Monday, December 28, 2015 7:27:18 AM
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26, 1947) ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton
Donald John Trump Sr. (born June 14, 1946) ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump
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The Wild Ideas You Missed While Donald Trump Was Talking
Trump’s not the only Republican making dubious claims. He’s just the only one we’ve paid attention to.
December 26, 2015
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/republican-debate-wild-ideas-donald-trump-213463 [with comments]
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The Republican Establishment Thinks Ted Cruz Can Save Them From Trump. There's One Big Problem.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
As Kenny Bania might say: It's gold, Jerry.
By Zach Carter
12/23/2015 05:08 am ET | Updated [sometime] 12/24/2015
WASHINGTON -- As Donald Trump continues to dominate GOP primary polls, establishment Republicans have been reluctantly warming [ http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/14/politics/ted-cruz-donald-trump-republican-establishment/ ] to the idea that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) might be their only alternative to the racist billionaire.
At least Cruz, the reasoning goes [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/12/the_gop_establishment_prefers_ted_cruz_to_donald_trump.html ], supports traditional Republican policies. Trump could upend the party's leadership structure and policy agenda, reshaping the GOP into something like the neo-fascist political parties that have gained ground in Europe over the past few years.
But that argument makes one significant assumption -- namely, that Cruz actually does support a policy agenda acceptable to the class of executives, financial elites and party honchos who make up the Republican establishment. In reality, a key plank of his economic platform would horrify them: Cruz supports a return to the gold standard, a relic of the pre-Depression past that would wreak havoc on the American business class, and on the rest of society too.
"I think the Fed should get out of the business of trying to juice our economy and simply be focused on sound money and monetary stability, ideally tied to gold," Cruz said in an October debate [ http://time.com/4091301/republican-debate-transcript-cnbc-boulder/ ].
He reiterated the call two weeks later [ http://time.com/4107636/transcript-read-the-full-text-of-the-fourth-republican-debate-in-milwaukee/ ]. "We had a gold standard under Bretton Woods, we had it for about 170 years of our nation’s history, and enjoyed booming economic growth and lower inflation than we have had with the Fed now," Cruz said at a Nov. 10 debate. "We need to get back to sound money."
No country on Earth now relies on a gold standard for its currency.
A 2012 survey of economists [ http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw1nNUYOXSAKwrq ] conducted by the University of Chicago's Initiative on Global Markets found literally no support for the gold standard among any of its respondents. These were not all liberals in love with deficit spending and robust regulation. Seven of the economists came from the notoriously conservative Chicago school itself.
"A gold standard regime would be a disaster for any large advanced economy," University of Chicago economist Anil Kashyap told the researchers, adding that support for the idea "implies macroeconomic illiteracy."
"There are much better ways to avoid excessive inflation, while maintaining the flexibility of a fiat currency," said University of Chicago economist Nancy Stokey.
Under a gold standard, a country pegs the value of its currency to a certain amount of gold. If you own dollars, you can trade them in to the government for a fixed amount of gold. This was appealing to ancient and medieval peoples who fetishized a shiny metal with limited practical use. But it turned out to be a disaster for major developed economies.
"In the late 19th century, the Gilded Age robber barons and big bankers thought the gold standard very modern," University of Texas at Austin economist James Galbraith told The Huffington Post in an email. "I congratulate Senator Cruz; his economics is perfectly in line with his worldview."
The price of gold is notoriously volatile [ http://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2013/sep/26/gold-investment-driven-market-fears ]. That irregularity can be destructive, and can make it very difficult for business leaders to plan their affairs. Say the price of gold drops 10 percent because a new mine is discovered, and speculators fuel a downward spiral in prices. If the dollar is pegged to the price of gold, that means the value of the dollar just dropped 10 percent because someone dug a hole in the ground.
That creates a mess for any business with international operations, especially if the United States is the only country on the gold standard. If the dollar gets cheaper, it effectively becomes less expensive to pay workers in dollars. Maybe, then, it would be time to open a factory in Arkansas and shift production away from Vietnam. That's great for profits, until gold surges anew in value -- at which point suddenly all of your U.S. workers, getting paid in gold-backed dollars, are expensive again.
It's an even bigger problem for the stock market. If dollars are tied to gold, then so are all the other financial assets that are denominated in dollars. The stocks and bonds of major U.S. corporations would end up fluctuating with the whims of a speculative market for gold. Without any change in its basic operations or prospects, a U.S. company could see the value of its shares plunge or skyrocket. This unpredictability would encourage investors to put their money in more stable foreign projects.
"Every country in the world went off the gold standard for a reason," says economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It was inconsistent with normal economic policy."
Yet the gold standard does have its adherents, and Cruz is getting some financial support for his quixotic monetary move. A new political ad group called the Lone Star Committee is trying to raise [ http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/22/politics/ted-cruz-gold-standard/index.html ] $1 million for a New Hampshire ad blitz promoting the gold standard. This is not an establishment Republican group. It's being run by Richard Danker, who previously worked as a policy adviser at the obscure conservative think tank American Principles in Action. Danker managed the 2014 Senate campaign of Jeff Bell, who was routed by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). APA is chiefly underwritten by the anti-gay financier [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/05/sean-fieler-gay-marriage_n_7511614.html ] Sean Fieler.
Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has been perhaps the most prominent advocate of the gold standard in recent decades, using his perch in Congress to excoriate the Federal Reserve and demand a return to "hard money." He now appears in TV ads warning of a looming financial crisis in which "stocks and bonds will crash" and "the savings of millions will be wiped out." In these ads, Paul encourages viewers to buy a book written by one Porter Stansberry, a man whom, it turns out, the Securities and Exchange Commission once successfully sued for securities fraud [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-paul-ads-warn-of-financial-crisis-1432245027 ].
Ron Paul's son Rand, a senator from Kentucky now vying for the 2016 GOP nomination, is a bit more restrained than Cruz in his criticism of central banking. During a November debate, he spoke of the need to "re-examine" whether the Fed should be "determining interest rates," but he stopped short of calling for a full return to the gold standard.
Hardcore anti-government libertarians tend to like the gold standard because it takes economic power away from central bankers and hands it over to financial markets. For many libertarians, a net loss in government power is a net gain in freedom. But Cruz's gold-standard pitch isn't just a play for the general libertarian vote. It's an appeal to a very specific kind of libertarian who believes in particularly weird things.
Milton Friedman was an extreme libertarian who opposed the licensing of physicians [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q71hrwUcu0 (next below; with comments)]
Friedman's greatest work was a 1963 book he co-wrote with Anna Schwartz, titled A Monetary History of the United States [ http://www.amazon.com/Monetary-History-United-States-1867-1960/dp/0691003548 ]. In it, Friedman and Schwartz make a persuasive case that the gold standard actually caused [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBCDS-y8vc (next below; with comments)]
In the early years of the Depression, currency speculators and worried citizens extracted huge sums of gold from government coffers by trading in their dollars, concerned that the government would not be able to support the value of the currency. The Fed responded with a single action that protected its gold reserves, the value of the dollar and the integrity of the gold standard: It raised interest rates. Doing so offered citizens a potentially greater return on their holdings of U.S. dollars, since higher interest rates mean better returns on savings accounts.
It worked. The dollar grew stronger and the run on American currency abated. But by encouraging people to save, the Fed was discouraging people from spending, curtailing the total amount of money available in the general economy. This, Friedman argued, turned an economic problem into a calamity. When everybody is broke, the last thing you want to do is limit the supply of money. Without money, nobody is going to get out of being broke.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt solved this dilemma in 1933 by taking the U.S. off the gold standard. That freed up the Fed to adjust the money supply based purely on broader economic conditions, without regard to how many pounds of gold it might secure by doing so. Roosevelt allowed foreign governments to continue to cash in dollars for gold, but that last vestige of the gold standard was abolished by President Richard Nixon in 1971.
Today, gold standard adherents consist mainly of cranks, crackpots and devotees of the Austrian school of economics. And the years since the financial crisis have devastated the intellectual underpinnings of the Austrian school. Austrian goldbugs began warning in 2009 that hyperinflation was just around the corner [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/inflation-predictions/ ], because based on the Austrian money model, it should have been. But hyperinflation never happened [ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/the-derp-and-fall-of-inflation-fearmongers/277347/ ].
The Cato Institute's Mark Calabria is one of the few serious economists who supports a gold standard. When he talked about it on Glenn Beck's show in 2011, he had to share airtime with a conspiracy theorist [ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/03/29/the-cato-institute-should-apologize-for-legitim/178071 ] from the John Birch Society who once produced a film on chemtrails and wrote a book arguing that vitamin B-17 -- which is actually a poison [ http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/cam/patient/laetrile-pdq#section/all ], not a vitamin -- can cure cancer. Still, Calabria and this guy were able to agree about gold.
The Republican establishment came to terms with accepting votes from the tinfoil-hat brigade a long time ago. But the GOP donor class has never allowed such people to set the party's economic agenda. A Cruz nomination might change that.
Zach Carter is a co-host of the HuffPost Politics podcast "So That Happened." Listen to the latest episode below:
[audio ( https://soundcloud.com/so-that-happened-1/flints-water-emergency-a-trump-fan-explains-trump-fandom-omnibus-and-gopdebate ) embedded]
Copyright © 2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-gold-standard_5679be10e4b0b958f6586fc7 [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Fractured Fairy Tales -- King Midas
Published on Sep 2, 2012 by perfectlydarien [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3w5Bd-tMeZjPZGcSBxmJIw / http://www.youtube.com/user/darienkd , http://www.youtube.com/user/darienkd/videos ]
Rocky and His Friends explain to us how government really works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGqAcrMkFJ0 [with comments]
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Trading Places: A 1983 Christmas Comedy That's Still Surprisingly Relevant
The 32-year-old-film, which is centered on insider trading and the culture of poverty, fits into the economic conversations America is having today.
Dec 25, 2015
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/trading-places/421899/ [with comments]
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Cruz Christmas Classics
Published on Dec 18, 2015 by Ted Cruz [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzMQMhq7Id0Y_wSDA_CJdGg / http://www.youtube.com/user/TedCruzforSenate , http://www.youtube.com/user/TedCruzforSenate/videos ]
http://www.tedcruz.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3hB3iOQKjY [with (nearly 4,000) comments]
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Ted Cruz Exposes His Children, Then Plays Victim
[ http://www.redstate.com/2015/12/23/ted-cruz-washington-post-monkeys/ (with comments)]
Published on Dec 26, 2015 by Mike Malloy [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpU4j-LN_aibXA1gONvWzxw / http://www.youtube.com/user/hschulein , http://www.youtube.com/user/hschulein/videos ]
The Washington Post has been monkeying around, and Sen. Ted Cruz is pissed.
The newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes drew a cartoon, published on Tuesday morning, that depicts the GOP presidential candidate as an organ-playing Santa Claus while his trained monkey daughters, aged 7 and 4, dance.
The Post's Ann Telnaes declared Tuesday that Cruz's daughters, Caroline, 7, and Catherine, 5, are "fair game" after they appeared with their father in a Christmas-themed video.
Full story: http://mic.com/articles/131127/washington-post-pulls-a-cartoon-that-depicts-ted-cruz-s-children-as-dancing-monkies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NgvncdQ2nE [with comments]
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Ted Cruz's Holiday Spirit
Nicholas Pilch via Getty Images
By Richard North Patterson
Posted: 12/22/2015 7:23 am EST Updated: 12/22/2015 8:59 am EST
This holiday season has offered far too little respite from humanity's dark side -- the hatred and fanaticism that gave us Paris, San Bernardino, Colorado Springs. How consoling, then, is Ted Cruz, who offers us the power of prayer and the balm of faith.
For Thanksgiving, Cruz called on the Almighty "to render our National government a blessing to all the people" and "promote the practice of true religion and virtue." His Christmas card quoted the Bible: "I have trusted in your loving kindness. My heart will rejoice in your salvation." Not content with mere random prayer, his website proposed to bind us in a" National Prayer Team." "Heidi and I," Cruz assured us, "are grateful for the prayers of people all over this great nation."
Lest we need guidance in placing our lips to God's ears, the website directs that our efforts be "dedicated to a focused season of prayer on behalf of the nation, presidential candidate Ted Cruz, his family and staff and the campaign" -- presumably including its pollsters and fundraisers. "Members," we are told, "will receive weekly emails containing prayer requests and short devotionals." Promptly, "Prayer Warriors For Ted Cruz" assured us on Facebook that "God is empowering # Ted Cruz in such a mighty way." Wafted by this wave of prayer, Cruz is currently brightening our holidays with a 12-city "Take Off With Ted Cruz Country Christmas Tour" through the southern primary states -- the spiritual uplift of which, serendipitously for the senator, has him pressing Donald Trump for first place in this morning's latest national poll.
So let us examine the senator's holiday rhetoric, the better to grasp what he is asking us to pray for.
"2016," he predicts, "will be a religious liberty election." But liberty for whom? Not gays or lesbians, evidently, for whom Cruz has prescribed conversion therapy to cure them of their "choice." The freedom Cruz has in mind are for people like Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who denied gay couples marriage licenses. After all, Cruz memorably explained, gays are behind the "jihad" -- such an evocative choice of words -- "being waged [against] people of faith who respect the biblical teaching that marriage is the union of one man and one woman." So deep is Cruz's respect that he pledges his best efforts to repeal gay marriage. "For the sake of this cause," he adds without apparent irony, "we need to bring people together."
Cruz's God, it seems, is also a gun enthusiast. Shortly after the slaughter in San Bernardino, he starred at a gun rights rally put on by a group whose self-described mission is to "glorify God in all we do." Cruz himself reacted to the massacre by proclaiming: "You don't get rid of the bad guys by getting rid of our guns" but "by using our guns." In Cruz's world, we may have to. Hours after the massacre, Cruz voted against a Senate measure to bar people on the FBI terrorist watch list from purchasing guns -- including the assault weapons used to murder 14 people. For those puzzled by the senator's seemingly circular reasoning, it is, perhaps, salient that the NRA vehemently opposed the measure.
Cruz' reaction to the Planned Parenthood killings in Colorado Springs was truly original. The shooter's cry of "no more body parts" caused some to wonder if the heated rhetoric against Planned Parenthood -- fervently stoked by Cruz himself -- had resonated in the mind of a deranged killer who, like so many other deranged killers, too easily acquired weapons. Not Cruz. Instead, he found a way to conflate two favorite themes: the murderer, he speculated, was a "transgendered left-wing activist."
With respect to the tragedy in Paris perpetrated by ISIS, Cruz swiftly cut to the heart of the problem: that President Obama is "willing to use military force [only] if it benefits radical Islamic terrorists" -- presumably including, though he chose not to mention this, those on the FBI's terrorist watch list whose right to acquire weapons of mass murder he voted to protect. But President Cruz will have the answer: "We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don't know whether sand can glow in the dark but we're going to find out." Less aglow was the former commandant of the Army War College -- "carpet bomb," he remarked, "is just one of those phrases that people with no military experience throw around." Which perhaps explains Cruz's bewildering claim that during the first Gulf War "we carpet bombed them into oblivion" when, as one would expect in the age of smart weaponry, no "carpet bombing" ever occurred.
Were your holidays lightened a bit by the Paris Climate Accord? Not Cruz's. He seized the moment to chair hearings denouncing climate change as a hoax perpetrated by liberals who "want massive government control over every aspect of our lives." Among the GOP candidates, Cruz is by far the most vehement in his rejection of climate science: remarkably, the senator purports to believe -- in utter defiance of the scientific community -- that according to satellite data "there has been no significant global warming for the past 18 years."
One suspects that Cruz knows very well that his climate denial is nowhere close to intellectually respectable. Thus his diversionary suggestion that Obama's efforts to battle climate change are just another manifestation of weakness in a president who "apparently thinks having an SUV in your driveway is more dangerous than a bunch of terrorists trying to blow up the world" -- including, one supposes, those folks on the terrorist watch list. For those attempting to follow this rhetorical bait and switch, it is worthy of note that in only one segment of Americans does a majority reject the overwhelming scientific consensus that man-made climate change is all too real: conservative Republican primary voters, including those clustered in Iowa.
A particularly dispiriting lump of holiday coal was Donald Trump's nativism -- espousing a massive deportation of Mexicans while proposing to "register" Muslims in America and bar Muslims abroad from traveling here. Artfully gliding in Trump's slipstream, Cruz proclaimed himself a "big fan of Donald Trump's," commending Trump for "focusing on the need to secure our borders" and echoing his hard line on immigration, and his "Christmas Tour" features an echo of George Wallace's segregationist pledge, promising to oppose legal status "today, tomorrow, forever." While modestly demurring to Trump's worst rhetoric with respect to Muslims, Cruz abandoned his erstwhile devotion to "religious liberty" -- opposing a Senate resolution against imposing a religious test for entry into the United States.
Perhaps, by now, you've lost the thread of Cruz's Thanksgiving call to "promote the practice of true religion and virtue." Unwittingly recorded at a private fundraiser, Cruz helped clear things up: Stating that Trump and Ben Carson will never become president, he confided that "my approach has been to bear hug both of them, and smother them with love... [until] the lion's share of their supporters come to me."
This, for once, is a window into the depths of Cruz's soul, long apparent to the political cognoscenti. As a key Republican insider of four decades says flatly, Cruz is relentlessly "Machiavellian -- the most calculating man I've seen in this business." His current calculation was on sharp display in the most recent Republican debate: eliminate Marco Rubio by tarring him with conservatives as a supporter of "amnesty and citizenship," and keep in good stead with Trump so as to inherit his nativist vote. Indeed, his Christmas stump speech includes a fresh appeal to the lowest common political denominator: "I think the new politically correct term is no longer illegal aliens; it's undocumented Democrats" -- to which he adds the implication that Rubio talks more favorably about legalization when speaking Spanish on Spanish-language television.
The simple truth about Cruz, says Eliana Johnson of the National Review, is that "the man who boasts of his ideological purity is perhaps the most obviously tactical candidate." His path to the nomination runs through Iowa and the deep South -- through evangelicals, gun fanatics, nativists, climate deniers and social conservatives -- and every position he takes is laser focused on winning them over. And it's working -- Cruz has surged past Trump in Iowa and into second place in the latest national polls, and the growing consensus within the Clinton campaign is that Cruz will be the GOP nominee. Cruz, not Trump, is becoming the man to watch.
And he bears watching. His holiday rhetoric is not that of a God-smacked extremist prone to verbal excess, but a cold-eyed cynic, a top-tier graduate of Princeton and Harvard who condescends to his target audience for his own narrow ends. For the construct which defines him is not a hard right-wing belief system, but something far more frightening: the barren psyche of a demagogue.
Classically defined, a demagogue is "a political leader who appeals to the emotions, fears, prejudice and ignorance of the lower socioeconomic classes in order to gain power." Thus, as with Cruz, for the sake of stirring excitement, demagogues "oppose deliberation" and "accuse moderate and thoughtful opponents of weakness."
Bad enough. But consider the psychology of someone for whom personal advancement obliterates truth or fairness, and who sees others as chess pieces instead of human beings. A week before Christmas, Congress passed a rare bipartisan compromise by wide margins: a spending bill which prevented a potentially ruinous government shutdown -- which, had it happened, would have been politically ruinous to Republicans. Protected by Republican leadership from the consequences of such a disaster, Cruz used conservative talk radio to throw them under the bus: "This is Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan passing the Democratic agenda, funding Obamacare, funding amnesty, expanding low-skilled immigration... It's an absolute betrayal."
This is Cruz -- a loner who routinely uses his Republican colleagues as foils for personal attacks; whose private conversation is little different than his self-aggrandizing stump speeches; and who is widely proclaimed as "the most hated man in the Senate." In self-exculpation for this universal loathing, Cruz mocks Rubio for being adequately socialized -- "he's a wonderful communicator, he's a charming individual, he's very well-liked in Washington" -- and argues: "If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy. But if you want someone to drive you home... I will get you home."
To a person, Cruz's colleagues would rather have a beer at home. How else to react to a nakedly ambitious man whose behavior and persona suggest the following characteristics: "manipulative," "cunning," and "callous," with a "grandiose sense of self," "a penchant for pathological lying," and a "marked lack of empathy for others." Which, as it happens, are among the hallmarks of a sociopath.
Small wonder, then, that of the 15 candidates followed by the Washington Post's fact checker, Cruz trailed only Trump and Carson in the percentage of statements rated as "false or mostly false." It is sobering to realize that if Ted Cruz assures us that something is a fact, there's a two-thirds chance he's lying.
"Any President," Cruz informs us, "who doesn't begin every day on his knees isn't fit to be commander in chief of this nation." In truth, pious frauds are not fit to be president, demagogues even less so -- whether on their knees or on the stump, seeding America with ignorance and hate for their own narcissistic ends.
Let us pray.
Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-north-patterson/ted-cruz-holiday-spirit_b_8805176.html [with comments]
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Are You Ready To Vomit Yet?
Published on Dec 25, 2015 by Mike Malloy
There is nothing more depressing than GOP politics — except when a Republican rally morphs into a rather crazy “prayer revival” in which everyone asks God to magically make their chosen candidate president. A Nashville, Tennessee rally on Tuesday started out normal for Cruz. The 2016 hopeful began by promising that he would force the federal government to waste more money investigating Planned Parenthood, and to end “religious persecution” — the conservative term for attempts to ensure that every American, regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender, and all other variables in society, have equal opportunities in life.
Full story:
Rafael Cruz Declares Son Ted Cruz 'The Anointed One'
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/rafael-cruz-declares-son-ted-cruz-anointed- [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp4lIvDIv-g [embedded; with comments ( http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ted-cruzs-father-tells-him-god-has-destined-you-greatness )]
Ted Cruz's Father Suggested His Son Is 'Anointed' to Bring About 'End Time Transfer of Wealth'
October 17, 2013
In a sermon last year at an Irving, Texas, megachurch that helped elect Ted Cruz to the United States Senate, Cruz' father Rafael Cruz indicated that his son was among the evangelical Christians who are anointed as "kings" to take control of all sectors of society, an agenda commonly referred to as the "Seven Mountains" mandate, and "bring the spoils of war to the priests", thus helping to bring about a prophesied "great transfer of wealth", from the "wicked" to righteous gentile believers.
[...]
http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/brucewilson/ted-cruzs-father-suggested-his-son-anointed-bring-about-end-time-transfer [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa5w9js48s [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy074QLV2D8 [with comments]
The Left Must Accept that Ted Cruz is the Dominionist Messiah
October, 30th, 2013
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/10/30/left-accept-ted-cruz-dominionist-messiah.html [with comments; also has embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa5w9js48s (with comments)]
WATCH: Ted Cruz's Dad Calls US a "Christian Nation," Says Obama Should Go "Back to Kenya"
Want to understand where the tea party champion's hardcore views come from? Meet his father, Rafael.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/ted-cruz-rafael-father-video-christian-tea-party [with additional embedded videos, including http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy074QLV2D8 (with comments), and (nearly 8,000) comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4eXsn5ItIY [embedded; with comments]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlc85QRDrX0 [with comments]
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Death of an Orca: What It Means for the GOP
By Jeff Schweitzer
Posted: 12/24/2015 2:33 pm EST Updated: 12/24/2015 4:59 pm EST
Donald Trump may be to the Republican Party what Blackfish [ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2971294/The-Blackfish-effect-SeaWorld-loses-25-4-million-documentary-criticizing-company-s-treatment-killer-whales-lowers-park-attendance.html ] was to SeaWorld.
The documentary Blackfish on the mistreatment of Orcas had a disastrous effect on the marine amusement park, revealing a long-standing and widely-accepted SeaWorld lie that the whales were being treated well. Following the release of Blackfish, attendance at the park fell by about 50%, with bleeding losses of revenue and about a 60% decline in stock value. Blackfish was like a light suddenly flipped on in the kitchen, revealing the roaches everybody knew were there but chose to ignore until the obvious was simply too overwhelming.
With Donald Trump's campaign we can no longer ignore the intolerance and hate that has so thoroughly infected the Republican Party pantry. With Trump front and center in the Republican primary season, the spotlight is now shining brightly on the ugly truth that was, pre-Trump, so conveniently swept under the counter. Trump's brazen and popular foray into the realm of vile rhetoric has revealed a long-standing but well-hidden truth about the GOP and conservativism in the United States: right-wing thought has devolved into a disease of ignorance and hate.
A New Low
While Republican presidential hopefuls descend down to historic and frightening lows of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, the rest of us must pause to take stock of why we have reached this horrible nadir in public discourse.
We have all heard the sentiment that, "A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." Mahatma Gandhi is often and widely cited as the author of this phrase, but he apparently never uttered [ https://atkinsbookshelf.wordpress.com/tag/famous-misquotations/ ] the words. Nevertheless, no matter who first noted this truth, the idea is sound and a viable guide to our humanness. Others have gone further, again with hazy attribution to Gandhi [ http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mahatmagan150700.html ], with the notion that, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way in which its animals are treated. I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."
Many of us would agree with these aphorisms. But the Republican field is hastily veering ever far away from this ideal, taking the opposite position that attacking those most in need is a moral imperative. This inversion of reason can be seen with the extraordinary extremism espoused by those representing the GOP. Trump is a deep well of such ugly sentiment, which has disturbingly resonated with a large swath of our population. His popularity is what is most frightening of all. That a demagogue will come along is no surprise, but that his despicable views will find resonance with so many of our voters is as shocking as it is disappointing. Trump is the lump in our collective breast, an ominous warning of a more virulent disease about to attack our body politic. Trumps ascendancy proves we are sick, that the cancer on our society is metastasizing.
Mainstream Extremism
Trump is no outlier or anomaly, but instead broadly representative of the growing radicalization of conservative thought - one reason other candidates vying for the Oval Office have not dared to criticize Trump. There is much to choose from, but let's look at just a few of the more drastic notions that have become mainstream, ideas that would have resulted in instant political death just a decade ago.
Trump proposes that the U.S. Government should shut down mosques [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/donald-trumps-week-controversial-remarks ], you know, like Nazi Germany closed synagogues. Should we have our own version of Kristallnacht now? Worse, if there can be a worse, pining for the good old days of internment camps for the Japanese during World War II, Trump suggests that the government create a database to track Muslims -like the Nazis tracked Jews. Perhaps we should require that all Muslims wear yellow crescent moons to make them easier to identify. If it was good enough for the Nazis, it is good enough for us, no?
Trump describes immigrants as rapists and criminals [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/ ]. "But you have people coming in and I'm not just saying Mexicans, I'm talking about people that are from all over that are killers and rapists and they're coming into this country." Never mind the pesky fact that there is no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes than people born in the country. Here is the conclusion from a Congressional Research Service [ http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R42057.pdf ] report from 2012: "The overall proportion of noncitizens in federal and state prisons and local jails corresponds closely to the proportion of noncitizens in the total U.S. population."
With this dark but factually incorrect perspective on the influx of criminals, Trump not surprisingly has a solution when he says all undocumented workers "have to go [ http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/donald-trump-undocumented-immigrants-have-go-n410501 ]." This means that a candidate for the presidency of our country is proposing, seriously, that we locate, round up, arrest and then forcibly deport a population of 11 million people [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/donald-trump-shocking-reality-deportation-plan ]. To find we find these undesirables in our midst, would we create a secret police like the Stasi in East Germany, so neighbors would rat on neighbors? Who would take care of the children left behind? Does this not give you the creeps?
According to Trump, poor people are poor because they do not work hard enough. His solution is to "leave the minimum wage [ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ruiz-trump-hypocritical-attitude-poor-offensivs-article-1.2436102 ] the way it is." If only the poor would find jobs all would be grand.
The list of bizarre policy proposals goes on and on, but Trump's assault on reason and civility does not end there. He openly mocked a New York Times reporter [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/25/trump-blasted-by-new-york-times-after-mocking-reporter-with-disability/ ] by imitating his spastic movements. He dismissed John McCain's service to his country [ http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/hes-not-war-hero-donald-trump-mocks-john-mccains-service-n394391 ] proclaiming that "I don't like losers." Trump went on to say that, "He is a war hero (only) because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured." Trump believes the normal act of going to the bathroom is too gross to be mentionable. He has denigrated Hillary Clinton for taking a bathroom break during a debate saying that "I know where she went. It's disgusting." There has likely never been a more misogynist candidate; he constantly degrades women. He said that Arianna Huffington, "...is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man - he made a good decision." If he does not like a question from a female reporter he will dismiss her as menstruating. Trump has called women [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/18-real-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-women_55d356a8e4b07addcb442023 ] "pigs", "dogs", and "disgusting animals."
To put all of this in perspective, let us pause here, contemplate, and do a brief exercise. Go back and substitute "Obama" everywhere we have "Trump." Now re-read this and consider even for a brief moment the holy hell that would ensue if Obama did anything remotely close to anything Trump has done. Really, do that, and then weep for your country, for its double standard, for its descent into a new era of madness.
We are plumbing new depths of depravity here; previously any one of these proclamations would have knocked a candidate out of the race within a few hours of being verbalized. Now, the crazier the talk the more traction the candidate gains. The cancer is spreading.
Two Worlds
On the bright side, Trump's blazing ignorance is shining a light on right-wing thought so that, finally, the ugly truth, so long suppressed, is revealing itself in ways that can no longer be ignored. We have before us now a world clearly divided between two opposing world views.
We are witnessing the clash of reason and faith, between science and religion, between truth and the big lie, between demagoguery and sane debate. Nowhere is that made clearer than in the rush toward willful ignorance seen in the Republican debates. Disdain for science and the scientific method is front and center in the field of candidates on stage with Trump. With the big lie and faith-based reasoning politicians are not constrained by the annoying shackles of reality. Denying the truth of climate change is now mandatory for any Republican; the GOP is one of the world's few remaining political organizations that reject the obvious certainty of human-caused climate change. False statements about Planned Parenthood are taken at face value by party sympathizers even when easily shown to be fantasy. Fighting evolution is part of the GOP fabric, a modern day version of the Church's attacks on Galileo. Never mind that we can demonstrate evolution in a Petri dish; it has been proven across multiple fields of science including genetics, biogeography, and paleontology. Even the Pope in 1996 grudgingly admitted that evolution is "more than just a theory." But the GOP hangs on to the fifteenth century.
Trump's campaign highlights like few others could that we are in a race for the bottom, in which the candidate who best embraces ignorance and hate wins. When beliefs are divorced from reality, a hallmark of the Trump's outrageous claims, anything goes. With no common understanding of even baseline truths, we lose the ability to have any meaningful discourse to solve our very real problems. We can magically deport 11 million people. We can identify Muslims and track their movements. We can close mosques. All without consequence. Sure, why not, because reality and objective truths are no constraint.
The slogan and its many variations of "make American great again" often show up in conservative circles. To what age are we harking back to exactly? Make no mistake; this is war, a fight for the soul of our nation. Making America great means, to the extreme right, dragging us back into another Dark Ages just as the rest of the world is embracing the knowledge and new technologies of the 21st century. Trump and his ilk are a pathological infection of, consuming us from within. Trump is no joke, his candidacy is not funny. His colleagues on stage are just as frightening. This is deadly serious. Our only hope is that like with Blackfish, the shocking truth about the GOP as revealed by Trump's candidacy, will bring the American electorate to its senses. To survive we must reject the lies from the right so long hidden in the national basement like a crazy uncle nobody wants to acknowledge. Trump brings the crazy to light; now we can see what our real choices are for the future.
Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/death-of-an-orca-what-it_b_8875082.html [with comments]
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Obama’s team says the GOP earned Donald Trump
President Barack Obama is expected in the New Year to speak out more against Donald Trump.
Loyalists say that after two terms of obstruction, Republicans are getting the anger candidate their rhetoric created.
12/27/16
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/obama-trump-republicans-217144 [with comments]
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Americans Won't Elect a Vulgar/Bullying Blowhard
Nine OK via Getty Images
By Peter D. Rosenstein
Posted: 12/24/2015 10:41 am EST Updated: 12/24/2015 12:59 pm EST
The American people won't elect a vulgar/bullying blowhard for President even if the ultra-right wing of the Republican Party manages to nominate him. We have never before seen the kind of campaign we are seeing this year within the Republican Party. All their chickens are coming home to roost. The worst excesses and policies of those running as Tea Party candidates in the past few years are combined in the two leading candidates, Donald Trump and Canadian born Rafael 'Ted' Cruz.
Trump and Cruz are espousing policies and positions appealing to the worst instincts in our nation in an effort to heighten people's fears over terrorism and the economy. They are playing to existing racism and the intolerance of the religious right in America. They think nothing of lying to excite a crowd or gain a vote.
Trump is speaking to the least educated [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/27/donald-trumps-surge-is-heavily-reliant-on-less-educated-americans-heres-why/ ] in the nation. Cruz is speaking to them and evangelical voters consciously displaying a total lack of respect for our founding fathers who understood what they were doing when they opted for a clear separation of church and state [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States ]. They understood people came to America to escape religious persecution and to be allowed to practice religion, or not practice it, as they saw fit and not have government pass laws favoring the beliefs of one religion over another.
The founding fathers, all white men, did leave things out of our constitution and some were added with the Bill of Rights. We just celebrated the 224th Anniversary of its ratification. Because some were and represented slave owners [ http://www.revolutionary-war.net/slavery-and-the-founding-fathers.html ] it wasn't until the civil war was fought that between 1865 and 1870 the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments were passed giving African Americans their rights. It wasn't until 1920 with the ratification of the nineteenth [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution ] amendment women got the right to vote. We have yet to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to fully include women in the constitution. But change does come, even if much too slowly, because the majority of American people are decent and with the right leadership eventually overcome their fears and biases to do the right thing.
Trump and Cruz campaign on the premise they can turn back the progress we have made and it could happen. They could appoint arch-conservative Supreme Court Justices and reverse decisions including Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion, Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage, and a host of others like The National Federation of Independent Business et. al. v Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services et. al. declaring the Affordable Care Act constitutional.
Trump [ http://www.ontheissues.org/Donald_Trump.htm ] has called for building a wall to keep out Mexicans and for deporting eleven million undocumented immigrants, most who came here to make a better life for themselves and their families. He would close our borders to Muslims, supports registering those here now and sending government informants into mosques. His recent vulgar attack against Clinton was considered obscene enough that many media outlets bleeped [ http://www.mediaite.com/online/to-bleep-or-not-to-bleep-youll-never-guess-which-network-wont-air-the-word-shlonged/ ] it out. He sounds like he is adopting fascism and the views of Mussolini. Ted Cruz [ http://www.ontheissues.org/Ted_Cruz.htm ], the current reincarnation of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) who conducted the witch-hunt for communists and homosexuals in government, said he will reverse laws on same-sex marriage; approves building the wall to keep out Mexicans and opposes any pathway to citizenship for the eleven million immigrants here now. He refuses to call Trump to task for any vulgarity or race baiting and opposes equal pay for equal work for women. He opposes any controls on the sale of guns including assault weapons. He regrets his vote for Chief Justice John Roberts because he voted that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional allowing millions of Americans to get healthcare. He supported shutting down the entire government because of a small allocation for Planned Parenthood which works to protect women's health.
These are the two men leading in all polls for the Republican nomination. None of the other men running, with the exception of Jeb Bush and only because he is in a personal feud with Trump, is saying anything against the policies or positions they support. As an American who cares about the rights of people and the future of our nation, I believe it is imperative the positions and irrational bluster of Trump and Cruz be defeated so soundly they are seen to be fully repudiated.
The only person running with the qualifications to be President; the person with the experience, knowledge and intelligence to lead our nation and the world; the person whose election would make real the goal of our constitution to form 'a more perfect union' is Hillary Rodham Clinton. When the dust settles and the nominees of both Parties are chosen; Democrats, Independents and even moderate Republicans will understand what is at stake in this election. They will support Hillary Rodham Clinton because she is best able to lead us into a better future.
Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-d-rosenstein/americans-wont-elect-a-vu_b_8873946.html [with comments]
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Dr. Ben Carson: Republicans have a 'mental disorder'
What was your first clue, sport?
Dec 17, 2015
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/12/17/1461159/-Dr-Ben-Carson-Republicans-have-a-mental-disorder [with comments]
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=115511932 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=118176080 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=118924029 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=117437052 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=115942261 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119088784 and preceding (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119393422 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119227239 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119398464 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119420609 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119425574 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119420373 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119433633 and following
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton
Donald John Trump Sr. (born June 14, 1946) ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump
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The Wild Ideas You Missed While Donald Trump Was Talking
Trump’s not the only Republican making dubious claims. He’s just the only one we’ve paid attention to.
December 26, 2015
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/republican-debate-wild-ideas-donald-trump-213463 [with comments]
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The Republican Establishment Thinks Ted Cruz Can Save Them From Trump. There's One Big Problem.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
As Kenny Bania might say: It's gold, Jerry.
By Zach Carter
12/23/2015 05:08 am ET | Updated [sometime] 12/24/2015
WASHINGTON -- As Donald Trump continues to dominate GOP primary polls, establishment Republicans have been reluctantly warming [ http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/14/politics/ted-cruz-donald-trump-republican-establishment/ ] to the idea that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) might be their only alternative to the racist billionaire.
At least Cruz, the reasoning goes [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/12/the_gop_establishment_prefers_ted_cruz_to_donald_trump.html ], supports traditional Republican policies. Trump could upend the party's leadership structure and policy agenda, reshaping the GOP into something like the neo-fascist political parties that have gained ground in Europe over the past few years.
But that argument makes one significant assumption -- namely, that Cruz actually does support a policy agenda acceptable to the class of executives, financial elites and party honchos who make up the Republican establishment. In reality, a key plank of his economic platform would horrify them: Cruz supports a return to the gold standard, a relic of the pre-Depression past that would wreak havoc on the American business class, and on the rest of society too.
"I think the Fed should get out of the business of trying to juice our economy and simply be focused on sound money and monetary stability, ideally tied to gold," Cruz said in an October debate [ http://time.com/4091301/republican-debate-transcript-cnbc-boulder/ ].
He reiterated the call two weeks later [ http://time.com/4107636/transcript-read-the-full-text-of-the-fourth-republican-debate-in-milwaukee/ ]. "We had a gold standard under Bretton Woods, we had it for about 170 years of our nation’s history, and enjoyed booming economic growth and lower inflation than we have had with the Fed now," Cruz said at a Nov. 10 debate. "We need to get back to sound money."
No country on Earth now relies on a gold standard for its currency.
A 2012 survey of economists [ http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID=SV_cw1nNUYOXSAKwrq ] conducted by the University of Chicago's Initiative on Global Markets found literally no support for the gold standard among any of its respondents. These were not all liberals in love with deficit spending and robust regulation. Seven of the economists came from the notoriously conservative Chicago school itself.
"A gold standard regime would be a disaster for any large advanced economy," University of Chicago economist Anil Kashyap told the researchers, adding that support for the idea "implies macroeconomic illiteracy."
"There are much better ways to avoid excessive inflation, while maintaining the flexibility of a fiat currency," said University of Chicago economist Nancy Stokey.
Under a gold standard, a country pegs the value of its currency to a certain amount of gold. If you own dollars, you can trade them in to the government for a fixed amount of gold. This was appealing to ancient and medieval peoples who fetishized a shiny metal with limited practical use. But it turned out to be a disaster for major developed economies.
"In the late 19th century, the Gilded Age robber barons and big bankers thought the gold standard very modern," University of Texas at Austin economist James Galbraith told The Huffington Post in an email. "I congratulate Senator Cruz; his economics is perfectly in line with his worldview."
The price of gold is notoriously volatile [ http://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2013/sep/26/gold-investment-driven-market-fears ]. That irregularity can be destructive, and can make it very difficult for business leaders to plan their affairs. Say the price of gold drops 10 percent because a new mine is discovered, and speculators fuel a downward spiral in prices. If the dollar is pegged to the price of gold, that means the value of the dollar just dropped 10 percent because someone dug a hole in the ground.
That creates a mess for any business with international operations, especially if the United States is the only country on the gold standard. If the dollar gets cheaper, it effectively becomes less expensive to pay workers in dollars. Maybe, then, it would be time to open a factory in Arkansas and shift production away from Vietnam. That's great for profits, until gold surges anew in value -- at which point suddenly all of your U.S. workers, getting paid in gold-backed dollars, are expensive again.
It's an even bigger problem for the stock market. If dollars are tied to gold, then so are all the other financial assets that are denominated in dollars. The stocks and bonds of major U.S. corporations would end up fluctuating with the whims of a speculative market for gold. Without any change in its basic operations or prospects, a U.S. company could see the value of its shares plunge or skyrocket. This unpredictability would encourage investors to put their money in more stable foreign projects.
"Every country in the world went off the gold standard for a reason," says economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It was inconsistent with normal economic policy."
Yet the gold standard does have its adherents, and Cruz is getting some financial support for his quixotic monetary move. A new political ad group called the Lone Star Committee is trying to raise [ http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/22/politics/ted-cruz-gold-standard/index.html ] $1 million for a New Hampshire ad blitz promoting the gold standard. This is not an establishment Republican group. It's being run by Richard Danker, who previously worked as a policy adviser at the obscure conservative think tank American Principles in Action. Danker managed the 2014 Senate campaign of Jeff Bell, who was routed by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). APA is chiefly underwritten by the anti-gay financier [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/05/sean-fieler-gay-marriage_n_7511614.html ] Sean Fieler.
Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has been perhaps the most prominent advocate of the gold standard in recent decades, using his perch in Congress to excoriate the Federal Reserve and demand a return to "hard money." He now appears in TV ads warning of a looming financial crisis in which "stocks and bonds will crash" and "the savings of millions will be wiped out." In these ads, Paul encourages viewers to buy a book written by one Porter Stansberry, a man whom, it turns out, the Securities and Exchange Commission once successfully sued for securities fraud [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-paul-ads-warn-of-financial-crisis-1432245027 ].
Ron Paul's son Rand, a senator from Kentucky now vying for the 2016 GOP nomination, is a bit more restrained than Cruz in his criticism of central banking. During a November debate, he spoke of the need to "re-examine" whether the Fed should be "determining interest rates," but he stopped short of calling for a full return to the gold standard.
Hardcore anti-government libertarians tend to like the gold standard because it takes economic power away from central bankers and hands it over to financial markets. For many libertarians, a net loss in government power is a net gain in freedom. But Cruz's gold-standard pitch isn't just a play for the general libertarian vote. It's an appeal to a very specific kind of libertarian who believes in particularly weird things.
Milton Friedman was an extreme libertarian who opposed the licensing of physicians [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q71hrwUcu0 (next below; with comments)]
on the grounds that such government meddling was harming the market for doctors. Yet on the subject of the gold standard, not even he was as much of a hawk as Cruz.
Friedman's greatest work was a 1963 book he co-wrote with Anna Schwartz, titled A Monetary History of the United States [ http://www.amazon.com/Monetary-History-United-States-1867-1960/dp/0691003548 ]. In it, Friedman and Schwartz make a persuasive case that the gold standard actually caused [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBCDS-y8vc (next below; with comments)]
the Great Depression.
In the early years of the Depression, currency speculators and worried citizens extracted huge sums of gold from government coffers by trading in their dollars, concerned that the government would not be able to support the value of the currency. The Fed responded with a single action that protected its gold reserves, the value of the dollar and the integrity of the gold standard: It raised interest rates. Doing so offered citizens a potentially greater return on their holdings of U.S. dollars, since higher interest rates mean better returns on savings accounts.
It worked. The dollar grew stronger and the run on American currency abated. But by encouraging people to save, the Fed was discouraging people from spending, curtailing the total amount of money available in the general economy. This, Friedman argued, turned an economic problem into a calamity. When everybody is broke, the last thing you want to do is limit the supply of money. Without money, nobody is going to get out of being broke.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt solved this dilemma in 1933 by taking the U.S. off the gold standard. That freed up the Fed to adjust the money supply based purely on broader economic conditions, without regard to how many pounds of gold it might secure by doing so. Roosevelt allowed foreign governments to continue to cash in dollars for gold, but that last vestige of the gold standard was abolished by President Richard Nixon in 1971.
Today, gold standard adherents consist mainly of cranks, crackpots and devotees of the Austrian school of economics. And the years since the financial crisis have devastated the intellectual underpinnings of the Austrian school. Austrian goldbugs began warning in 2009 that hyperinflation was just around the corner [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/inflation-predictions/ ], because based on the Austrian money model, it should have been. But hyperinflation never happened [ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/the-derp-and-fall-of-inflation-fearmongers/277347/ ].
The Cato Institute's Mark Calabria is one of the few serious economists who supports a gold standard. When he talked about it on Glenn Beck's show in 2011, he had to share airtime with a conspiracy theorist [ http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/03/29/the-cato-institute-should-apologize-for-legitim/178071 ] from the John Birch Society who once produced a film on chemtrails and wrote a book arguing that vitamin B-17 -- which is actually a poison [ http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/cam/patient/laetrile-pdq#section/all ], not a vitamin -- can cure cancer. Still, Calabria and this guy were able to agree about gold.
The Republican establishment came to terms with accepting votes from the tinfoil-hat brigade a long time ago. But the GOP donor class has never allowed such people to set the party's economic agenda. A Cruz nomination might change that.
Zach Carter is a co-host of the HuffPost Politics podcast "So That Happened." Listen to the latest episode below:
[audio ( https://soundcloud.com/so-that-happened-1/flints-water-emergency-a-trump-fan-explains-trump-fandom-omnibus-and-gopdebate ) embedded]
Copyright © 2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-gold-standard_5679be10e4b0b958f6586fc7 [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Fractured Fairy Tales -- King Midas
Published on Sep 2, 2012 by perfectlydarien [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3w5Bd-tMeZjPZGcSBxmJIw / http://www.youtube.com/user/darienkd , http://www.youtube.com/user/darienkd/videos ]
Rocky and His Friends explain to us how government really works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGqAcrMkFJ0 [with comments]
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Trading Places: A 1983 Christmas Comedy That's Still Surprisingly Relevant
The 32-year-old-film, which is centered on insider trading and the culture of poverty, fits into the economic conversations America is having today.
Dec 25, 2015
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/trading-places/421899/ [with comments]
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Cruz Christmas Classics
Published on Dec 18, 2015 by Ted Cruz [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzMQMhq7Id0Y_wSDA_CJdGg / http://www.youtube.com/user/TedCruzforSenate , http://www.youtube.com/user/TedCruzforSenate/videos ]
http://www.tedcruz.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3hB3iOQKjY [with (nearly 4,000) comments]
*
Ted Cruz Exposes His Children, Then Plays Victim
[ http://www.redstate.com/2015/12/23/ted-cruz-washington-post-monkeys/ (with comments)]
Published on Dec 26, 2015 by Mike Malloy [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpU4j-LN_aibXA1gONvWzxw / http://www.youtube.com/user/hschulein , http://www.youtube.com/user/hschulein/videos ]
The Washington Post has been monkeying around, and Sen. Ted Cruz is pissed.
The newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes drew a cartoon, published on Tuesday morning, that depicts the GOP presidential candidate as an organ-playing Santa Claus while his trained monkey daughters, aged 7 and 4, dance.
The Post's Ann Telnaes declared Tuesday that Cruz's daughters, Caroline, 7, and Catherine, 5, are "fair game" after they appeared with their father in a Christmas-themed video.
Full story: http://mic.com/articles/131127/washington-post-pulls-a-cartoon-that-depicts-ted-cruz-s-children-as-dancing-monkies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NgvncdQ2nE [with comments]
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Ted Cruz's Holiday Spirit
Nicholas Pilch via Getty Images
By Richard North Patterson
Posted: 12/22/2015 7:23 am EST Updated: 12/22/2015 8:59 am EST
This holiday season has offered far too little respite from humanity's dark side -- the hatred and fanaticism that gave us Paris, San Bernardino, Colorado Springs. How consoling, then, is Ted Cruz, who offers us the power of prayer and the balm of faith.
For Thanksgiving, Cruz called on the Almighty "to render our National government a blessing to all the people" and "promote the practice of true religion and virtue." His Christmas card quoted the Bible: "I have trusted in your loving kindness. My heart will rejoice in your salvation." Not content with mere random prayer, his website proposed to bind us in a" National Prayer Team." "Heidi and I," Cruz assured us, "are grateful for the prayers of people all over this great nation."
Lest we need guidance in placing our lips to God's ears, the website directs that our efforts be "dedicated to a focused season of prayer on behalf of the nation, presidential candidate Ted Cruz, his family and staff and the campaign" -- presumably including its pollsters and fundraisers. "Members," we are told, "will receive weekly emails containing prayer requests and short devotionals." Promptly, "Prayer Warriors For Ted Cruz" assured us on Facebook that "God is empowering # Ted Cruz in such a mighty way." Wafted by this wave of prayer, Cruz is currently brightening our holidays with a 12-city "Take Off With Ted Cruz Country Christmas Tour" through the southern primary states -- the spiritual uplift of which, serendipitously for the senator, has him pressing Donald Trump for first place in this morning's latest national poll.
So let us examine the senator's holiday rhetoric, the better to grasp what he is asking us to pray for.
"2016," he predicts, "will be a religious liberty election." But liberty for whom? Not gays or lesbians, evidently, for whom Cruz has prescribed conversion therapy to cure them of their "choice." The freedom Cruz has in mind are for people like Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who denied gay couples marriage licenses. After all, Cruz memorably explained, gays are behind the "jihad" -- such an evocative choice of words -- "being waged [against] people of faith who respect the biblical teaching that marriage is the union of one man and one woman." So deep is Cruz's respect that he pledges his best efforts to repeal gay marriage. "For the sake of this cause," he adds without apparent irony, "we need to bring people together."
Cruz's God, it seems, is also a gun enthusiast. Shortly after the slaughter in San Bernardino, he starred at a gun rights rally put on by a group whose self-described mission is to "glorify God in all we do." Cruz himself reacted to the massacre by proclaiming: "You don't get rid of the bad guys by getting rid of our guns" but "by using our guns." In Cruz's world, we may have to. Hours after the massacre, Cruz voted against a Senate measure to bar people on the FBI terrorist watch list from purchasing guns -- including the assault weapons used to murder 14 people. For those puzzled by the senator's seemingly circular reasoning, it is, perhaps, salient that the NRA vehemently opposed the measure.
Cruz' reaction to the Planned Parenthood killings in Colorado Springs was truly original. The shooter's cry of "no more body parts" caused some to wonder if the heated rhetoric against Planned Parenthood -- fervently stoked by Cruz himself -- had resonated in the mind of a deranged killer who, like so many other deranged killers, too easily acquired weapons. Not Cruz. Instead, he found a way to conflate two favorite themes: the murderer, he speculated, was a "transgendered left-wing activist."
With respect to the tragedy in Paris perpetrated by ISIS, Cruz swiftly cut to the heart of the problem: that President Obama is "willing to use military force [only] if it benefits radical Islamic terrorists" -- presumably including, though he chose not to mention this, those on the FBI's terrorist watch list whose right to acquire weapons of mass murder he voted to protect. But President Cruz will have the answer: "We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don't know whether sand can glow in the dark but we're going to find out." Less aglow was the former commandant of the Army War College -- "carpet bomb," he remarked, "is just one of those phrases that people with no military experience throw around." Which perhaps explains Cruz's bewildering claim that during the first Gulf War "we carpet bombed them into oblivion" when, as one would expect in the age of smart weaponry, no "carpet bombing" ever occurred.
Were your holidays lightened a bit by the Paris Climate Accord? Not Cruz's. He seized the moment to chair hearings denouncing climate change as a hoax perpetrated by liberals who "want massive government control over every aspect of our lives." Among the GOP candidates, Cruz is by far the most vehement in his rejection of climate science: remarkably, the senator purports to believe -- in utter defiance of the scientific community -- that according to satellite data "there has been no significant global warming for the past 18 years."
One suspects that Cruz knows very well that his climate denial is nowhere close to intellectually respectable. Thus his diversionary suggestion that Obama's efforts to battle climate change are just another manifestation of weakness in a president who "apparently thinks having an SUV in your driveway is more dangerous than a bunch of terrorists trying to blow up the world" -- including, one supposes, those folks on the terrorist watch list. For those attempting to follow this rhetorical bait and switch, it is worthy of note that in only one segment of Americans does a majority reject the overwhelming scientific consensus that man-made climate change is all too real: conservative Republican primary voters, including those clustered in Iowa.
A particularly dispiriting lump of holiday coal was Donald Trump's nativism -- espousing a massive deportation of Mexicans while proposing to "register" Muslims in America and bar Muslims abroad from traveling here. Artfully gliding in Trump's slipstream, Cruz proclaimed himself a "big fan of Donald Trump's," commending Trump for "focusing on the need to secure our borders" and echoing his hard line on immigration, and his "Christmas Tour" features an echo of George Wallace's segregationist pledge, promising to oppose legal status "today, tomorrow, forever." While modestly demurring to Trump's worst rhetoric with respect to Muslims, Cruz abandoned his erstwhile devotion to "religious liberty" -- opposing a Senate resolution against imposing a religious test for entry into the United States.
Perhaps, by now, you've lost the thread of Cruz's Thanksgiving call to "promote the practice of true religion and virtue." Unwittingly recorded at a private fundraiser, Cruz helped clear things up: Stating that Trump and Ben Carson will never become president, he confided that "my approach has been to bear hug both of them, and smother them with love... [until] the lion's share of their supporters come to me."
This, for once, is a window into the depths of Cruz's soul, long apparent to the political cognoscenti. As a key Republican insider of four decades says flatly, Cruz is relentlessly "Machiavellian -- the most calculating man I've seen in this business." His current calculation was on sharp display in the most recent Republican debate: eliminate Marco Rubio by tarring him with conservatives as a supporter of "amnesty and citizenship," and keep in good stead with Trump so as to inherit his nativist vote. Indeed, his Christmas stump speech includes a fresh appeal to the lowest common political denominator: "I think the new politically correct term is no longer illegal aliens; it's undocumented Democrats" -- to which he adds the implication that Rubio talks more favorably about legalization when speaking Spanish on Spanish-language television.
The simple truth about Cruz, says Eliana Johnson of the National Review, is that "the man who boasts of his ideological purity is perhaps the most obviously tactical candidate." His path to the nomination runs through Iowa and the deep South -- through evangelicals, gun fanatics, nativists, climate deniers and social conservatives -- and every position he takes is laser focused on winning them over. And it's working -- Cruz has surged past Trump in Iowa and into second place in the latest national polls, and the growing consensus within the Clinton campaign is that Cruz will be the GOP nominee. Cruz, not Trump, is becoming the man to watch.
And he bears watching. His holiday rhetoric is not that of a God-smacked extremist prone to verbal excess, but a cold-eyed cynic, a top-tier graduate of Princeton and Harvard who condescends to his target audience for his own narrow ends. For the construct which defines him is not a hard right-wing belief system, but something far more frightening: the barren psyche of a demagogue.
Classically defined, a demagogue is "a political leader who appeals to the emotions, fears, prejudice and ignorance of the lower socioeconomic classes in order to gain power." Thus, as with Cruz, for the sake of stirring excitement, demagogues "oppose deliberation" and "accuse moderate and thoughtful opponents of weakness."
Bad enough. But consider the psychology of someone for whom personal advancement obliterates truth or fairness, and who sees others as chess pieces instead of human beings. A week before Christmas, Congress passed a rare bipartisan compromise by wide margins: a spending bill which prevented a potentially ruinous government shutdown -- which, had it happened, would have been politically ruinous to Republicans. Protected by Republican leadership from the consequences of such a disaster, Cruz used conservative talk radio to throw them under the bus: "This is Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan passing the Democratic agenda, funding Obamacare, funding amnesty, expanding low-skilled immigration... It's an absolute betrayal."
This is Cruz -- a loner who routinely uses his Republican colleagues as foils for personal attacks; whose private conversation is little different than his self-aggrandizing stump speeches; and who is widely proclaimed as "the most hated man in the Senate." In self-exculpation for this universal loathing, Cruz mocks Rubio for being adequately socialized -- "he's a wonderful communicator, he's a charming individual, he's very well-liked in Washington" -- and argues: "If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy. But if you want someone to drive you home... I will get you home."
To a person, Cruz's colleagues would rather have a beer at home. How else to react to a nakedly ambitious man whose behavior and persona suggest the following characteristics: "manipulative," "cunning," and "callous," with a "grandiose sense of self," "a penchant for pathological lying," and a "marked lack of empathy for others." Which, as it happens, are among the hallmarks of a sociopath.
Small wonder, then, that of the 15 candidates followed by the Washington Post's fact checker, Cruz trailed only Trump and Carson in the percentage of statements rated as "false or mostly false." It is sobering to realize that if Ted Cruz assures us that something is a fact, there's a two-thirds chance he's lying.
"Any President," Cruz informs us, "who doesn't begin every day on his knees isn't fit to be commander in chief of this nation." In truth, pious frauds are not fit to be president, demagogues even less so -- whether on their knees or on the stump, seeding America with ignorance and hate for their own narcissistic ends.
Let us pray.
Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-north-patterson/ted-cruz-holiday-spirit_b_8805176.html [with comments]
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Are You Ready To Vomit Yet?
Published on Dec 25, 2015 by Mike Malloy
There is nothing more depressing than GOP politics — except when a Republican rally morphs into a rather crazy “prayer revival” in which everyone asks God to magically make their chosen candidate president. A Nashville, Tennessee rally on Tuesday started out normal for Cruz. The 2016 hopeful began by promising that he would force the federal government to waste more money investigating Planned Parenthood, and to end “religious persecution” — the conservative term for attempts to ensure that every American, regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender, and all other variables in society, have equal opportunities in life.
Full story:
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/12/22/watching-ted-cruz-end-his-rally-with-an-insane-mini-prayer-revival-will-make-you-cry-video/ [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlI2rjPIRI0 [embedded; with comments ( http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/ted-cruz-campaign-rally-morphs-into-creepy-prayer-revival-so-everyone-can-pray-for-him-to-be-president/ {with comments})]
Rafael Cruz Declares Son Ted Cruz 'The Anointed One'
7/23/13
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/rafael-cruz-declares-son-ted-cruz-anointed- [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp4lIvDIv-g [embedded; with comments ( http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ted-cruzs-father-tells-him-god-has-destined-you-greatness )]
Ted Cruz's Father Suggested His Son Is 'Anointed' to Bring About 'End Time Transfer of Wealth'
"The pastor [Huch] referred to Proverbs 13:22, a little while ago, which says that the wealth of the wicked is stored for the righteous. And it is through the kings, anointed to take dominion, that that transfer of wealth is going to occur." - Rafael Cruz, August 26, 2012
October 17, 2013
In a sermon last year at an Irving, Texas, megachurch that helped elect Ted Cruz to the United States Senate, Cruz' father Rafael Cruz indicated that his son was among the evangelical Christians who are anointed as "kings" to take control of all sectors of society, an agenda commonly referred to as the "Seven Mountains" mandate, and "bring the spoils of war to the priests", thus helping to bring about a prophesied "great transfer of wealth", from the "wicked" to righteous gentile believers.
[...]
http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/brucewilson/ted-cruzs-father-suggested-his-son-anointed-bring-about-end-time-transfer [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa5w9js48s [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy074QLV2D8 [with comments]
The Left Must Accept that Ted Cruz is the Dominionist Messiah
October, 30th, 2013
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/10/30/left-accept-ted-cruz-dominionist-messiah.html [with comments; also has embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNa5w9js48s (with comments)]
WATCH: Ted Cruz's Dad Calls US a "Christian Nation," Says Obama Should Go "Back to Kenya"
Want to understand where the tea party champion's hardcore views come from? Meet his father, Rafael.
Oct. 31, 2013
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/ted-cruz-rafael-father-video-christian-tea-party [with additional embedded videos, including http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy074QLV2D8 (with comments), and (nearly 8,000) comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4eXsn5ItIY [embedded; with comments]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlc85QRDrX0 [with comments]
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Death of an Orca: What It Means for the GOP
By Jeff Schweitzer
Posted: 12/24/2015 2:33 pm EST Updated: 12/24/2015 4:59 pm EST
Donald Trump may be to the Republican Party what Blackfish [ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2971294/The-Blackfish-effect-SeaWorld-loses-25-4-million-documentary-criticizing-company-s-treatment-killer-whales-lowers-park-attendance.html ] was to SeaWorld.
The documentary Blackfish on the mistreatment of Orcas had a disastrous effect on the marine amusement park, revealing a long-standing and widely-accepted SeaWorld lie that the whales were being treated well. Following the release of Blackfish, attendance at the park fell by about 50%, with bleeding losses of revenue and about a 60% decline in stock value. Blackfish was like a light suddenly flipped on in the kitchen, revealing the roaches everybody knew were there but chose to ignore until the obvious was simply too overwhelming.
With Donald Trump's campaign we can no longer ignore the intolerance and hate that has so thoroughly infected the Republican Party pantry. With Trump front and center in the Republican primary season, the spotlight is now shining brightly on the ugly truth that was, pre-Trump, so conveniently swept under the counter. Trump's brazen and popular foray into the realm of vile rhetoric has revealed a long-standing but well-hidden truth about the GOP and conservativism in the United States: right-wing thought has devolved into a disease of ignorance and hate.
A New Low
While Republican presidential hopefuls descend down to historic and frightening lows of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, the rest of us must pause to take stock of why we have reached this horrible nadir in public discourse.
We have all heard the sentiment that, "A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." Mahatma Gandhi is often and widely cited as the author of this phrase, but he apparently never uttered [ https://atkinsbookshelf.wordpress.com/tag/famous-misquotations/ ] the words. Nevertheless, no matter who first noted this truth, the idea is sound and a viable guide to our humanness. Others have gone further, again with hazy attribution to Gandhi [ http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mahatmagan150700.html ], with the notion that, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way in which its animals are treated. I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."
Many of us would agree with these aphorisms. But the Republican field is hastily veering ever far away from this ideal, taking the opposite position that attacking those most in need is a moral imperative. This inversion of reason can be seen with the extraordinary extremism espoused by those representing the GOP. Trump is a deep well of such ugly sentiment, which has disturbingly resonated with a large swath of our population. His popularity is what is most frightening of all. That a demagogue will come along is no surprise, but that his despicable views will find resonance with so many of our voters is as shocking as it is disappointing. Trump is the lump in our collective breast, an ominous warning of a more virulent disease about to attack our body politic. Trumps ascendancy proves we are sick, that the cancer on our society is metastasizing.
Mainstream Extremism
Trump is no outlier or anomaly, but instead broadly representative of the growing radicalization of conservative thought - one reason other candidates vying for the Oval Office have not dared to criticize Trump. There is much to choose from, but let's look at just a few of the more drastic notions that have become mainstream, ideas that would have resulted in instant political death just a decade ago.
Trump proposes that the U.S. Government should shut down mosques [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/donald-trumps-week-controversial-remarks ], you know, like Nazi Germany closed synagogues. Should we have our own version of Kristallnacht now? Worse, if there can be a worse, pining for the good old days of internment camps for the Japanese during World War II, Trump suggests that the government create a database to track Muslims -like the Nazis tracked Jews. Perhaps we should require that all Muslims wear yellow crescent moons to make them easier to identify. If it was good enough for the Nazis, it is good enough for us, no?
Trump describes immigrants as rapists and criminals [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/ ]. "But you have people coming in and I'm not just saying Mexicans, I'm talking about people that are from all over that are killers and rapists and they're coming into this country." Never mind the pesky fact that there is no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes than people born in the country. Here is the conclusion from a Congressional Research Service [ http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R42057.pdf ] report from 2012: "The overall proportion of noncitizens in federal and state prisons and local jails corresponds closely to the proportion of noncitizens in the total U.S. population."
With this dark but factually incorrect perspective on the influx of criminals, Trump not surprisingly has a solution when he says all undocumented workers "have to go [ http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/donald-trump-undocumented-immigrants-have-go-n410501 ]." This means that a candidate for the presidency of our country is proposing, seriously, that we locate, round up, arrest and then forcibly deport a population of 11 million people [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/donald-trump-shocking-reality-deportation-plan ]. To find we find these undesirables in our midst, would we create a secret police like the Stasi in East Germany, so neighbors would rat on neighbors? Who would take care of the children left behind? Does this not give you the creeps?
According to Trump, poor people are poor because they do not work hard enough. His solution is to "leave the minimum wage [ http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ruiz-trump-hypocritical-attitude-poor-offensivs-article-1.2436102 ] the way it is." If only the poor would find jobs all would be grand.
The list of bizarre policy proposals goes on and on, but Trump's assault on reason and civility does not end there. He openly mocked a New York Times reporter [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/25/trump-blasted-by-new-york-times-after-mocking-reporter-with-disability/ ] by imitating his spastic movements. He dismissed John McCain's service to his country [ http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/hes-not-war-hero-donald-trump-mocks-john-mccains-service-n394391 ] proclaiming that "I don't like losers." Trump went on to say that, "He is a war hero (only) because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured." Trump believes the normal act of going to the bathroom is too gross to be mentionable. He has denigrated Hillary Clinton for taking a bathroom break during a debate saying that "I know where she went. It's disgusting." There has likely never been a more misogynist candidate; he constantly degrades women. He said that Arianna Huffington, "...is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man - he made a good decision." If he does not like a question from a female reporter he will dismiss her as menstruating. Trump has called women [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/18-real-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-women_55d356a8e4b07addcb442023 ] "pigs", "dogs", and "disgusting animals."
To put all of this in perspective, let us pause here, contemplate, and do a brief exercise. Go back and substitute "Obama" everywhere we have "Trump." Now re-read this and consider even for a brief moment the holy hell that would ensue if Obama did anything remotely close to anything Trump has done. Really, do that, and then weep for your country, for its double standard, for its descent into a new era of madness.
We are plumbing new depths of depravity here; previously any one of these proclamations would have knocked a candidate out of the race within a few hours of being verbalized. Now, the crazier the talk the more traction the candidate gains. The cancer is spreading.
Two Worlds
On the bright side, Trump's blazing ignorance is shining a light on right-wing thought so that, finally, the ugly truth, so long suppressed, is revealing itself in ways that can no longer be ignored. We have before us now a world clearly divided between two opposing world views.
We are witnessing the clash of reason and faith, between science and religion, between truth and the big lie, between demagoguery and sane debate. Nowhere is that made clearer than in the rush toward willful ignorance seen in the Republican debates. Disdain for science and the scientific method is front and center in the field of candidates on stage with Trump. With the big lie and faith-based reasoning politicians are not constrained by the annoying shackles of reality. Denying the truth of climate change is now mandatory for any Republican; the GOP is one of the world's few remaining political organizations that reject the obvious certainty of human-caused climate change. False statements about Planned Parenthood are taken at face value by party sympathizers even when easily shown to be fantasy. Fighting evolution is part of the GOP fabric, a modern day version of the Church's attacks on Galileo. Never mind that we can demonstrate evolution in a Petri dish; it has been proven across multiple fields of science including genetics, biogeography, and paleontology. Even the Pope in 1996 grudgingly admitted that evolution is "more than just a theory." But the GOP hangs on to the fifteenth century.
Trump's campaign highlights like few others could that we are in a race for the bottom, in which the candidate who best embraces ignorance and hate wins. When beliefs are divorced from reality, a hallmark of the Trump's outrageous claims, anything goes. With no common understanding of even baseline truths, we lose the ability to have any meaningful discourse to solve our very real problems. We can magically deport 11 million people. We can identify Muslims and track their movements. We can close mosques. All without consequence. Sure, why not, because reality and objective truths are no constraint.
The slogan and its many variations of "make American great again" often show up in conservative circles. To what age are we harking back to exactly? Make no mistake; this is war, a fight for the soul of our nation. Making America great means, to the extreme right, dragging us back into another Dark Ages just as the rest of the world is embracing the knowledge and new technologies of the 21st century. Trump and his ilk are a pathological infection of, consuming us from within. Trump is no joke, his candidacy is not funny. His colleagues on stage are just as frightening. This is deadly serious. Our only hope is that like with Blackfish, the shocking truth about the GOP as revealed by Trump's candidacy, will bring the American electorate to its senses. To survive we must reject the lies from the right so long hidden in the national basement like a crazy uncle nobody wants to acknowledge. Trump brings the crazy to light; now we can see what our real choices are for the future.
Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-schweitzer/death-of-an-orca-what-it_b_8875082.html [with comments]
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Obama’s team says the GOP earned Donald Trump
President Barack Obama is expected in the New Year to speak out more against Donald Trump.
Loyalists say that after two terms of obstruction, Republicans are getting the anger candidate their rhetoric created.
12/27/16
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/obama-trump-republicans-217144 [with comments]
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Americans Won't Elect a Vulgar/Bullying Blowhard
Nine OK via Getty Images
By Peter D. Rosenstein
Posted: 12/24/2015 10:41 am EST Updated: 12/24/2015 12:59 pm EST
The American people won't elect a vulgar/bullying blowhard for President even if the ultra-right wing of the Republican Party manages to nominate him. We have never before seen the kind of campaign we are seeing this year within the Republican Party. All their chickens are coming home to roost. The worst excesses and policies of those running as Tea Party candidates in the past few years are combined in the two leading candidates, Donald Trump and Canadian born Rafael 'Ted' Cruz.
Trump and Cruz are espousing policies and positions appealing to the worst instincts in our nation in an effort to heighten people's fears over terrorism and the economy. They are playing to existing racism and the intolerance of the religious right in America. They think nothing of lying to excite a crowd or gain a vote.
Trump is speaking to the least educated [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/27/donald-trumps-surge-is-heavily-reliant-on-less-educated-americans-heres-why/ ] in the nation. Cruz is speaking to them and evangelical voters consciously displaying a total lack of respect for our founding fathers who understood what they were doing when they opted for a clear separation of church and state [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States ]. They understood people came to America to escape religious persecution and to be allowed to practice religion, or not practice it, as they saw fit and not have government pass laws favoring the beliefs of one religion over another.
The founding fathers, all white men, did leave things out of our constitution and some were added with the Bill of Rights. We just celebrated the 224th Anniversary of its ratification. Because some were and represented slave owners [ http://www.revolutionary-war.net/slavery-and-the-founding-fathers.html ] it wasn't until the civil war was fought that between 1865 and 1870 the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments were passed giving African Americans their rights. It wasn't until 1920 with the ratification of the nineteenth [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution ] amendment women got the right to vote. We have yet to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to fully include women in the constitution. But change does come, even if much too slowly, because the majority of American people are decent and with the right leadership eventually overcome their fears and biases to do the right thing.
Trump and Cruz campaign on the premise they can turn back the progress we have made and it could happen. They could appoint arch-conservative Supreme Court Justices and reverse decisions including Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion, Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage, and a host of others like The National Federation of Independent Business et. al. v Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services et. al. declaring the Affordable Care Act constitutional.
Trump [ http://www.ontheissues.org/Donald_Trump.htm ] has called for building a wall to keep out Mexicans and for deporting eleven million undocumented immigrants, most who came here to make a better life for themselves and their families. He would close our borders to Muslims, supports registering those here now and sending government informants into mosques. His recent vulgar attack against Clinton was considered obscene enough that many media outlets bleeped [ http://www.mediaite.com/online/to-bleep-or-not-to-bleep-youll-never-guess-which-network-wont-air-the-word-shlonged/ ] it out. He sounds like he is adopting fascism and the views of Mussolini. Ted Cruz [ http://www.ontheissues.org/Ted_Cruz.htm ], the current reincarnation of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) who conducted the witch-hunt for communists and homosexuals in government, said he will reverse laws on same-sex marriage; approves building the wall to keep out Mexicans and opposes any pathway to citizenship for the eleven million immigrants here now. He refuses to call Trump to task for any vulgarity or race baiting and opposes equal pay for equal work for women. He opposes any controls on the sale of guns including assault weapons. He regrets his vote for Chief Justice John Roberts because he voted that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional allowing millions of Americans to get healthcare. He supported shutting down the entire government because of a small allocation for Planned Parenthood which works to protect women's health.
These are the two men leading in all polls for the Republican nomination. None of the other men running, with the exception of Jeb Bush and only because he is in a personal feud with Trump, is saying anything against the policies or positions they support. As an American who cares about the rights of people and the future of our nation, I believe it is imperative the positions and irrational bluster of Trump and Cruz be defeated so soundly they are seen to be fully repudiated.
The only person running with the qualifications to be President; the person with the experience, knowledge and intelligence to lead our nation and the world; the person whose election would make real the goal of our constitution to form 'a more perfect union' is Hillary Rodham Clinton. When the dust settles and the nominees of both Parties are chosen; Democrats, Independents and even moderate Republicans will understand what is at stake in this election. They will support Hillary Rodham Clinton because she is best able to lead us into a better future.
Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-d-rosenstein/americans-wont-elect-a-vu_b_8873946.html [with comments]
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Dr. Ben Carson: Republicans have a 'mental disorder'
What was your first clue, sport?
Dec 17, 2015
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/12/17/1461159/-Dr-Ben-Carson-Republicans-have-a-mental-disorder [with comments]
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=115511932 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=118176080 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=118924029 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=117437052 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=115942261 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119088784 and preceding (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119393422 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119227239 and preceding and following
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119420609 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119425574 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119420373 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119433633 and following
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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