-all story which appeared in the New York Daily News.
Talking Points Memo  has the story:

On Monday, Nuzzi, a college student and writer, published a story on the blog NSFWCORP that claimed multiple sources on the campaign told her there had been “six departures” from Weiner’s team, more than had been previously disclosed.
She also claimed that staffers had been underpaid and that the former campaign manager, Danny Kedem, left over the weekend because Weiner “lied to him about the timing of his sexting scandal.”
Nuzzi’s post on NSFWCORP was followed up by Tuesday’s Daily News cover story in which she claimed Weiner incorrectly called multiple interns “Monica” and said people only joined Weiner’s campaign to curry favor with his wife, Huma Abedin, a close aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Along with these allegations, Nuzzi wrote in the Daily News that “a lot” of Weiner’s staff had “short résumés,” including Morgan, who Nuzzi derisively noted “last worked as the press secretary for the New Jersey state education commissioner.”
“I’m dealing with like stupid fucking interns who make it on to the cover of the Daily News even though they signed NDAs and/or they proceeded to trash me,” Morgan told TPM, referring to a non-disclosure agreement.
“And by the way, I tried to fire her, but she begged to come back and I gave her a second chance.”
…
“Fucking slutbag. Nice fucking glamour shot on the cover of the Daily News.
Man, see if you ever get a job in this town again,” said Morgan.
According to Morgan, Nuzzi stopped interning for the campaign “like four weeks ago.” Nuzzi’s story on NSFWCORP described her as having spent “four weeks” as a Weiner intern.
When asked whether the claims in Nuzzi’s stories were true, Morgan suggested many of them were “bullshit.”
“It’s all bullshit,” she said. “I mean, it’s such bullshit. She could fucking — fucking twat.”

Whoa!
However, politics is a reflective shit pile — Morgan walked it all back in a statement to BusinessInsider: “In a moment of frustration, I used inappropriate language in what I thought was an off the record conversation. It was wrong and I am very sorry, which is what I said tonight when I called and emailed Olivia to apologize.”
TPM says the talk was totally, like, on the record.

Cunt you see that?