The religious right isn't doing much for religion

  Peter Wehner, a prominent #NeverTrump conservative, has disowned the evangelical label. He says that the “support being given by many Republicans and white evangelicals to President Trump and now to Mr. Moore have caused me to rethink my identification with both groups. Not because my attachment to conservatism and Christianity has weakened, but rather the opposite. I consider Mr. Trump’s Republican Party to be a threat to conservatism, and I have concluded that the term evangelical - despite its rich history of proclaiming the ‘good news’ of Christ to a broken world - has been so distorted that it is now undermining the Christian witness.”
  The close association with Trump has alienated nonwhite and women who have identified in the past as evangelical, The New York Times reports.
 Now, we are NOT saying that Christians should refrain from participating in the political life of the country, nor are we saying that Trump and this particular generation of evangelical leaders are solely responsible for the decline in religiosity. However, what we are saying is that obsession with political power and cult-like followings of secular political leaders do not preserve faith or create a religious revival. To the contrary, this breeds anger, resentment and obsession with politics, not faith. The notion of Christians as victims in America, martyrs in a culture war, is both at odds with reality and an example of blame-shifting. To cultivate a more religious society and one more in tune with their own values, faith leaders might consider spending less time licking envelopes for Roy Moore and more time tending to their spiritual flocks.
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/15/jennifer-rubin-the-religious-right-isnt-doing-much-for-religion/

The Spirit of Christmas

Wake up, John Doe. You're the hope of the world.

American Rhetoric: Movie Speech

"Meet John Doe" (1941)

 

                                                     John Doe Delivers National Radio Address

 

 

If anybody should ask you what the average John Doe is like, you couldn't tell him because he's a million and one things. He's Mr. Big and Mr. Small. He's simple and he's wise. He's inherently honest, but he's got a streak of larceny in his heart. He seldom walks up to a public telephone without shoving his finger into the slot to see if somebody left a nickel there.

 

He's the man the ads are written for. He's the fella everybody sells things to. He's Joe Doakes, the world's greatest stooge and the world's greatest strength.

 

Yes, sir -- Yes, sir, we're a great family, the John Does. We are the meek who are -- who are supposed to inherit the earth. You'll find us everywhere. We raise the crops; we dig the mines, work the factories, keep the books, fly the planes and drive the busses. And when a cop yells: "Stand back there, you!" He means us, the John Does!

 

We have existed since time began. We built the pyramids. We pulled the oars for Roman emperors, sailed the boats for Columbus, retreated from Moscow with Napoleon and froze with Washington at Valley Forge.

 

Yes, sir. We've been in there dodging left hooks since before history began to walk. In our struggle for freedom we've hit the canvas many a time, but we always bounced back! Because we're the people -- and we're tough.

 

They've started a lot of talk about free people going soft -- that we can't take it. That's a lot of hooeyl A free people can beat the world at anything, from war to tiddle-de-winks, if we all pull in the same direction.

 

I know a lot of you are saying "What can I do? I'm just a little punk. I don't count." Well, you're dead wrong! The little punks have always counted because in the long run the character of a country is the sum total of the character of its little punks.

But, we've all got to get in there and pitch. We can't win the old ballgame unless we have teamwork. And that's where every John Doe comes in. It's up to him to get together with his teammates. And your teammate, my friend, is the guy next door to you. Your neighbor -- he's a terribly important guy that guy next door. You're gonna need him and he's gonna need you, so look him up. If he's sick, call on him. If he's hungry, feed him. If he's out of a job, find him one.

To most of you, your neighbor is a stranger, a guy with a barkin' dog and high fence around him. Now, you can't be a stranger to any guy that's on your own team. So tear down the fence that separates you. Tear down the fence and you'll tear down a lot of hates and prejudices. Tear down all the fences in the country and you'll really have teamwork.

I know a lot of you are saying to yourselves, "He's askin' for a miracle to happen. He's expectin' people to change all of a sudden. Well, you're wrong. It's no miracle. It's no miracle because I see it happen once every year. And, and so do you -- at Christmas time. There's somethin' swell about the spirit of Christmas, to see what it does to people, all kinds of people.

Now, why can't that spirit, that same, warm Christmas spirit last the whole year around? Gosh, if it ever did, if each and every John Doe would make that spirit last 365 days out of the year, we'd develop such strength, we'd create such a tidal wave of good will that no human force could stand against it. Yes sir, my friends, the meek can only inherit the earth when the John Doe's start lovin' their neighbors.

You better start right now. Don't wait till the game is called on account of darkness.

Wake up, John Doe. You're the hope of the world.

 

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechmeetjohndoe.html

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9501EFDD1E38E33BBC4B52DFB566838A659EDE

 

View from the culture war’s front lines

 

View from the culture war’s front lines

Q: What about overall? If you had to say where things are at today, in terms of church-state separation, compared to when you took over at Americans United in 1992, where are they?

A: Overall things have advanced. I don’t believe this administration’s negative view will prevail very long because it’s inconsistent with what the American people want. They don’t believe government money should go to promote religion. Their hearts and minds are far, far moved from where they were 25 years ago…I think there is an enormous growth in tolerance…Once you make a certain amount of progress, you never get back to the same starting point. People have become more tolerant, more accepting.

It’s only a bad time because the Supreme Court looks to be at genuine risk of falling into the hands of a majority of so-called Originalists.

 I do this sermon called ‘The Two Worst Ways to Make Policy: Constitutional Originalism and Biblical Literalism.’

The Bible is a wonderful book, but it’s not an ethics textbook, that’s not how it was created. And Constitutional Originalism depends on the fiction that you can tell exactly what the first Congress meant when it passed the Bill of Rights. Most of that is lost to history.

 

Q: But you came from a pretty conservative part of the country [he grew up in Bethlehem, Pa.]

A: I remember in high school going to a debate between Buckley and [Socialist leader] Norman Thomas. I thought: Man, this is going to be fun! My Dad and I were big Buckley fans. I can still remember the feeling, sitting in the bleachers, thinking: ‘I think something life changing is happening’ to me. Buckley was talking about himself, and Thomas was talking about community, and how you have to take into account concerns of everyone, and I’m thinking: ‘This is kind of like what I learn about in Sunday school!’ Years later I was with Buckley and I said: ‘Your failure that night created me.’

I realized that night [that] this super-conservativism is just inconsistent with moral principles. Because you can’t live a life that doesn’t touch everybody else’s.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/11/27/after-25-years-on-the-culture-wars-front-lines-this-prominent-pastor-activist-thinks-liberals-are-winning/?utm_term=.eb988aea2677

 

Liberals, Hold You Heads Up!

Sometimes I get so upset at ourselves for not holding up our heads and be proud for what Democrats and Liberals have done for America. Why don't our leaders in congress shout it out! We have many young people that may not know this political history and we have many politically unaware citizens that certainly don't know. I made this video in 2008 to spread the word.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV7PiqF36WE

When I first started studying politics I noticed how the "right" does a great job at demoralizing the other side. I would say going on 30 years. It worked so great many people over the years have voted Republican. I just hope what we see now in our politics, that America has not turned into a far right country. Help us all if it has!

The Hijacked American Presidency

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/opinion/trump-hijacked-american-presidency.html

Every now and then we are going to have to do this: Step back from the daily onslaughts of insanity emanating from Donald Trump’s parasitic presidency and remind ourselves of the obscenity of it all, registering its magnitude in its full, devastating truth.

There is something insidious and corrosive about trying to evaluate the severity of every offense, trying to give each an individual grade on the scale of absurdity. Trump himself is the offense. Everything that springs from him, every person who supports him, every staffer who shields him, every legislator who defends him, is an offense. Every partisan who uses him — against all he or she has ever claimed to champion — to advance a political agenda and, in so doing, places party over country, is an offense.

We must remind ourselves that Trump’s very presence in the White House defiles it and the institution of the presidency. Rather than rising to the honor of the office, Trump has lowered the office with his whiny, fragile, vindictive pettiness.

The presidency has been hijacked.

Madam Secretary - Avoiding an Arms Race

W

Inside Russia’s Social Media War on America

For many Americans, Russian hacking remains a story about the 2016 election. But there is another story taking shape. Marrying a hundred years of expertise in influence operations to the new world of social media, Russia may finally have gained the ability it long sought but never fully achieved in the Cold War: to alter the course of events in the U.S. by manipulating public opinion. The vast openness and anonymity of social media has cleared a dangerous new route for antidemocratic forces. “Using these technologies, it is possible to undermine democratic government, and it’s becoming easier every day,” says Rand Waltzman of the Rand Corp., who ran a major Pentagon research program to understand the propaganda threats posed by social media technology.


If that sounds alarming, it helps to understand the battlescape of this new information war. As they tweet and like and upvote their way through social media, Americans generate a vast trove of data on what they think and how they respond to ideas and arguments–literally thousands of expressions of belief every second on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google. All of those digitized convictions are collected and stored, and much of that data is available commercially to anyone with sufficient computing power to take advantage of it.


That’s where the algorithms come in. American researchers have found they can use mathematical formulas to segment huge populations into thousands of subgroups according to defining characteristics like religion and political beliefs or taste in TV shows and music. Other algorithms can determine those groups’ hot-button issues and identify “followers” among them, pinpointing those most susceptible to suggestion. Propagandists can then manually craft messages to influence them, deploying covert provocateurs, either humans or automated computer programs known as bots, in hopes of altering their behavior.



By raising doubts about the validity of the 2016 vote and the vulnerability of future elections, Russia has achieved its most important objective: undermining the credibility of American democracy.
For now, investigators have added the names of specific trolls and botnets to their wall charts in the offices of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. They say the best way to compete with the Russian model is by having a better message. “It requires critical thinkers and people who have a more powerful vision” than the cynical Russian view, says former NSA deputy Inglis. And what message is powerful enough to take on the firehose of falsehoods that Russia is deploying in targeted, effective ways across a range of new media? One good place to start: telling the truth.

http://time.com/4783932/inside-russia-social-media-war-america/

Trump’s Loyalty Test

“It is significant that we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution and not an individual leader, ruler, office or entity,” reads an explainer on the oath on the FBI website. “A government based on individuals–who are inconsistent, fallible and often prone to error–too easily leads to tyranny on the one extreme or anarchy on the other.”
In practice, this means the FBI is built to resist loyalty requests from a President. Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s acting director and a candidate for the job, has testified to the Senate that there will be no letup, whatever the wishes of the President, in the inquiry into his campaign’s contacts with the Russians. “There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date,” he said. “You cannot stop the men and women of the FBI from doing the right thing, from protecting the American people, from upholding the Constitution.”


Both factions have labored to protect the President from his worst instincts. Aides have tried everything from restricting access to the Oval Office to filling the President’s schedule in a futile bid to minimize distractions. Staffers are frustrated by leaks about staff turmoil coming from Trump’s extended circle of allies. But Trump has so far resisted attempts to impose order, insisting on long stretches of unstructured time to watch television and call allies. Unlike most CEOs, he is an “instinctive and reactive” leader, in the words of one aide, “unwilling or incapable” of hewing to a long-term strategy. Others inside the White House have likened his itchy Twitter finger and obsession with cable chatter to a drug addict who cannot grasp that his habits have become a problem. A single segment “can take over the day” for the entire West Wing, complains a staffer.
The result is a dysfunctional workplace. The President has made clear that he believes he has been let down by his staff. Meanwhile, his staff is increasingly hesitant to sacrifice their credibility for a boss who won’t protect them. When news of the classified intelligence given to the Russians came out, the press office, still reeling from supplying bad information on the firing of Comey, sent out McMaster to issue a spirited defense. One day later, when news broke of Comey’s memo alleging that Trump had asked him to drop the Flynn investigation, no White House staff rushed to the cameras. Instead, reporters received a denial from the White House by email. No adviser to the President chose to attach their name to his defense.
http://time.com/4783929/president-trump-loyalty-test/

Trump Isn’t a Pragmatist. He Doesn’t Understand Ideology.

Article: It is widely known that Trump — whose political profile over the decades has vacillated from liberal to conservative to moderate to populist, and supported and opposed abortion rights, higher taxes on the rich, and universal health care — does not care very much about political ideas. This explanation is true, but incomplete. The president also does not know very much about political ideas. And it is not merely the details of policy that he lacks. Trump has no context for processing ideas. He does not understand which kinds of ideas imply support for which kinds of policies, nor why political figures tend to believe what they do, nor why they agree or disagree with one another. He is capable of forming strongly held beliefs about people in politics, but he does so in entirely personal terms. Trump’s flamboyant, weird ignorance reveals a distinct pattern. He is not so much nonideological as sub-ideological.
Trump thinks about politics like a low-information voter, which enabled him to speak their language naturally. His stated belief during the campaign that he could expertly craft a series of popular deals — “it’s going to be so easy” — appealed to low-information voters because it earnestly described the political world as they see it. Trump’s experience as a developer and professional celebrity have put a narcissistic gloss on Trump’s low-information worldview. He sees politics as a variation of real estate or reality television — a field where the players are sorted not so much as combatants on opposing teams (though they may compete at times) but on a hierarchy of success, with the big stars at the top sharing interests in common. His vague boasts that his presidency would create terrific things that everybody loves and is winning again is a version of how he truly sees the world.
Politics is a strange institution that forces committed professionals who have coherent philosophical beliefs to persuade voters who mostly do not. Barack Obama accomplished this in highbrow fashion. His characteristic political style was to incorporate the values of both left and right and try to technocratically synthesize the perspectives together. (“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”) Trump accomplishes it in lowbrow style, by literally not understanding the source of the disagreement.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/trump-isnt-a-pragmatist-he-doesnt-understand-ideology.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Intelligencer%20-%20May%203%2C%202017&utm_term=Subscription%20List%20-%20Daily%20Intelligencer%20%281%20Year%29

Deconstructing Trump-speak

Deconstructing Trump-speak
"Trump's trademark talk is full of rambling, aside-filled bursts of simple but definitive words, laden with self-congratulatory bravado and claims that have fact-checkers working overtime," AP's Matt Sedensky writes after asking linguists about Trump's rhetorical signatures:
• Kathleen Hall Jamieson: "The public speech of the president in the past has been crafted speech, it has been considered speech. Presidents prepared before speeches, presidents prepared before press conferences, presidents had stock answers ready to give."
• "Word choice is typically simple — to Trump, things are terrible or incredible, best or worst. Asides are frequent. And repetition is rampant: When Trump wants to get a point across, he makes it again and again."
• "Trump has suggested there's method to his word choice ... that the simple terms he often opts for can be more effective than the flowery eloquence listeners may be used to from presidents. 'I went to an Ivy League school. I'm very highly educated. I know words; I have the best words,' he said during the campaign."
• Historian Kristen Kobes Du Mez of Calvin College: "I don't know that any president has ever used 'super-duper' in his rhetoric before."

The Trump Doctrine
Yahoo's Olivier Knox, surveying a wide range of diplomats in Washington, finds that Trump's "unpredictable approach to world affairs [has] unsettled rivals, but also sometimes unnerves even close allies who wonder if anyone can speak with authority for the Twitter-reliant commander in chief."
"They also noted that a large number of pivotal positions at the Pentagon and State Department remain vacant, hindering the regular policymaking process."

The White House Visitor Log, Exposed!

Without Truth there is no Trust.

Trust is a transaction between leaders and those they lead. Throughout our history, the deeply held beliefs of various Presidents have taken the nation into war, delayed the pursuit of peace, alienated allies, appeased enemies. At other times, presidential beliefs have conquered the continent, freed the slaves, taken us to the moon because the President firmly believed we could get there. As citizens, it is vital that we be able to believe our President; it is also vital that we know what he believes, and why. This President has made both a severe challenge.
Nancy Gibbs, EDITOR This appears in the April 03, 2017 issue of TIME.


Without truth there is no trust.

Speaking on national television the night before that 1970 election, Senator Ed Muskie of Maine addressed the real choice confronting the voters: "There are only two kinds of politics. They're not radical and reactionary or conservative and liberal or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men. "Cast your vote," he concluded, "for trust in the ancient traditions of this home for freedom."

The Man Who Wants to Unmake the West

 

Europeans are starting to worry that Steve Bannon has the EU in his cross hairs. Here's how the White House could genuinely help pull it apart. To Bannon, a strengthened EU is nothing less than a risk to civilization: a body that dilutes national identity and whose border policies allow Islam to invade the West, one refugee at a time.

Bannon was an executive at Breitbart News, an activist-editor-gadfly known mostly on the far right, and the “Brexit” campaign was something of a pet project. He hitched onto the Tea Party movement early in Barack Obama’s presidency and noticed a similar right-populist wave rising across the Atlantic, where fed-up rural, white Britons were anxious about immigration and resentful of EU bureaucrats. The cause touched on some of Bannon’s deepest beliefs, including nationalism, Judeo-Christian/Catholic nationalist identity and the evils of Big Government.

Bannon’s vision, as laid out in public remarks and private conversations, opposes international organizations in favor of empowering nation-states.

Bannon’s public remarks, and accounts from people who have spoken with him, make clear he believes Brexit and Trump’s election are part of something bigger, a global political revolt that could restore what he calls lost “sovereignty” on the continent.

Bannon told an audience of religious conservative activists at the Vatican in 2014. “That is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.”

To Bannon, however, a strengthened EU is nothing less than a risk to civilization: a body that dilutes national identity and whose border policies allow Islam to invade the West, one refugee at a time. Bannon, who did not respond to interview requests, has repeatedly made clear his views about Europe. Most revealing is the widely read transcript of his Vatican talk, in which Bannon declared that “the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis." Europe’s citizens, he said, are restless for “sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism.” And, Bannon added: “They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union."

Bannon has approvingly cited Maurras’ distinction between the “legal country,” led by elected officials, and the “real country” of ordinary people, as a frame for the populist revolt underway.

Bannon “made it clear he had lost faith in Europe as secularism and arriving Muslim immigrants had eroded traditional Christian values as the founding pillar of our civilization,” Rose wrote. “Losing the Christian faith, in his view, has weakened Europe—it’s neither willing nor able to confront Islam’s rising power and some European Muslims’ insistence on privileged treatment of their religion."

Bannon’s solution? Rebuilding the firm borders between European states—to keep the Muslim immigrants out, and to keep in the religious and national identity. “I have admired nationalist movements throughout the world,” Bannon told the Wall Street Journal shortly after the U.S. election. “I have said repeatedly, strong nations make great neighbors."

 

 

 

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/trump-steve-bannon-destroy-eu-european-union-214889

 

 

 

But do they? Many a European leader, not to mention historian, disagrees. Runaway nationalism led to, among many other horribles, Franz Ferdinand’s assassination and World War I, and gave us Hitler, Mussolini and Milosevic. Those things, in turn, drew America’s military across the Atlantic.

 

“I don’t get it. Americans have spent a lot of their history either fighting against Europeans or fighting on behalf of Europeans against other Europeans,” says Charles Kupchan, who served until January as the top official for European affairs at the Obama White House. “Anybody who wants to bring Europe down risks putting us back in the 19th century or the early 20th century.”

 

European officials note that this happens to be a goal of Russia’s president, Putin, who is busily undermining the post-Cold War internationalist order in favor of a nationalistic, geography-based power politics. A U.S. effort to dismantle the EU, one Western European government official says with distaste, “would put America on the same side as Putin.”

 

The thought is rattling Europe at the highest levels. In January, Donald Tusk, president of the EU’s European Council—who calls himself “an incurably pro-American European who is fanatically devoted to trans-Atlantic cooperation”—sent a letter to member states characterizing the Trump administration as a menace to the Union, alongside the likes of Russia and radical Islam. “[W]ith the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy,” Tusk wrote, America now had to be considered not a stalwart friend of the EU but a “threat.”

 

Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the United States, put it in starker terms in remarks at a February security conference in Munich attended by top Trump officials. “Is President Trump going to continue a tradition of half a century of being supportive of the project of European integration, or is he going to continue to advocate EU member countries to follow the Brexit example?” Ischinger asked. “If he did that, it would amount to a kind of nonmilitary declaration of war. It would mean conflict between Europe and the United States. Is that what the U.S. wants?

 

 

 

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a favorite target of Breitbart, almost always in the context of her “open door” migrant policy. The news site, formerly run by Bannon, is working toward opening a bureau in Berlin in time for the country’s general election later this year, in which Merkel will seek a fourth term.

 

Not long ago, Breitbart cautiously praised Emmanuel Macron, a center-of-left French presidential candidate running as an independent, as a “French Tony Blair” willing to consider dismantling an unreformed European Union. But the site has since changed its tone, going all in for Marine Le Pen, while deriding the “Pro-EU Macron,” in articles such as, “France Blames Russia For Poor Performance of Left-Wing Presidential Candidate.”

 

In a January letter to EU member states, Donald Tusk, the European Council president, lamented the rise of “national egoism” within Europe, taking a shot at the kinds of Euroskeptic movements Bannon has encouraged. Still, after a February meeting with Mike Pence, Tusk said the U.S. vice president had committed America’s “unequivocal support for the idea of a united Europe.”

 

 

 

Elections to watch:

Netherlands- March- Dutch election results: Europe's far-right populists fail first test

France - Spring

Germany - September

Italy - Summer

 

and Mexico - Summer 2018

Deep States and Demagogues

It really is an upside down world when I am posting a Bret Stephens column. As a political junkie, the world has titled off its axis a little too much for comfort. It is indeed, a lopsided world for many of us.

But as the Turkish example reminds us, whatever else exists in Washington, it isn’t a deep state. When Mr. Trump demanded the resignations of 46 U.S. attorneys, they all left, except for Manhattan’s Preet Bharara, who asked for a firing and got it. The CIA is run by a Trump appointee, and the only generals in charge of federal departments are the ones the president nominated to their positions. The GOP establishment has rolled over for the new president. As for the “corporatist, globalist media” that Steve Bannon rails against, it also includes Fox News. This is paranoid time. Specifically, we are again in territory best identified by Richard Hofstadter in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The paranoid style can be evidence of irrationalism bordering on mental illness. It can also be a form of a cunning instrumentalism to destroy your political opponents by stoking hysterical fears in your supporters. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a master of the latter method. What about Mr. Trump? Conservatives used to understand the ideological provenance of words and the consequences that flow from treating political differences as mortal threats to the state. Too bad too many intelligent conservatives gave up worrying about the use of language sometime last year. They will come to regret what they’ve allowed, perhaps only when they, too, become its victims. ~Conservative Opinion Writer Bret Stephens

https://www.wsj.com/articles/deep-states-and-demagogues-1489446006

Republicans are defining lunacy down

Children sitting in Professor Trump’s history class would learn that Obama was America’s first Muslim president; that his co-religionists celebrated in the streets following the 9/11 attacks; that their vaccination schedule is the dangerous scam of greedy doctors; that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the death of John F. Kennedy; that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster; that unnamed liberals might have been involved in the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. More recently, Trump has claimed — based, so far, on nothing — that Obama ordered the bugging of Trump Tower. And Trump’s allies, with the White House’s blessing, have alleged the existence of a “deep state,” conducting what talk radio host Mark Levin calls a “silent coup.” Trump does not support things because they are true; they are true because he supports them. And he expects everyone who works for him to publicly and vocally embrace his version of reality. Day by day, Republicans are lowering their standards of sanity to defend an administration seized by conspiracy thinking. If they do not stand up to this trend, they will be defining lunacy down. ~Conservative writer Michael Gerson
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-are-defining-lunacy-down/2017/03/13/7f505ba4-0821-11e7-b77c-0047d15a24e0_story.html?utm_term=.93e7412f7449

States are writing bills to require presidential candidates to release tax returns

States are writing bills to require presidential candidates to release tax returns: They're responding to President-elect Donald Trump's decision to not release his tax returns during the presidential campaign, breaking decades of precedent.

Immigration Reform under the GOP?

http://itep.org/itep_reports/2017/03/undocumented-immigrants-state-local-tax-contributions-2.php

http://itep.org/itep_reports/2017/03/undocumented-immigrants-state-local-tax-contributions-2.php

45,000 Americans died every year just because they didn't have insurance. Unacceptable.

The recent op-ed piece by Paul Hollis and John Kay was one big lie from start to finish. President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats did not "ram" Obamacare through. Negotiations between Democrats and Republicans began as soon as Obama took office in January of 2009. The ACA was not signed until March 23, 2010 — after much debate and many votes. The Republicans were pretty clear that they could not possibly care less about the plight of uninsured Americans. They still don't. The ACA was outright sabotaged from Day One by the Republicans in Congress and their stooges in the red states. Did some folks lose their existing policies after the ACA was passed? Yes, but this was almost entirely due to the fact that old-style catastrophic coverage plans are no longer considered as real insurance. Those plans provided slim coverage with high deductibles and still weren't cheap. They have been replaced with actual insurance that provides real, reliable coverage at a reasonable price. There were generous subsidies offered to those who couldn't afford to pay. Did some people end up worse off? Again — yes — but if you balance the few hundred thousand individuals who are paying more now against the 20 million who couldn't get insurance before, there is no comparison. Premiums are currently on the rise. However, so are the subsidies. According to the Kaiser Foundation, in all but two states, a 40-year-old non-smoker earning $40,000 a year will see NO increase in his net out-of-pocket because as his premiums go up, so do the subsidies. In Massachusetts, where Obamacare was invented by a Republican, over 97 percent of the people have health insurance. The mandate that forces you to buy insurance is solely the product of the conservative Heritage Foundation. It wanted to prevent what it referred to as "freeloaders" on our healthcare system. Until this GOP plan was adopted by a Democratic president, conservatives thought that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. When President Obama agreed, they dropped it like a hot rock. This was part one of the million-part-plan by the GOP to make Obama a single-term president. Big picture: the ACA has achieved its primary goal of reducing by nearly half the number of uninsured in the United States. In Louisiana alone, we went from 22 percent of our citizens with no health insurance to 12.5 percent. There is still work to do. Trump and the Republicans are not willing to do it. All they want is to take us back to where we were eight years ago when, according to the Harvard Medical School, 45,000 Americans died every year just because they didn't have insurance. Unacceptable.

http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/opinion/letters/article_63797998-f92f-11e6-998e-fbe514c44dad.html

Medicaid Expansion in Louisiana

Finally, under a Democratic Governor, Medicaid was expanded in Louisiana. Article: The Louisiana Department of Health announced on Thursday that enrollment is at 400,635 new enrollees. A recent Gallup report found the uninsured rate in Louisiana fell by nearly half from 21.7 percent in 2013 to 12.5 percent in 2016.According to stats from LDH, more than 58,700 adults have now received at least one preventive or primary care service after enrolling in the expansion. Sixty-seven women have been newly diagnosed with breast cancer, and 1,193 adults newly diagnosed with diabetes, among other outcomes cited. Michele Kidd Sutton, president and CEO of North Oaks Health System in Hammond, said in the LDH release that the hospital has seen a 60 percent increase in mammograms for Medicaid patients, 61 percent increase in bone density screenings and a 26 percent increase in cervical cancer screenings. These are all real people, with real needs, who have had their lives changed for the better.

http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/article_9e784c0a-f479-11e6-be71-57eae137bd8e.html

Trump Can't Build a Wall Without the Real Estate

Mr. Trump fails to take into account the major hurdle the wall faces: eminent domain. To build the wall, the U.S. would need to own all 1,954 miles of the border. Most of this land is now private property—especially in Texas, where the U.S. government owns only 100 miles of the 1,254-mile border. To acquire the rest of the land it would need, Washington would need to employ eminent domain, the authority under the Fifth Amendment to seize private property for public use upon payment of “just compensation.” Recent history shows that’s easier said than done. In 2006 Congress passed the Secure Fence Act with strong bipartisan backing, including the support of New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, now Senate minority leader. The law authorized construction of a border fence along 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, including 100 miles in Texas. Lawmakers expected swift completion of the project. Instead, a decade later, there are unfenced gaps—because the fence had to have holes to accommodate local ranchers whose cattle graze on the southern side, but also due to property owners’ fighting land seizures in federal court.

At the end of 2016, more than 120 separate cases pertaining to eminent-domain seizures for the fence were still active in the U.S. court system. In 2009 the Department of Homeland Security inspector general issued a report that noted, “Acquiring real property from non-federal owners is a costly, time-consuming process requiring negotiations and sometimes condemnation.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-cant-build-a-border-wall-without-the-real-estate-1487290376

In Today's Newspapers/Quotes

The Trump opposition-Democrats, unions, Never Trumpers-now know that if they can turn three Republican senators against him, he won’t matter. ~Daniel Henninger from Wall Street Journal

 

And now with Betsy DeVos at the helm, we have something we’ve never seen before-widespread fear of the Education Department by the left. So it’s not time to wait four more years to try to dismantle the department. The time for that is now. ~Neal P. McCluskey from Cato Institute

 

“This is not about who won the election. This is about concerns about intuitional integrity,” said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior intelligence official. “It’s probably unprecedented to have this difficult a relationship between agencies.” “I can’t recall ever seeing this level of friction. And it’s just not good for the country.”

 

Trump’s fear of opening his tax returns to public scrutiny could go beyond reveling what Donald Jr. called family’s considerable business dealings with
Russia. The release could also expose a net worth well below the billion-dollar mark. ~ Froma Harrop

 

Steve Schmidt, who worked in President George W. Bush’s administration. “This is something entirely different. The ineptitude, the sloppiness, the incompetence and the chaos are unprecedented.”

 

Let’s talk about the swamp. If we have learned anything about the Trump presidency, it is that Mr. Trump and his chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, despise the Washington swamp, which includes the city’s lobbyists, all of its bureaucrats, every member of the media, the entire congressional delegation and their staffs. Forgotten now is that Nixon didn’t resign because of anything proven by the anonymous torrent, but only after he saw he’d lost the support of his own party in Congress. We’re not there, yet. ~Daniel Henninger from Wall Street Journal

 

How Donald Trump Became Conspiracy Theorist in Chief

He's made the paranoid style of American politics go mainstream.

Nowhere is Trump's embrace of oddball ideas and cranks more evident than his courtship of Jones, a 42-year-old Texan who built a lucrative media empire by hawking anti-radiation tablets and fulminating about "false flag" operations and the globalist cabal. It was previously unthinkable for a major-party nominee to appear on Jones' show (broadcast from "FEMA Region 6"), but Trump is an exception. Stone has appeared regularly on Jones' daily program, and the two were inseparable at the GOP convention, where they co-hosted a pro-Trump rally. Campaign aides and Donald Trump Jr. have promoted Infowars stories on social media. And Trump himself, who phoned into Jones' show last December for a friendly chat, has welcomed the host's support and parroted his message to a degree that has shocked even Jones. "It is surreal to talk about issues here on air, and then word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later," Jones confessed on the air in early August.
But it's not just Clinton who's in the crosshairs of the Trump-Jones conspiracy machine—it's electoral democracy itself. This summer, Jones warned of an attempt at "rigging" the election to deny Trump the presidency. He proposed sending teams of cameramen to polling sites to document the "illegals" voting for Clinton. By early August, Trump was channeling Jones in his stump speech. "I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest," he said. He told the Washington Post that he feared unscrupulous Democrats would try to "vote 10 times." By injecting so much distrust into electoral results, Trump could delegitimize a Clinton victory, setting himself up as a bomb-thrower in exile.
No wonder Jones has told listeners that he's urged Trump to keep pushing the "rigged election" narrative. The Infowars host filmed a short segment wondering if the Democrats would try to have him killed. After all, by calling him out, Clinton did something his enemies, those globalist tyrants and UN stooges, had spent years avoiding at all costs. "You don't say, 'Alex Jones'! You never say the name Alex Jones!" he said. "But more and more, they have to speak the name that no one says." For once, he had a point—a lot of people were saying it.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/trump-infowars-alex-jones-clinton-conspiracy-theories

Stephen Bannon and Donald Trump

Stephen Bannon and Donald Trump --The question should be what are their beliefs and what ideas are they basing their actions? What is behind this Muslim Ban? And the deeper reason for the soon to see more and more rounding up of undocumented immigrants? Both men seem to be showing the country they want to burn everything down which includes Washington Establishment, our norms and our institutions. But Why? And what will come next after everything comes crashing down? To get anywhere with answering these questions the Alt-Right must be studied.

 

Article: In July, Bannon, who soon would leave Breitbart to become a top campaign aide to Trump, was interviewed by journalist Sarah Posner. He proudly declared of Breitbart, "We're the platform for the alt-right." The alt-right is an extreme but not well-defined wing of the conservative movement that rants against immigrants, Muslims, the globalist agenda, and multiculturalism and that generally advocates white nationalism (if not white supremacism—in this world, there is a difference). The alt-right also generates a hefty amount of anti-Semitism.

In March, the website published an article headlined "An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right," which was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos, a prominent figure in the movement. It noted that the alt-right opposed "full 'integration'" of racial groups: "The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.”

 

What does Spencer, the intellectual guru of the movement, advocate? He is quite explicit: an all-white United States. This is not a secret. In a recent interview with Mother Jones, Spencer explained his belief that America's white population is endangered, due to multiculturalism and immigration, and he advocated "a renewed Roman Empire," a dictatorship where only white people could be citizens. "You cannot view another white person as your enemy," he remarked. His goal is a white ethnostate. How to get there may be unclear. He added that he hoped America's nonwhites can be convinced to leave the country on their accord: "It's like presenting to an African that this hasn't worked out. We haven't made each other happier. We are going to have to take part in this paradigmatic shift together." During the campaign, Spencer declared, Trump "loves white people." 

Race is central to the alt-right. Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, notes, "The alt-right, in a nutshell, believes that Western culture is inseparable from European ethnicity." That is, being white.

 

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/why-its-fair-and-necessary-call-trumps-chief-strategist-stephen-bannon-white-nationalist

 

 

Hitler Reacts to Donald Trump Becoming President

In Trump's mind, it's always really sunny. And that's terrifying

I rehash this weather history because it’s not subject to debate. This is tantamount to Trump declaring black is white or day is night. It was overcast, and he declared that it was “really sunny.” This disconnect from reality is my biggest fear about Trump, more than any one policy he has proposed. My worry is the president of the United States is barking mad.

 

“More than anyone else I have ever met,” Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal,” told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer at the time, “Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” My Post colleague Jennifer Rubin, a conservative blogger, picked up on this theme in an important post this week, recalling Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) description of Trump as somebody who “doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies” and “his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.” Rubin raised the prospect that Trump might eventually need to be declared unfit to serve under the 25th Amendment if he can’t “separate what he wants to believe and what exists.”

 

 

That’s why it’s unnerving that Trump not only decided that he saw 1 million or 1.5 million people watching his inauguration but also that he pressured the head of the National Park Service to support his fantasy.

 

That’s why it’s frightening not only that Trump embraces the fantasy that millions voted illegally but also that he supports the falsehood by citing a Pew Center on the States report that says nothing about voter fraud — and by claiming pro golfer Bernhard Langer was turned away from voting in Florida while other, suspicious-looking people were permitted to cast provisional ballots. Langer, a German citizen, can’t vote in the United States, and it turns out he witnessed no such thing.

 

When Trump caused international havoc with tweets about China, North Korea and others, there was speculation that he was pursuing the “madman theory” to unsettle adversaries by making them think he’s crazy.

 

He’s doing such a convincing job of it that I worry that being a madman isn’t Trump’s theory but his reality.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-trumps-mind-its-always-really-sunny-and-thats-terrifying/2017/01/27/ff0a6278-e499-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html?utm_term=.827ea135f595

 

 

Progressive Bubble

In Time Magazine article titled - The California Republic Comes Roaring Back.  Back in his studio in San Francisco, artist Eric Rewitzer takes issue with the notion that he lives in a bubble, though the reality he describes sounds rather bubble-like—a place where people all believe in the same progressive future. "When Trump won, it reminded me how comfortable I had become in just accepting that progress was going to continue. If the bubble is anything, it's a sense of comfort that we're doing the right thing," he says. "What happened after the election is I felt I have to stand up. I can't take for granted that this is the way good people think everywhere."

 

In Trump’s Washington, Nothing Feels Stable

Last week’s executive order on immigration continues to reverberate. The handling of the order further legitimized the desire of many congressional Republicans to distance themselves from the president, something they feel they’ll eventually have to do anyway because they know how to evaluate political horse flesh, and when they look at him they see Chief Crazy Horse. What went wrong has been fully adjudicated in the press. But this should be said: The president and his advisers are confusing boldness with aggression. They mean to make breakthroughs and instead cause breakdowns. The overcharged circuits are leaving them singed, too. People don’t respect you when you create chaos. Prudence is not weakness, and carefulness is a virtue, not a vice. If all this was spontaneous, the left is strong indeed. If it was a matter of superior organization, that’s impressive too. You should never let your enemy know its own strength. They discovered it in the Women’s March, know it more deeply now, and demonstrated it to Democrats on the Hill. It was after the demonstrations that Democratic senators started boycotting the confirmation hearings. They now have their own tea party to push them around. Americans want an America that looks after itself, but they don’t admire bigotry or respect prejudice. They’re embarrassed by it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-trumps-washington-nothing-feels-stable-1486081546

We Ignore Trump at our Peril

 

I wish I could agree with those who say we should pay little attention to President Trump’s verbal eruptions and focus only on concrete actions, but I can’t. It matters that the most powerful man in the world insists on “facts” that are nothing but self-aggrandizing fantasy. It matters that the president of the United States seems incapable of publicly admitting any error. It matters that Trump’s need for adulation appears to be insatiable.

My point is that Trump’s off-the-wall statements and Twitter rants cannot be dismissed as mere attempts to distract. We have a president who is obsessed with his public standing, given to outlandish statements, eager to believe in conspiracy theories and unwilling to admit when he is wrong. To our peril, his character and moods will shape his policies. ~ Eugene Robinson/The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-ignore-trump-at-our-peril/2017/01/26/1d8bf630-e3ff-11e6-ba11-63c4b4fb5a63_story.html?postshare=5201485535240116&tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.d7749fd02829

 

Trump's bigotry, fearmongering will make America weak again

http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2017/02/trumps_bigotry_fearmongering_w.html#incart_river_index


So, what does this mean for the United States under Trump?

First, Trump's policies aren't about making us safer, but about pandering to the racists, bigots and xenophobes in his base.

Second, members of Congress and others who enable or who tacitly approve these policies will bear the indelible stains of the hate and ignorance that inspired them.

Third, a nation that crafts foreign and domestic policies out of fear, hatred and ignorance is a nation in decline.

Fourth, the ban (and the White House has repeatedly called it a "ban"), endangers our people and emboldens our enemies by targeting a specific faith.

 

Retired Gen. David Petraeus, a finalist for Trump's secretary of state, told the House Armed Services Committee on Feb. 1, "We must also remember that Islamic extremists want to portray this fight as a clash of civilizations, with America at war against Islam. We must not let them do that."

With his ban, Trump is encouraging them to do just that.

The choice is ours. We can abide hateful policies that erode our democracy and threaten our moral standing -- or we can defend American values. Trump hopes we'll do the former. To save our country, we must do the latter.

Robert Mann, an author and former U.S. Senate and gubernatorial staffer, holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.

The Johnson Amendment and Trump

Trump proposes to get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment. The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which sees the separation of church and state as a blessing, not a curse, quickly issued a statement that repealing the Johnson Amendment would not further the religious liberty that it fights for. "Politicizing churches does them no favors," the statement says. "The promised repeal is an attack on the integrity of both our charitable organizations and campaign finance system. Inviting churches to intervene in campaigns with tax-deductible offerings would fundamentally change our houses of worship. It would usher our partisan divisions into the pews and harm the church's ability to provide refuge."

Trump's announcement has the whiff of political payoff rather than addressing a real policy need. Going after the Johnson Amendment is little more than political pandering. ~ Tim Morris at Times Picayune

To Conservative Voters

To conservative voters: You have been given a gift. The gift is this: Your guy won, your team has the house and the senate. And it's going....not great. My charge to you: figure out how you want to be represented in history. You are on the cusp of being the party that rose up and fought for what you told us you stood for, or you can be the people we have to explain to our children, when they asked why no one fought the breakdown of our democracy.

If you voted for the president or a republican senator because you believe in fiscal conservatism, you should be furious that your tax dollars are going to build a wall that will have zero impact on the effects of immigration.

If you hate the left because of "Political Correctness," you need to be asking yourself if you're okay with the President censoring communications from MULTIPLE government organizations like the National Park Service, the EPA and more.

If you voted because you hated Secretary Clinton's email server, I expect you to be calling your representatives to ask why Steve Bannon and others continue to use their unsecured personal emails and why your president is using an unsecured android device still.

If you voted because you believed they would be better protection against terrorists, you need to ask yourself why it's okay that your president just took away $130 million in anti-terror funds from New York with his punishment of Sanctuary Cities.

If you are angry that your insurance is too expensive, you should ask why your senators are repealing ACA without a replacement, an action that will leave 20 million people without insurance at all.

If you believe the Clinton initiative provided unequal treatment to countries that supported their foundation, you should be livid that your president has moved to block visas from Muslim countries like Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, but not places where he has business ties like Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

This is an opportunity to prove that you voted for the reasons you told me you did. I am taking you seriously, I am taking you literally.

 

 

Dear World, From America

http://johnpavlovitz.com/2017/01/28/dear-world-from-america/

Article: Please understand that nearly three million more people voted for his opponent Hillary Clinton than for him. (Yes, we realize this is completely screwed-up). Millions more voted for other candidates, and sadly nearly 90 million of our people did not vote at all. The point is, the vast majority of Americans are not with him. Article...Over the past week, we’ve watched long erected pillars of our Republic bulldozed in the stroke of a madman’s pen. We’ve seen the very hallmarks of who we are as a nation tossed in the garbage; the celebration of diverse coexistence, the open welcome to the oppressed, the guarantee of unalienable rights for every person, the same access to health and opportunity and safety afforded to everyone, the freedom to speak without censor or restraint. At this moment these are all in great jeopardy.

Article:we want you to know that this is not who we are. It may be who this man is. It may be who those sharing power with him are. It may even be the tens of millions who originally voted for him (though that support is vanishing quickly among those who not among the religious zealots and extremists).

But this is not America. It is not the steady, strong beacon of freedom that it was intended to be. It is not the America our people have fought and died for. It is not the one first formed in the crucible of oppression and cast into the words of our ever-disregarded Constitution.

 This is not our America. Our America affirms the inherent, priceless beauty of every human being. Our America declares that no person is ascribed less value because of their skin color, religion, gender, financial means, sexual orientation, nation of origin, or any other variable. Our America is home for those seeking hope and joy and rest.

And we are going to fight for this America. Through political channels and through grassroots activism, through the use of our Press and of our personal voices, we’re going to expose this man’s incompetence, call out his heart sickness, and condemn every violent, reckless, vicious act when it does not reflect our hearts and our will. Please do your best to disregard anything that comes from his mouth or those loudly and continually parroting his propaganda. They have proven themselves mortally allergic to the truth.

 

Article: And we hope that in whatever way you can, that you will stand with us. We know that we have made this mess ourselves. We understand that you have your own problems to contend with, some far more urgent and pressing than this, but we believe that we are a single community; that we are tethered together in our Humanity, that we are in real-time crafting the life our children and their children will inherit.

 

Article: Dear World, we’re sorry and we hope you’ll endure these days with us.
With Despair and Hope in equal measure, in Peace and Unity with you,
The American Majority
He does not speak for us.
His America is not our America.

 

 

 

Grover Norquist: Find a Republican Who Can Handle a Pen