Reason -vs- Fear and Paranoia...

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Mr. Trump’s bet: When the politician most fluent in American rage roars, the movement she gave voice to in the fall of 2008 will roar back today.

With his call to deport illegal immigrants, especially because Mexico sends us its “bad ones,” his proposal to bar Muslims from entering the country, his emphasis on the threats to lawful gun ownership and his promise to protect American goods and workers from China, Mr. Trump is riding the wave of anxiety that Ms. Palin first gave voice to as Senator John McCain’s running mate. Mr. Trump has now usurped and vastly expanded upon Ms. Palin’s constituency, but the connection between the two movements is undeniable.

Sarah Palin introduces Donald J. Trump at a campaign event in Tulsa, Okla. Credit Brandi Simons/Associated Press        



Full story HERE.



And now on to THIS.

Donald Trump’s outreach to Christians is bearing fruit, if results of the NBC News/Survey Monkey weekly online tracking poll out Tuesday are any indication.

Among white evangelical Republican voters nationally, Trump earned the support of 37 percent, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose father is a pastor and has played a key role in recruiting faith leaders to support his son, is at 20 percent. In the same survey conducted the previous week, Cruz registered 9 percentage points higher. Below the top two contenders, Ben Carson earned 11 percent among evangelicals, and Marco Rubio took 10 percent.

The Manhattan business mogul, who is Presbyterian, made headlines throughout the course of the past week for his various interactions with fellow Christians, including a stop at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, last Monday. Delivering the weekly convocation address, Trump caused a stir when he made reference to a book in the Bible a “Two Corinthians,” rather than the usual nomenclature, “Second Corinthians.” (Trump later claimed that it was written that way in his notes, and besides, his mother was Scottish and would have said it that way.

Full story  BELOW THE FOLD


The Boston Globe has an article with a saner view that recommends republicans use good judgement rather than fear and paranoia when making their selection.

New Hampshire Republicans can do their party a critical service on Feb. 9 by voting for an experienced political figure with a record of results, and thus dealing a blow to the divisive, demagogic candidates running on nativism and other political simplicities.

The Globe urges them to support John Kasich, whose record as governor of Ohio shows him to be a pragmatic, fiscally responsible executive, but one who is also concerned with helping the poor. His success in that important swing state, and his record as a moderate conservative who is willing to compromise in pursuit of results, suggests he is the Republican hopeful most likely to be successful on the national stage.

By voting for Kasich, New Hampshire can reward a candidate whose politics have been largely positive — and rebuke those candidates who have spent their campaign appealing to voters’ fears and biases.

Full story BELOW THE FOLD.


There are clear choices for those voting republican. For the sake of the nation lets hope the majority use reason rather than fear and paranoia when they make their choice. America's future very could very well hang in the balance. A future built by Trumpf administration is one we absolutely do not want or need.

Explaining the Rise of Trump...

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America has certainly entered a new era of fear and paranoia. For the many Americans who take a broader and more in depth view of world events and what is driving them the fear and paranoia is indeed seen as irrational. The rise of Trump and other GOP candidates who have played to the fear factor does neither the GOP or our nation any good.

The following article, published by BBC, hits the nail squarely on its head, putting the rise of Trump in a historical perspective that is both interesting and accurate.

One startling feature of the latest race to become the next president of the US - which begins in earnest with next week's Iowa caucuses - is the runaway success in the opinion polls of the outspoken billionaire, Donald Trump. But this should not be so surprising, says Michael Goldfarb, as Trump is just the latest example of a tendency in American politics that goes back a very long way.

Fear.

The simple four-letter word that works if you want to get elected. Political professionals know that playing on people's fears - going negative - is the way to win.

Paranoia.

A somewhat fancier word that is used to describe excessive, irrational fear and distrust. It, too, works from time to time - in American politics, at least.

This current presidential season is one of those times. Donald Trump has surged to the front of the pack competing for the Republican Presidential nomination by giving voice to outsized fears many in America have - of illegal immigrants, of Islamic terrorists, of free trade agreements shipping American jobs to China.

Trump promises to make America Great Again - as if the US somehow was no longer the most powerful country in the world - by simple solutions: deporting all 11 million illegal immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the US, and forcing the Chinese government to back down through tough talk.

The phrase "paranoid style in American politics" was coined by the late historian Richard Hofstadter. He defined the Paranoid Style, "an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent."

In a country that at its best radiates an infectious optimism, it is interesting how often fear has stalked the American landscape.

Richard Parker, who lectures on religion in the early days of America at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government, traces paranoia in American public life back to the Salem Witch Trials in the late 17th Century and even before that, to the religious politics of the Mother Country.

Find much more BELOW THE FOLD.

Via: Memeorandum

Former NYC Mayor Eyeing Independend Run For The Presidency...

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Michael R. Bloomberg at City Hall in New York in 2013 on the day before his last day as mayor. The state of play in this year’s presidential election has prompted Mr. Bloomberg to consider a third-party run for the White House. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times        

Interesting and intriguing. Given the circus car that is the GOP field the entry of Bloomberg as an independent presidential candidate would be a welcome and refreshing breath of fresh air. Bloomberg, who is and acts like an adult, certainly has credentials; having served as Mayor of New York City.

Michael R. Bloomberg has instructed advisers to draw up plans for a potential independent campaign in this year’s presidential race. His advisers and associates said he was galled by Donald J. Trump’s dominance of the Republican field, and troubled by Hillary Clinton’s stumbles and the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the Democratic side.

Mr. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, has in the past contemplated running for the White House on a third-party ticket, but always concluded he could not win. A confluence of unlikely events in the 2016 election, however, has given new impetus to his presidential aspirations.

Mr. Bloomberg, 73, has already taken concrete steps toward a possible campaign, and has indicated to friends and allies that he would be willing to spend at least $1 billion of his fortune on it, according to people briefed on his deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss his plans. He has set a deadline for making a final decision in early March, the latest point at which advisers believe Mr. Bloomberg could enter the race and still qualify to appear as an independent candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.

Whether Mayor Bloomberg could win a presidential race is questionable, but if it served to keep Trump, Crux, or Rubio out of the White House it would serve a valuable purpose nonetheless.

More BELOW THEFOLD.

Source

Via: Memeorandum

RNC as Expected Disinvites National Review as Debate Partner... Certainly No Surprise

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It was certain to happen and was fully expected. GOP brand loyalty, regardless of lack of truth in their candidates utterances, is expected by the republican brass. The action dis-inviting the National Review as debate partner by the RNC ought to raise everyone's eyebrows. The National Review article, as well as the supporting views of the many contributing articles, are spot on. Real conservatives will not support Donald Trump.

The Republican National Committee has disinvited National Review from a presidential debate partnership following the release of an edition devoted to taking down Donald Trump, the conservative magazine reported late Thursday.

Jack Fowler, publisher of National Review, outlined the RNC’s rationale in a piece published on the magazine’s website.

“The reason,” he wrote, explaining the RNC’s stance: “Our ‘Against Trump’ editorial and symposium. We expected this was coming. Small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald.”

The real estate magnate and frontrunner in national Republican presidential polling slammed the edition on its release in a series of tweets.

National Review agreed to partner with NBC for the Republican debate scheduled for Feb. 26 in Houston, Texas. Shortly after, the partnership for the pre-Super Tuesday debate was suspended and the RNC selected CNN as its replacement, according to Fowler’s report.

The debate was rescheduled for Feb. 25 and set to feature National Review alongside Salem Radio and Telemundo as partners.

Source

Via: Memeorandum

Sarah Palin's Plan to Help The Donald...

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Mary Altaffer / AP

Sarah Palin is back at doing what she does best, spreading nonsense and freely tossing out the "red meat" that the tea party faithful loves to digest. Of course their curiosity and desire for the truth died long ago and that is precisely what billionaire Donald Trump is counting on. And, unfortunately, he is right, they will gobble it up; which of course is why he has Sarah on the campaign trail stumping for him.

Irony and humor is thick in the tea party and GOP these days.

In endorsing Donald Trump, Sarah Palin faced a challenge. How does a woman who has built her brand on hating cultural elites endorse a billionaire, Manhattan TV star? Her answer: by turning Trump into a victim.

She began by reasserting her own victimhood. When considering endorsing Trump, Palin said she was “told left and right, ‘you are going to get so clobbered in the press. You are just going to get beat up, and chewed up, and spit out.’” But she wasn’t fazed because the media has been trying to do “that every day since that night in ‘08, when I was on stage nominated for VP.” Then she connected her own victimhood to the crowd’s, declaring that, nonetheless, “like you all, I’m still standing.” And she linked both back to Trump: “So those of us who’ve kind of gone through the ringer as Mr. Trump has, makes me respect you even more.”

After that, Palin expanded the circle of victimhood to include American sailors who were made to “suffer and be humiliated” by Iran, forced to “kowtow” and “apologize” and “bend over and say, ‘Thank you, enemy.’” And she added workers who suffer so the “campaign donor class” can have “cheap labor” by ensuring that “the borders are kept open” and who lose their jobs when those rich donors endorse “lousy trade deals that gut our industry.”

What ties these people to Trump? They’re victims of a bipartisan system designed to screw them. And whom do the people running that bipartisan system fear most? Who is “really ticking people off”? Donald Trump. “He’s been able to tear the veil off this idea of the system,” and as a result, “Our own GOP machine, the establishment ...they’re attacking their own frontrunner.” The same people who screwed Palin, and who screw American troops and workers, the people who “stomp our neck and tell us to chill,” are now savaging Donald Trump as well.

But he alone, perhaps because he is a billionaire and from their elite world, may be able to stand up to them and strike a blow on behalf of the little people.

Complete article BELOW THE FOLD.

Via: Memeorandum

Palin to Stump for Trump...

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Sarah Palin is back in the news (along with her son Track), right where she loves to be. After sliding into relative obscurity her path to again receiving national media attention was her endorsement of Donald Trump for the republican nomination. Palin will be hitting the campaign trail with The Donald in an effort to boost his support among tea party conservatives.

Trump, being very appreciative of Palin's endorsement made mention that Sarah may find a position in his administration. Hopefully Trump does not have the opportunity to make good on his remark, but in the unlikely event he does let us all hope it is an obscure position in some basement office of the White House.

Hitting the campaign trail today in Tulsa, Oklahoma the former republican VP nominee and half term Governor of Alaska wasted no time in "addressing the elephant in the room" linking her son's arrest for domestic violence to President Obama. “They come back wondering if there is that respect for what their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military have given so sacrificially to this country, and that starts at the top. It’s a shame that our military personnel even have to question, have to wonder if they’re respected anymore. It starts from the top. The question, though, it comes from the top, the question, though, that comes from our own president where they have to look at him and wonder, ‘Do you know what we go through? Do you know what we’re trying to do to secure America and to secure the freedoms that have been bequeathed us?’”


Of course there is not a trace of evidence that supports Palin's claim and naturally she didn't offer any because it really is just about throwing out the red meat for hers, and Trump's adoring tea party fans. You know, the ones who hate Obama just because... Palin's son Track is possibly suffering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) as a result of his serving in the military. If this be the case, as a veteran Track is entitled to VA benefits and he ought to be seeking the counselling needs to put his life back in order. But for Palin to make her wild illusory comment merely show her willing dishonesty or perhaps real ignorance. In actuality President Obama has done more for Veterans than any president in the past 30 years. There is help for PTSD, however, it appears as though there is no cure for ODS (Obama Derangement Syndrome). You can read the full story from Politico BELOW THE FOLD. Via: Memeorandum

Is Trump Destroying The Republican Party?

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Could Trump be the destruction of the GOP? One RNC committeeman apparently thinks it is a possibility'

CHARLESTON, S.C.—A Republican National committeeman delivered a call-to-arms against Donald Trump during a closed-door GOP meeting on Thursday, urging his colleagues to take a forceful stand against those who he said are destroying the party’s brand.

At a breakfast at the RNC winter meeting, Holland Redfield, an RNC committeeman who represents the minority-rich Virgin Islands, rose to address party Chairman Reince Priebus. In the five-minute impromptu speech, a video recording of which Redfield provided to POLITICO, Redfield did not explicitly mention Trump’s name. But he made clear that angry voices in the party pose a grave threat to the GOP’s future, and expressed alarm at what he described as crushing pressure to play nice.

“You can argue with me, but we’re almost terrorized as members of our party. ‘Shut up. Toe the line, embrace each other, and let’s go forward.’ I understand that. But there is a limit to loyalty. I am loyal to this party by speaking out on these very issues,” he said at the private breakfast meeting.

At one point, Redfield essentially argued that those in the room have been held hostage by Trump’s threat to run as a third-party candidate if the party hierarchy treats him unfairly.
“As a party, we owe it to ourselves to speak up, and not let the tail wag the dog, and not let someone say, all of a sudden, ‘If you don’t play my game, then I’m running as an independent.”

A viable and principled opposition party to the democratic party is certainly necessary. However, given the GOP's right flank increasing efforts to control (and corrupt) the party to move it ever more rightward (reactionary) maybe it is a good thing if the party is destroyed from with in. A new party would certainly rise in opposition to the democratic party, and, if we're lucky, it might offer the citizens of the nation a rational, reasonable, and effective agenda to move the country forward. Something the GOP has failed to do of late.



Read more BELOW THE FOLD.



 Via: Memeorandum

As Trump Continues to Serve His Kool Aid...

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Another View -- John H. Sununu: Don't drink the Trump Kool-Aid  

By JOHN H. SUNUNU -

Most of us know “Drinking the Kool-Aid” refers to a commitment to an idea without comprehending the implications of that commitment. We remember that this phrase derives from the horrible tragedy of 1978 where 900 followers of Jim Jones died when he convinced them to drink a mixture of Kool-Aid and cyanide.

What is often forgotten is that hundreds of others who did not want to drink the deadly cocktail were murdered by forcibly being given doses of cyanide.Today Republicans find themselves in a similar position as many of our primary voters continue to support Donald Trump. Trump has even become the darling of some of our most influential conservative talk radio hosts despite support for issues that historically have been anathema to conservatives. In truth, Trump is cut from the same big government cloth as Barack Obama. He welcomed the Obama stimulus packages, supports government-funded universal health care, and is a fan and an exploiter of eminent domain for his real estate developments. Trump has said he is “very pro-choice” and remains committed to letting his “good friend” Vladimir Putin dominate strategic policy in the Middle East. Our radio hosts have drunk his Kool-Aid.

Even on his signature issue of immigration, he is nothing more than an opportunist. In 2012, Trump attacked Mitt Romney for suggesting that there should be deportations of illegal immigrants, accusing Romney of being “mean-spirited”, and scolding him for losing the Latino vote. Trump’s lack of ideology allows him to exploit our anger at our porous borders by advocating his new Trumped up policy of rounding up and deporting 11 million people. His candidacy is leveraged on that extreme reversal of stance and a rhetorical misrepresentation of his lifelong position.

Barack Obama has shown that on-the-job training for a President does not work, especially in the area of foreign policy. Donald Trump’s foreign policy statements would be considered ludicrous by his supporters if they could only allow themselves to ignore the cult of personality and simply think about what he says. Trump’s comfort with the resurgence of Russian leadership in the Mideast should be anathema to our conservative friends. His abject ignorance on the issue of our nuclear triad as displayed in the last debate should really worry them, and Trump’s claim that he understands foreign policy because he pays attention to the Sunday talk shows should gag even his most ardent followers. - See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/Another-View-John-H-Sununu-Dont-drink-the-Trump-Kool-Aid#sthash.IHQtCcia.dpuf

Trump; narcissist, opportunist, hypocrite, and ignorant on foreign policy. Just the man we don't need in high office. Sununu is precisely right, even as we recognize he is working for the republican establishment.

Continue reading BELOW THE FOLD.

Via: Memeorandum

Humor in Truth...

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Eleven days into 2016 and still recovering from the hustle and bustle of the preceding year end holidays I was looking for something to get me back to normal and give me a great belly splitting laugh. But that laugh needed to be a laugh caused by something that was funny because of the great truths it held. Today that great belly splitting laugh happened.

June 28, 2015

Jeff Landry, an aide to Donald Trump, scratched the back of his right leg with his left shoe, stalling. You have to answer just right, or he goes apeshit. Jeff remembered grimly what a pleasant change he’d thought this job would be, but now he looked back on those six harrowing weeks working for Harvey Weinstein like a long-ago Hanukkah.

The question Trump had put to him was “How do we close this?” Jeff played it safe: “I say go big.”

Trump lit up.

“I can do big,” he said. “This whole thing, which was my idea, incidentally, and a very good idea, really a very great idea, was about bigness. We had a problem: ‘The Apprentice’ was tanking. I couldn’t get on Fallon or Kimmel anymore. NBC was going to replace me, and that’s bad for my brand. It’s not like bankruptcy—which I have done many times before, and I do it very well, by the way, really better than anyone, because I’m a winner. I win at everything, even bankruptcy. So, before they give me the axe, I announce that I’m running for President and boom! Winner again. Talk shows are begging me to come on. NBC offers me twice my old money. Mission accomplished. But now I gotta get out. Running for President is bullshit. What kind of loser would do this? Get me a rally.”

“And you’ll announce that you’re dropping out?” Jeff said.

“No! I can’t announce that I’m quitting to go back to TV—it makes me look like a joke. I have to be forced out.”

“But how?”

“You know how politically correct this country is—Jesus, it makes me sick,” Trump said. “In fact, if Jesus himself were here he’d agree with me. I know a lot about Jesus, by the way. A really tremendous person—he would’ve loved the Trump West Bank. Anyway, I’m going to say that Mexicans are rapists, and we’re kicking them all out. No one wants a heartless President, but that’s exactly what you want in a guy who says ‘You’re fired’ for a living. Boosts my brand. I’ll be back on NBC by Christmas.”

July 12, 2015

Jeff flinched as a half-full box of Krispy Kremes smashed into the wall by his head. “Excuse me?” Trump said. “You’re telling me that I gave the Mexicans-are-rapists speech, which was one of the worst pieces of out-and-out racism ever uttered by a non-Southerner, and my numbers have gone up?”

Jeff nodded, as unhappy as Trump. “By a lot.”

Trump picked the doughnuts up off the floor. There were six left, and he ate them as he thought. “O.K.,” he said, his lips flecked with green and yellow sprinkles. “Here’s my mistake. I’m good at everything, even identifying my own mistakes. I picked on the Mexicans. Nobody cares about the Mexicans. Personally, I love them. They’ve helped me clean out a lot of my properties after they went into foreclosure through no fault of my own. But I forgot that this is the G.O.P. Get me on a talk show. I know how to get the base upset.”

July 22, 2015

Jeff wiped sixty-four ounces of iced Dunkaccino off his shirt. He was losing his touch—he’d been sure that the cup would break to the left, but it hadn’t.

“This is not possible,” Trump snarled. “You know I’m a draft dodger, right? Only Cheney got more deferments than I did. The closest I’ve ever come to fatal combat was when I ran into Rosie O’Donnell in a men’s room. So here I am, a known draft dodger, and I go on TV and question the courage of a genuine American war hero, John McCain, and, instead of drumming me out of the race so I can get back to my empire, my numbers have gone up again?”

“Ten points,” Jeff said.

“No wonder I’m a Democrat. No wonder I invited Hillary to my wedding. These people are nuts. Next time, I’m going to go really big.”

January 12, 2016

Trump slumped in his chair. He’d been holding the last slice of an extra-large everything pizza for an unheard-of five whole minutes without eating it. Jeff’s applications to work for calmer, nicer men—Rahm Emanuel, Robert Durst, the new social-media guy at ISIS—had so far not come through. He hardly slept anymore, and even though he was only thirty, his hands shook as if he’d just survived a plane crash.

“Let’s review,” Trump said. “I said that Megyn Kelly was menstruating. I insulted Carly Fiorina’s face. I did a routine about Ben Carson’s belt that should have provoked a psychiatric intervention. I proposed internment camps for the Muslims already here, and then I said that we should bar all other Muslims from entering the country. And you’re telling me that my numbers are what?”

“The highest ever,” Jeff said, dropping behind a club chair as a platinum blow-dryer shot past him.

Trump wandered over to the window. “We have a serious problem,” he said, almost not eating the pizza. “I might win.”

Well, the only part that isn't funny is that he just might win.

SOURCE

Libertarian Gary Johnson Announces His Candidacy For President...

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Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson has joined the crowded 2016 presidential race. But he's not making any promises about his ability to defeat the likes of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

“I am announcing my candidacy right now for the Libertarian nomination,” Johnson said on Fox Business’ “Coast to Coast” with Neil Cavuto on Wednesday. “I do believe that crony capitalism is alive and well. It’s Democrats and Republicans that contribute to that. I’d like to be that choice that is not going to succumb to that.

Johnson — a self-made millionaire — also ran in 2012 as a member of the Libertarian Party, which advocates for a radically smaller and less powerful federal government.

In an interview with POLITICO, Johnson vowed to run a completely different campaign than he did in 2012, when he received just 1,275,971 votes, or 0.99 percent of the total electorate. In 2012, he launched his campaign with a splashy event that he said cost thousands; this time, he did it for free on Fox Business, he noted.

"My voice has not been heard, and speaking with a broad brush stroke, that is someone who is fiscally conservative and socially liberal," Johnson said. "At the end of the day, on my deathbed I know that I’m going to reflect on life and believe that I was the voice of reason in all this. Will that result in any better showing than last [election cycle]? Will that result in even being the nominee? Who is to say?"

Libertarians draw as many Democratic votes as they do Republicans, Johnson said, arguing that he could appeal to voters dissatisfied with their options.

Realistically, Johnson will have about as much chance of being elected president as a snow ball forming in the Mojave desert at high noon. But it will be refreshing to hear a candidate (again) that has different and reasoned ideas without the hyperbole and general BS the republican party candidates are offering.

We can hope the media doesn't ignore Johnson, all the while knowing it will.

Find the full article BELOW THE FOLD.

Via: Memeorandum

The Bundys and the Vigilante Occupiers...

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In as much as this site does not support the actions of Cliven and Ammon Bundy or the other "patriots" in Oregon, there is, however, a thin logic thread supporting those on the rightwing cusp out west.

Ammon Bundy has explained the occupation this way: “The people cannot survive without their land and resources. All comfort, all wealth, everything that we have as a people, to live, to eat, comes from the earth. We cannot have the government restricting the use of that to the point where it puts us in poverty.” Asked how long the occupiers would stay, Bundy replied that they would be satisfied “when the people of Harney County can use these lands without fear: once they can use these lands as free men.”

SKIP

... Bundy’s movement makes sense—a strange and parochial kind, but still sense—only in a more specifically American and Western context. In American politics, there are two traditions of laying claims by occupying a place. The more familiar kind, which belongs to the left and the civil-rights movement, makes private spaces more public and political. Strikes asserted workers’ role in their employers’ factories and mines. Sit-ins at lunch counters asserted a principle of equality against business owners’ traditional legal right to decide whom to admit to their places. The Occupy movement made the privately owned but publicly accessible Zuccotti Park into a pageant of participatory, consensual democracy and anarchist self-organization, at least for two months in 2011.

The other tradition turns public land into private property by occupying it. Historically, it has been anything but a protest technique. From Independence until the late nineteenth century, the major function of federal law was to convert public land, which had recently been indigenous land, into private property for white settlers. The usual trade was ownership for occupation. In the nineteenth century, it was possible to acquire land by clearing forest, planting trees on grassland, draining wetlands, irrigating dry land, mining precious minerals, and gathering stone. Until 1934, much of Harney County could be homesteaded in ranching tracts that were as large as six hundred and forty acres. Although President Franklin Roosevelt ended active homesteading in response to the Dust Bowl, he did so by executive action, and the laws permitting homesteading remained on the books, poised for possible revival, until Congress repealed them, in 1976.

The Bundys’ side of these fights is rooted in the radical idea that the federal government was never supposed to hold Western lands permanently, but instead should have ceded them to the states or granted them directly to private owners. It is possible to piece together this argument from the text of the Constitution, but courts have never accepted it. It is not really a legal theory but a political wish that history ended in 1891, when the federal government began to create national forests, or even back in 1872, when Congress made Yellowstone the country’s first national park.

SKIP

American vigilantism is never racially innocent. Its two parents are self-mobilization on the frontier, usually against Native Americans at a time when homesteading was reserved to whites, and the racial terror of the Ku Klux Klan in the South during and after Reconstruction. It is too much to call the occupiers “domestic terrorists,” as the Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh or the Klan were, but it is also obtuse to ignore the special comfort that certain white men have using guns as props in their acts of not-quite-civil disobedience. After all, guns were how they acquired their special sense of entitlement to public lands in the first place.

SOURCE

Wherever you find a group of individuals acting in the manner of the co called private militias in Oregon the true reasons for their actions will always be found in what constitutes their own self interests; almost always at the expense of the public's interest or general welfare.

What say you?

Islamic Terror Put Into Proper Perspective...

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Worldwide terror perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalist extremists must be confronted by the nations of the world. This truth is unquestioned by governments whose people have been affected Islamic terror and most have responded to quell Islamic terrorism. This includes the USA and Obama administration who has put the risk in the proper perspective and responded with a measured and rational response. Unfortunately many in the USA apparently prefer to hit the panic button and rush headlong into fear mode advocating a response hugely disproportionate with the actual threat we are exposed to.

Exactly how much more dangerous has terrorism made our lives? To answer this question, it helps to run the numbers. There are about two and a quarter million people in Paris. This means that, if you were living in Paris on the day of the recent attacks, there was roughly a one-in-twenty-thousand chance of being a victim. While that may seem high, the annual likelihood of getting killed by a car in France is almost exactly the same. (Last year, there were three thousand two hundred and fifty traffic fatalities in a population of sixty-four million.)

... In Paris, the annual murder rate in previous years has been has high as 2.6 per hundred thousand people; by that measure, the terrorist attacks this year were a significant perturbation, more than doubling the average murder rate. Even so, it’s worth noting that this makes Paris about as dangerous as New York City, where the murder rate has been as high as seven per hundred thousand in recent years. New York is generally considered a very safe city. So, while terrorism has made life in France more dangerous, the new level of danger is one we tolerate—even celebrate—in the United States.

SKIP

As far as the U.S. is concerned, it has been pointed out already—by the President, in fact—that about thirty-three thousand people die each year from gunshot wounds. That’s about four hundred thousand people since 2001. By contrast, setting aside 9/11, and even including the San Bernardino shootings, only fifty-four deaths have occurred because of domestic acts of terrorism during that time. Even if you include 9/11, the total death toll from terrorism amounts to less than one per cent of the death toll from gun violence...

There are differences, of course, between death by terrorism and death by other causes. Driving a car carries with it a set of inevitable risks. Going to a concert or eating at a restaurant should not. Still, the risks of falling prey to terrorism are nevertheless very small for most Americans. Terrorists have forced us to accept that any activity associated with living in a free society now carries with it a finite, and microscopically small, chance of tragic horror. Still, it’s up to us to choose how to react to this minuscule possibility.

SKIP

If we were more rational in the degree to which we’re alarmed about terrorism, we might become more rational in our responses to it. It’s hard to alter the mindset of a would-be terrorist, but it’s comparatively easy to introduce measures that could reduce gun-related fatalities in general. To date, Congress has shown no interest in discussing such a possibility. Instead, it has focussed on the doubtful question of whether denying refuge to Syrian families might increase public safety.

A cynical individual might wonder who benefits more from the terror induced by terrorism: the terrorists themselves or the politicians and governments who use the public reaction to acts of terror for political gain? Hermann Göring, interviewed during the Nuremberg Trials, said, “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” We need to be vigilant against those who seek to manipulate us—whoever they are.

The GOP and the many candidates vying for their parties presidential nomination need to step back a pace or two, tone down the trumpets of fear, and rationally analyze the Islamic terrorist threat in perspective. In other words view it in the broader context of actual reality rather than simply hyping fear of Islam and Muslims in general. This is not to say the threat is not real or that it should be ignored hoping that it will eventually go away; it will not without steadfast resistance and force. But overreacting as Trump and others have done plays into the hands of the enemy and produces no tangible benefits for our nation.

Read the full article at the SOURCE

Face of 21st Century Republicans...

The Donald Trump and Ted Cruz agenda for 21st century America.

Our Pledge as it Ought To Be...

Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth

Our nation's pledge of allegiance before religionist were successful in influencing our government to change it in 1954. 

Wouldn't the patriotic action be to revert back to the original pledge? One the Founding Fathers would be more likely approve of.

Hat Tip goes to Captain Fog from The Swash Zone