Rand Paul calls Trump's rise in polls a temporary 'loss of sanity:' Rand Paul in the news
by Sabrina Eaton
Today's Rand Paul news: In a Thursday interview on CNN, Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul said he believes real estate mogul Donald Trump's rise in presidential polls "is a temporary sort of loss of sanity, but we're going to come back to our senses and look for someone serious to lead the country at some point:" The Hill
Paul was hardly able to disguise his obvious contempt for Trump and the media that incessantly covers him, telling CNN's Wolf Blitzer: "Television works, Wolf. If you would give some other candidates time from eight in the morning until eight at night all day long, every day for three weeks, I'm guessing some other candidates might rise as well:" MediaIte
He also went after Trump's proposal to have Mexico pay for a wall along the border."They're hungry for someone who will tell the truth, who will say Washington is broken and that we really have to start over ... wash out the place," Paul said of the voters currently supporting Trump. "But the thing is, we also have to have a serious discussion of how we're going to do it:" Sun Times Network
Financial disclosure forms that Paul filed at the Federal Election Commission show he's got assets valued between $576,000 and $1.7 million and no liabilities, putting him on the lower end of the 2016 presidential candidates' wealth spectrum. He reported income of between $377,000 and $1.4 million in the 18-month period beginning in January 2014, including his $174,000 salary for serving as a U.S. senator. A large chunk of Mr. Paul's income came from royalties and advances from four books he has written. "Taking a Stand," published in 2014, brought in between $100,000 and $1 million, according to the disclosure: The Wall Street Journal
A super PAC founded to support the presidential candidacy of Rand Paul took in about $1.9 million in campaign contributions since its relaunch last month, according to areport filed Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission. Most of the money given to the organization, Concerned American Voters, came from one individual: PayPal board member and legal marijuana advocate Scott Banister, who gave $1.25 million: National Journal
"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"
It will be long before the poison of the Party System is worked out of the body politic. Some of its most indirect effects are the most dangerous. One that is very dangerous just now is this: that for most Englishmen the Party System falsifies history, and especially the history of revolutions. It falsifies history because it simplifies history. It paints everything either Blue or Buff in the style of its own silly circus politics: while a real revolution has as many colours as the sunrise--or the end of the world. And if we do not get rid of this error we shall make very bad blunders about the real revolution which seems to grow more and more probable, especially among the Irish. And any human familiarity with history will teach a man this first of all: that Party practically does not exist in a real revolution. It is a game for quiet times.
If you take a boy who has been to one of those big private schools which are falsely called the Public Schools, and another boy who has been to one of those large public schools which are falsely called the Board Schools, you will find some differences between the two, chiefly a difference in the management of the voice. But you will find they are both English in a special way, and that their education has been essentially the same. They are ignorant on the same subjects. They have never heard of the same plain facts. They have been taught the wrong answer to the same confusing question. There is one fundamental element in the attitude of the Eton master talking about "playing the game," and the elementary teacher training gutter-snipes to sing, "What is the Meaning of Empire Day?" And the name of that element is "unhistoric." It knows nothing really about England, still less about Ireland or France, and, least of all, of course, about anything like the French Revolution.
Revolution by Snap Division
Now what general notion does the ordinary English boy, thus taught to utter one ignorance in one of two accents, get and keep through life about the French Revolution? It is the notion of the English House of Commons with an enormous Radical majority on one side of the table and a small Tory minority on the other; the majority voting solid for a Republic, the minority voting solid for a Monarchy; two teams tramping through two lobbies with no difference between their methods and ours, except that (owing to some habit peculiar to Gaul) the brief intervals were brightened by a riot or a massacre, instead of by a whisky and soda and a Marconi tip. Novels are much more reliable than histories in such matters. For though an English novel about France does not tell the truth about France, it does tell the truth about England; and more than half the histories never tell the truth about anything. And popular fiction, I think, bears witness to the general English impression. The French Revolution is a snap division with an unusual turnover of votes. On the one side stand a king and queen who are good but weak, surrounded by nobles with rapiers drawn; some of whom are good, many of whom are wicked, all of whom are good-looking. Against these there is a formless mob of human beings, wearing red caps and seemingly insane, who all blindly follow ruffians who are also rhetoricians; some of whom die repentant and others unrepentant towards the end of the fourth act. The leaders of this boiling mass of all men melted into one are called Mirabeau, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and so on. And it is conceded that their united frenzy may have been forced on them by the evils of the old regime.
That, I think, is the commonest English view of the French Revolution; and it will not survive the reading of two pages of any real speech or letter of the period. These human beings were human; varied, complex and inconsistent. But the rich Englishman, ignorant of revolutions, would hardly believe you if you told him some of the common human subtleties of the case. Tell him that Robespierre threw the red cap in the dirt in disgust, while the king had worn it with a broad grin, so to speak; tell him that Danton, the fierce founder of the Republic of the Terror, said quite sincerely to a noble, "I am more monarchist than you;" tell him that the Terror really seems to have been brought to an end chiefly by the efforts of people who particularly wanted to go on with it--and he will not believe these things. He will not believe them because he has no humility, and therefore no realism. He has never been inside himself; and so could never be inside another man. The truth is that in the French affair everybody occupied an individual position. Every man talked sincerely, if not because he was sincere, then because he was angry. Robespierre talked even more about God than about the Republic because he cared even more about God than about the Republic. Danton talked even more about France than about the Republic because he cared even more about France than about the Republic. Marat talked more about Humanity than either, because that physician (though himself somewhat needing a physician) really cared about it. The nobles were divided, each man from the next. The attitude of the king was quite different from the attitude of the queen; certainly much more different than any differences between our Liberals and Tories for the last twenty years. And it will sadden _some_ of my friends to remember that it was the king who was the Liberal and the queen who was the Tory. There were not two people, I think, in that most practical crisis who stood in precisely the same attitude towards the situation. And that is why, between them, they saved Europe. It is when you really perceive the unity of mankind that you really perceive its variety. It is not a flippancy, it is a very sacred truth, to say that when men really understand that they are brothers they instantly begin to fight.
The Revival of Reality
Now these things are repeating themselves with an enormous reality in the Irish Revolution. You will not be able to make a Party System out of the matter. Everybody is in revolt; therefore everybody is telling the truth. The Nationalists will go on caring most for the nation, as Danton and the defenders of the frontier went on caring most for the nation. The priests will go on caring most for religion, as Robespierre went on caring most for religion. The Socialists will go on caring most for the cure of physical suffering, as Marat went on caring most for it. It is out of these real differences that real things can be made, such as the modern French democracy. For by such tenacity everyone sees at last that there is something in the other person's position. And those drilled in party discipline see nothing either past or present. And where there is nothing there is Satan.
For a long time past in our politics there has not only been no real battle, but no real bargain. No two men have bargained as Gladstone and Parnell bargained--each knowing the other to be a power. But in real revolutions men discover that no one man can really agree with another man until he has disagreed with him.
Jorge Huete Perez, vice president of the Nicaraguan Academy of Sciences, has worked with environmentalists from around the world to bring attention to the canal which will be "the largest earth-moving project in history."
Jorge's Video Presentation Of The Bio-Repository Project
Anyone who knows Alejandra (Alixe) Huete and her husband, Jorge Huete, knows they are fine people, devoted to the common good.
Jorge was Nicaragua's first Ph.D. molecular biologist.
Alongside his many scientific accomplishments, Jorge speaks Russian better than English - and his English is superb.
Jorge is a passionate researcher, eager to "take the bull by the horns." Almost singlehandedly, he launched Nicaragua's first DNA identification service.
I encourage you to donate to this worthy cause.
Pax tecum,
Alan
PS An amusing anecdote... that was not very amusing at the time... Alixe, Jorge and son Gabo live in a hilly, wooded barrio known as Los Alpes just outside Managua. Several years ago, while enjoying their company and hospitality, I awoke on a bright moonlit, open-window night and there in the glow slowly limned an eight inch bat reposing on my chest. So... What would you do?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alejandra Huete<alixehuete@gmail.com> Date: Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 3:44 PM Subject: Hi family and friends, we are doing a biodiversity DNA collection project in Nicaragua along the Canal Route and...... To: Alejandra Huete
The Center for Molecular Biology at the Universidad Centroamericana in Managua, Nicaragua, is doing a biodiversity DNA collection project along the Interoceanic Canal Route across Nicaragua and could use some help with the expenses. (Any donation from U.S. tax payers is tax deductible.) You can see and read about the project through the "experiment.com" crowd funding website. You'll see a nice write up of the project at this site - https://experiment.com/projects/saving-species-along-nicaragua-s-inter-oceanic-canal-route?s=search - and can donate safely through the same page. Let us know what you think and join the discussion. We'll be posting updates and field notes as work progresses. Any donation, from $5 or $10 or $100 (or more!) will be put to good use and greatly appreciated!
With the left by and large failing to provide political leadership in the critical political situation that has developed in Mexico following the kidnapping of 43 students in Iguala, Guerrero and the “white house” scandal surrounding President Enrique Peña Nieto, Catholic priests have been attempting to fill the void. Several Catholic priests—Padre Gregorio (Goyo) López, Padre Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, and Archbishop Raúl Vera most prominent among them—have in different ways been playing the role of spokespersons for the oppressed. These priests have been speaking out against government corruption and the politicians’ links to the drug cartels, defending local armed self-defense organizations, demanding an investigation into the role of the Mexican Army, and even calling for a constituent assembly to refound the country on a new and more democratic basis.
The Catholic Church was from the 1500s to the mid-twentieth century among the most reactionary forces in Mexico, always allied with the landlords and the government. There were famous exceptions, such as Father Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo and Father José Manuel Morelos y Robles, both of whom led the radical wing of the Mexican Independence movement of the early 1800s, still by and large the Church and the priests were arch-reactionaries. But after John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, some Mexican prelates and priests moved to the left, embracing not only church reform but also the Theology of Liberation. Today one finds Bishop Raúl Vera calling for overturning and replacing the Mexican government with a new democratic government to be built from the grassroots up.
One might expect such demands to come from the left—and sometimes one does—but the largest left party, National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is focused on winning elections and raising him to the presidency in 2018, and while it has criticized presidential corruption in the “white house” affair, has not attempted to lead the most recent wave of protests over the killing and kidnapping of the Ayotzinapa Teachers College Students on September 26. Though small left political parties, clandestine guerrilla groups, and armed self-defense forces appear to abound in Mexico, none of them has the credibility or the mass following to put itself forward as the leader in the current prolonged political crisis. The National Coordinating Committee (la CNTE) of the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE), strong in the southern and western states, has played some role in organizing a mass opposition to government policies, but it is not a political party capable of putting forward a genuine political alternative. Many Mexicans, especially young people, don’t believe in Congress, don’t believe in the election authorities, simply do not trust any political party. So, now the Catholic Church has taken up the task of social and political criticism as well as the proposal of alternatives.
Padre Goyo
Each of the Catholic priests who have taken on the role of defender of the people has his own political roles and has carved out his own political space. The nearly 50-year old Padre Gregorio López, better known as Padre Goyo, heads a parish in Apatzingán, Michoacán, a territory controlled by the Knights Templar drug cartel. (He is not to be confused with another Padre Padre Goyo, Gregorio López Gorostieta, who was found murdered, presumably by one of the cartels in the town of Tlapehuala, Guerrero on December 26, 2014.) Padre Goyo, who at home wears both a clerical collar and a bullet proof vest, has become famous in Mexico for fingering drug cartel figures to the Mexican police, among them the mayor of Apatzingán who was subsequently removed from office. An erstwhile defender of the region’s armed self-defense organizations and of their most prominent leader, Dr. José Manuel Mireles Valverde the community of Tepalcatepec, Goyo also criticizes other self-defense organizations that he believes are fronts for the cartels.
Goyo has also created the Citizens Council Responsible for Promoting a Healthy Fabric of the Social Order or CCRISTOS, made up of local businesspeople and professionals; with that group and the Federal Police has carried out raids on Knights Templar center in Apatzingán. His method had been to organize the middle class and to seek an alliance with the government and the police authorities. His flamboyant behavior and outspoken manner led the Church to send him to Rome where he is supposed to have met with the Pope who reportedly set limits to his activities, though he continues to be kept at arm’s length by Mexican church authorities.
Padre Goyo recently traveled to the United States speaking in Mexican communities from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York. When I heard him speak in Queens, a tireless if sometimes rambling speaker whose discourse was filled with anecdotes about the drug lords’ many murder victims and tales of his own struggle for justice; he lashed out against the cartels, promoted his own strategy of organizing middle class reform organizations such as CCRISTOS, and insisted that people had to demand that the political authorities and the police do their job and end corruption. He denied that he had sold out the movement or Dr. Mireles while meeting with the Mexican Minster of the Interior, presenting himself as a necessary broker between society and government. Goyo ended his talk be explaining that he was heading off to South America to speak with prominent leaders, seeking to join forces with others fighting against such violence.
Padre Solalinde
Altogether different is Padre Alejanro Solalinde, a 69-year old priest with a calm manner who runs the Brothers on the Road migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, and who has become a leading human rights spokesperson in the last few years. While still a seminarian in the Carmelite order, Solinde and a group of fellow students left the order over ideological differences and disappointment in their education. Solalinde went off to earn bachelor’s degrees in history and another psychology as well as a master’s in family therapy at the Ecclesiastical Studies Institute of Higher Learning. He subsequently spent 30 years as a parish priest before being asked by the Mexican Bishops’ Council to undertake work as the pastor for migrants in the southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero. Now a monsignor, he has been awarded the prize for Peace and Democracy and the Pagés Llergo prize for Democracy and Human Rights. He left Mexico in 2012 because of death threats, but subsequently returned to continue his work.
Thoroughly disgusted with the Mexican authorities, Padre Solalinde recently said, “Peña Nieto, you should know that your government has reached the point that it is only a question of time, before we carry out a peaceful change, we are going to do what you and the three levels of government—and especially the legislators who represent no one—have failed to do.” In the struggle for peaceful change in Mexico, Monsignor Solalinde has been cooperating with Bishop Raúl Vera López in working to bring about a Citizens Constituent Assembly.
Bishop Raúl Vera López
Bishop Raúl Vera López, today organizing to replace the Mexican government with a better one, has had a distinguished career. Born in 1945, he studied chemistry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and after graduating in 1968 went off to join the Dominican order, taking his vows in León, Guanajuato in November 1969. From there he went to Bologna, Italy to study theology, later graduating summa cum laude with a degree in theology from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. He was ordained in the priesthood in June of 1975 by Pope Paul VI. He served in the most important leadership councils of the Dominican order in Mexico until he was named bishop by John Paul II, serving for a while as auxiliary bishop to Bishop Samuel Ruiz García in Chiapas during the Mexican government’s peace talks with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1995.
In 2000 he became the Bishop of the city of Saltillo in the State of Coahuila on the U.S.-Mexican border where he put much of his emphasis on human rights work. He has spoken out frequently on the situation of the state’s miners, as well as that of other workers, and established the Border with Justice project to deal with the many human rights issues on the Coahuila-Texas border. He also established the Fray Juan de Larios Human Rights Center to monitor and to denounce human rights problems in the region. He has won many awards for his work and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. Now he has taken on the struggle to create a new government in Mexico.
Vera has called for a Citizens Constituent Assembly. A constituent congress is the term used for a national representative assembly that undertakes to create a new government and to write a new constitution. The two most famous such assemblies, also called constituent congresses or constitutional conventions, were the American Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 following the War of Independence and the National Constituent Assembly of France created at the time of the revolution of 1789. Mexico has had several constitutions and governments created over the years, the most recent adopted in 1917 in the midst of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. While that constitution was in many respects one of the most democratic in the world at the time—at least in theory—the government that it established evolved into an authoritarian one-party state, the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that held power from 1928 to 2000, followed by a brief conservative government interregnum and the a return to the rule of the PRI, which is where we are today. At the time of the Chiapas Rebellion of January 1, 1994, the EZLN also called for a constituent assembly and in August of that year held a so-called National Democratic Convention in the jungle, though it was neither really a convention or democratic. While left parties have also suggested a constituent assembly, none of them has the authority of Bishop Vera whose recent call has eclipsed the proposals of the far left.
Taking advantage of the February 5 anniversary of the adoption of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, Vera and his supporters, many of them leading advocates of human rights in Mexico, presented their Citizens’ and Peoples’ Constituent Assembly project to the public. Speaking at the Fray Angélico University Cultural Center near the UNAM in Mexico City, Vera argued that the country’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches had “usurped power,” and he called upon the Mexican people to organize and take it back. The group also published a manifesto (see translation below), together with a similar effort called the National Popular Convention, declaring that they were not any sort of political vanguard but rather that it, “It will be the people of Mexico who together, free and conscious, will achieve the transformation of our country.”
Joint Declaration of the Citizens’ an Peoples’ Constituent Assembly – Ayotzinapa
To the People of Mexico
To the Brother and Sister Peoples of the World
To the National and International Media
February 5, 2015 – The dismantling of the country, of the indigenous territories, the destruction of social rights, the curtailment of individual guarantees, and electoral frauds are aspects of the generalized violence exercised against the population, whose cruelest expression is the forced disappearance, torture, and imprisonment of people involved in social struggle. State terrorism imposes itself like a permanent martial law in order to achieve the final sacking of our natural resources in order to sustain the decadence of the most powerful and salvage empire that humanity has known. This violence has turned Mexico into a common grave. While plans for our dispossession and occupation grow and the state announces the generalization of its violence against the population, new and old actors go out into the streets today in massive numbers, moved by the crime of Ayotzinapa, shaking the foundations of a regime that seemed impotent. They unleash hope and put in the center of the struggle the call for justice and a radical questioning of the antinational regime.
Today the National Popular Convention and the Citizens’ and Peoples’ Constituent Assembly come into the public light, like two streams of the same great river that is the Mexican people in search of a peaceful, popular and civic solution to the crisis as it advances toward the refoundation of Mexico. We recognize both initiatives as part of the process through wich our peoples construct spaces of reflection, analysis, resistance, and common action, and through which they can express all of their voices, wisdom, experiences, spiritualities, and the powerful root of our culture. Both spaces, in addition to our joining in the call for the appearance alive of the 43 Ayotzinapa Teachers College Students, put us in the center of the need for national unity.
For this reason, we declare that we are walking on parallel, not opposing paths. The objectives of each project lead us to dialogue. In the following days we will continue strengthening the bridges of dialogue, communication, mutual understanding, and action to contribute to liberation from this shameful and unjust neoliberal system.
We affirm that we are not the vanguard, but rather people making humble efforts to bring together a part of the dissidence that had led to the oppression which this government of lackeys of the transnational, oligarchic capitalist class imposes on us, and for that reason we require dialogue to come together, to speak with different references, but above all those of the unorganized men and women in our citizenry. It will be the peoples of Mexico who together, free and conscious will achieve the transformation of our country.
Because they were taken from us alive, we want them back alive!
Your visit to the Airline Museum moves me to recommend the Bank of America credit card. In addition to no annual fee, 3% cashback on gas, 2% cashback on groceries and 1% cashback on the rest, check out the card's "Museums on Us" feature: https://get.com/blog/best-credit-cards-museum/
Despite these advantages, it is painful to recommend BofA, a financial institution even more thuggish than its fellows.
You may be interested in my proposal to "level the playing field" by authorizing credit unions to undertake all functions currently reserved to commercial banks, a modest move in the direction of "free markets" that free-loading free marketeers would oppose tooth and nail.
"Pax On Both Houses: Good Ideas For The Body Politic"
PS It bears mention that we 5 Archibalds grew up to "Happy Trails," the theme song of The Roy Rogers Show, an eagerly anticipated half hour serial which we watched weekly along with other "cowboy" demigods: Hopalong Cassidy, The Cisco Kid, Gabby Hayes, Death Valley Days, Colt 45, The Rifleman, Gunsmoke, Paladin, Bat Masterson, Zane Gray Theater, Bonanza andThe Lone Ranger and Tonto, the Indian sidekick whose Spanish name means "Stupid."
One of the most remarkable -- and unremarked -- mythic changes in my lifetime is the near disappearance of "The Cowboys and Indians motif," a secular religion that totally dominated my youth. John Lennon said that "The Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ" but Westerns were even more popular, communicating a murderous, genocidal, violence-solves-all ethic that - in the minds of flag-waving "exceptionalists" - handily trumped The Sermon on The Mount.
Today, the nearly defunct presumption that Indians were "supposed to be expropriated" -- and as early American politicians actually urged, "exterminated" -- finds modern reprise in our growing understanding that "black lives matter" and that cops no longer enjoy "open season on black males."
Open Season On Unarmed American Black Men, A Compendium Of Pax Posts
Hope this email finds you well! Things are going well. I'm currently road tripping from Denver to Rochester and am busy hitting up all sorts of cool museums (currently sitting in the parking lot of the national airline history museum in Kansas City waiting for it to open) on the way and discovering the beauty of Kansas that your friend Fred captured quite well in his piece you sent earlier. I'll respond in more detail after I arrive back in Rochester mid-next week!
Like millions of other Christian environmentalists, I had been eagerly anticipating the release of “Laudato Si” Pope Francis’ encyclical on environmental ethics. I have long been an adherent of the notion of Creation Care, or the practice of environmental stewardship as a moral imperative. These are firm convictions and causes close to my heart and which are deeply rooted in my being as a person of faith. I couldn’t wait to read what this exciting pontiff whose papacy is still so relatively fresh had to say on these vital matters.
“I urgently appeal…for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all…Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity….All of us can cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents,” according to the encyclical.
“Laudato Si” was heralded in advance of its release by many of the national progressive Catholic organizations and thinkers I have come to admire (theFranciscan Action Network, NETWORK, Father James Martin, S.J., etc.), and it is still bring promoted and discussed online and in the media. When I attended mass in the weeks following the release of Laudato Si, I was expecting to hear this highly anticipated teaching referred to and passed on to the people from the pulpit. However, I was disappointed when other topics took precedence in the homilies that I heard during those masses. Laudato Si and its pressing message and urgent call to action seemed to be ignored.
Instead of discussion of Laudato Si, I heard homilies about traditional marriage and how families need Christian fathers at the head of them, and much umbrage and gnashing of teeth over the United States Supreme Court’s ruling on same sex marriage announced in June.
Also, Pope Francis’ poll numbers in America have seem to taken a dip (from the highs of 76% in early 2014 to the 59% baseline approval rating he started out with in the States) since “Laudato Si” was released. Since he began speaking truth to power in an even more amplified manner regarding what he sees, including “an unjust and unsustainable global economy” that is desecrating God’s creation and oppressing the poor, and disadvantaged, according to Catholic Church commentator John Allen.
According to Gallup, “The drop in the pope’s favorable rating is driven [in large part] by a decline among…political conservatives” and the “drop in favorability is even starker among Americans who identify as conservative — 45% of whom view him favorably, down sharply from 72% last year. This decline may be attributable to the pope’s denouncing of “the idolatry of money” and linking climate change partially to human activity, along with his passionate focus on income inequality — all issues that are at odds with many conservatives’ beliefs.”
Based on this polling, there might reason to believe that propaganda from the powerful interests aligned with the right wing in this country seems to be effecting the perception of the Holy Father and his message. After all, Fox News is trying to gin up negative feelings about the pope and his advocacy for economic and environmental justice by labeling him “The Most Dangerous Man in the World.” It is sad if some of the faithful are closing their hearts and minds to reason and morality when it comes to issues of environmental and economic issues because of their susceptibility to this bombastic smear campaign and their allegiance to this indulgent political ideology.
An Associated Press analysis of fundraising reports filed with federal regulators through Friday found that nearly 60 donations of a million dollars or more accounted for about a third of the more than $380 million brought in so far for the 2016 presidential election. Donors who gave at least $100,000 account for about half of all donations so far to candidates' presidential committees and the super PACs that support them.
The review covered contributions to outside groups that can accept checks of any size, known as super PACs, and to the formal campaigns, which are limited to accepting no more than $2,700 per donor. The tally includes donations from individuals, corporations and other organizations reflected in data filed with the Federal Election Commission as of Friday, the deadline for super PACs to report for the first six months of the year.
4.) The clarification of your correspondent's final point -- that Obama said he was proud of his father's service in WWII -- was a mistaken reference to his maternal grandfather who played the role of "father" in Obama's life and of whom Barack was very proud.
One can argue the technicality that, in fact, Obama stated his father's participation in WWII. However, to tell this lie deliberately would have no benefit, only liability. Furthermore, Obama's Islamic father -- who deserted Barack at age 2 -- was obviously too young to have served as an American soldier in World War II.
On the following webpage, the explanation of Obama's mistake is contextualized alongside another slip of the tongue in which Obama was "caught" on video -- twice!!! -- saying that there 57 states.
If a gifted politician is going to trell a lie, he will not lie about readily demonstrable matters-of-fact.
***
A fundamental purpose of education is to train people to undertake orderly research and then evaluate information with enough intellectual rigor that an individual will change his mind if careful examination of facts-and-context reveal that one's previous view was incorrect.
It is an inconvenient truth that most people clueless concerning epistemologically sound research, evaluation and judgment.
"The Death Of Epistemology: Anti-Vaccine Epert (And Playboy Model) Jenny McCarthy"
Revealingly, it is an indisputable fact that Ted Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada. However, conservatives NEVER argue that Cruz is not entitled to run for president.
They don't argue against Cruz's candidate when even he himself acknoledges his Canadian birth by and American mother and a Cuban father because no major (nor minor) political party considers these circumstances an impediment to presidential aspiration.
I encourage you to ask your correspondent, Audrey Killar (?), what she thinks about the legality of Ted Cruz' candidacy.
See what you think about this...I'm guessing it's more red herring stuff...cause that's about all she sends me. So because it comes from a lawyer it's credible....ciao
Here are 4 Simple questions from an attorney...are there ANY logical answers ?
You be the judge……
Here's what I would like to know. If the TRUTH ever comes out and it is decided that Obama was never eligible to be president, what happens to all the laws he signed into being and all the executive orders? Should they all be null and void?
Here are 4 Simple questions from a reputable attorney...This really should get your "gray matter" to churning, even if you are an Obama fan.
For all you "anti-Fox News" folks, none of this information came from Fox. All of it can be verified from legitimate sources (Wikipedia, the Kapiolani hospital website itself, and a good history book, as noted herein). It is very easy for someone to check out.
4 Simple Questions .....
1. Back in 1961 people of color were called 'Negroes’. So how can the Obama 'birth certificate' state he is "African-American" when the term wasn't even used at that time ?
2. The birth certificate that the White House released lists Obama's birth as August 4, 1961 and Lists Barack Hussein Obama as his father. No big deal, Right? At the time of Obama's birth, it also shows that his father is aged 25 years old, and that Obama's father was born in "Kenya, East Africa". This wouldn't seem like anything of concern, except the fact that Kenya did not even exist until 1963, two whole years after Obama's birth, and 27 years after his father's birth. How could Obama's father have been born in a country that did not yet Exist ? Up and until Kenya was formed in 1963, it was known as the "British East Africa Protectorate". (check it below)
3. On the Birth Certificate released by the White House, the listed place of birth is "Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital". This cannot be, because the hospital(s) in question in 1961 were called "KauiKeolani Children's Hospital" and "Kapi'olani Maternity Home", respectively. The name did not change to Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital until 1978, when these two hospitals merged. How can this particular name of the hospital be on a birth certificate dated 1961 if this name had not yet been applied to it until 1978? (CHECK IT BELOW)
Why hasn't this been discussed in the major media?
4. Perhaps a clue comes from Obama's book on his father. He states how proud he is of his father fighting in WW II. I'm not a math genius, so I may need some help from you. Barack Obama's "birth certificate" says his father was 25 years old in 1961 when Obama was born. That should have put his father's date of birth approximately 1936 - if my math holds (Honest! I did that without a calculator!) Now we need a non-revised history book-one that hasn't been altered to satisfy the author's goals-to verify that WW II was basically between 1939 and 1945. Just how many 3 year olds fight in Wars? Even in the latest stages of WW II his father wouldn't have been more than 9 years old. Does that mean that Mr. Obama is a liar, or simply chooses to alter the facts to satisfy his imagination or political purposes ?
Very truly yours,
RICHARD R. SILVERLIEB Attorney at Law 354 Eisenhower Parkway Livingston, NJ 07039
"A pen in the hand of this president is far more dangerous than a gun in the hands of 200 million law-abiding citizens.
Send this to as many Patriots as you can! Ask your Republican friends in Washington D.C. If they have a backbone ... Why in the hell can't they use it and get media coverage to explode this across our country? Impeachment in itself is not justice! We are talking orange jumpsuit & long prison sentences.
Lead installers for SolarCity, Charles Groves, right, and Matt Parra, install solar panels on the roof of a home on March 31, 2011, in Palo Alto, California.
Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX are impressive. But the solar company he founded with his cousins could be transformational.
here’s a huge, ongoing, and justifiable obsession with Elon Musk and his ventures—chiefly Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, and SpaceX, his private spacecraft business. It’s not surprising a biography of the man was a best-seller this year. But to my mind, the most important and interesting venture that the polymathic South African immigrant helped start is the one that gets the least press. That’s SolarCity, a company that aims to paper America’s rooftops with solar panels.
Musk’s work with Tesla may inspire the most obvious comparisons to Henry Ford. But SolarCity—where Musk is the chairman, and whose concept he suggested to two of his cousins, Lyndon Rive (now the chief executive officer) and Peter Rive (Lyndon’s brother, now chief technology officer)—might offer some even more apt parallels to Ford’s career.
When it comes to forging new industries, coming up with a new technology is only the beginning. As I’ve noted before in this column, innovation in business models and processes can be as important as the initial Eureka moment. Henry Ford didn’t invent the internal combustion engine. But he did put together and perfect a combination of processes, methods, and tools—the superefficient assembly line, vertically integrated manufacturing, enormous scale, bold human resources policies like the $5 day, and cutting-edge financing techniques—that transformed the car from an expensive toy for the rich into a utilitarian vehicle for the middle class.
Now, Tesla has pioneered a new mode of selling cars—direct to the consumer instead of through dealerships. And it is attempting to integrate vertically by constructing its own massive battery factory. But at its root the company is selling a small number of very expensive sports cars to very rich people. Tesla is essentially where Ford Motor Co. was in 1903, before the Model T.
SolarCity, which I first wrote about six years ago when it had just a few hundred employees, has a smaller market capitalization than Tesla ($5.7 billion, compared with almost $34 billion for Tesla). But you can make the case that it has the potential to be more economically influential. SolarCity employs 12,000 people, and is adding 500 positions per month, as Lyndon Rive told me earlier this week. Tesla sells about 12,000 vehicles per quarter around the world. So far this year, SolarCity has been adding about 12,000 customers per month in the U.S. On Friday, it reported that it had 262,495 customers as of June 30. (Both companies generally post losses rather than profits.)
SolarCity, which focuses on putting solar panels on the roofs of homes and buildings, didn’t invent the solar panel. But, like Ford Motor Co. did a century ago, it has put together and perfected a combination of functions and disciplines—efficient assembly, economies of scale, vertical integration, and innovative financing techniques—that could make mass adoption possible. And it continually seeks and finds ways to expand its market.
Let’s review. Several years ago, the high cost of solar panels was a prohibitive deterrent to adoption; homeowners would have to pay $30,000 to $50,000 upfront in exchange for savings that would trickle in over time. So SolarCity developed a solar lease strategy that lets people put solar panels on their roof for no money down and start saving money instantly. According to GTM Research, arrangements like solar leases accounted for 72 percent of the new installed residential solar capacity in 2014. SolarCity alone accounted for 34 percent of those installations—the market leader by far.
The ability to save money on power with no money down is an appealing proposition. But building these systems is a very capital-intensive business. A developer like SolarCity faces the same problem an individual does—it has to put up a lot of cash upfront while the revenues (in the form of tax credits and streams of lease or power payments) won’t materialize for months or years. It’s a money-losing proposition, at least in the early years. (SolarCity reported a net loss of $375 million in 2014.) To continue growing, it developed another new set of financing techniques. It made deals with big Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs to finance the construction of thousands of systems and packaged the leases into bonds that can be purchased by individual investors.
Home rooftop installation is a business in which it is difficult to gain cost savings through economics of scale because it involves doing one-offs—30 panels on a house here, 24 panels on a roof there. But SolarCity figured out a way to turn this retail business into something that more closely resembles a wholesale one. It has made a series of deals with the Defense Department to put solar panels on large clusters of military housing: 6,500 homes in Hawaii, and 6,000 homes on installations in the San Diego area. In California, its largest market, SolarCity has built a network of 40 warehouses, which serve as efficient distribution and staging areas for single-home projects. And in an attempt at vertical integration, last year it purchased solar panel manufacturer Silevo. SolarCity is now building a huge plant in Buffalo, New York, that will supply low-cost panels for its installer.
Now SolarCity is using this scale, experience, and financing muscle to break into a new market: small businesses. For large companies that have good credit and lots of buildings with giant roofs—like Walmart and Ikea—solar is a no-brainer in states that have attractive incentives. Installers are eager to work with them because it is much more economically efficient to build a single 5,000-panel array than to build 100 50-panel arrays. That has left small-business owners, who tend to have smaller roofs and less robust credit, in the dark. “Typically, installers had no interest in a commercial system under 500 kilowatts [about the size of a Walmart roof],” Lyndon Rive told me in an interview this week.
Earlier this week, SolarCity announced it would start offering solar leases in California to small businesses. The terms are similar to those on offer to home owners: no money down, an immediate savings of 5 to 25 percent on current electricity rates, plus a guarantee that rates won’t rise over the 20-year lifetime of the lease. Systems can be as small as 30 kilowatts (100–125 panels). “We’ve built the infrastructure to do the installation work ourselves,” Rive told me. Through installing thousands of home rooftops, SolarCity has developed processes for planting systems on roofs quickly and at a low fixed cost. SolarCity is also marrying one financing innovation—the solar lease—to another. In California, businesses can now participate in so-called property assessed clean energy programs, under which property owners can borrow money to make improvements and pay back the funds through an assessment that is like a property tax.
Rather than grab a share of an existing market, as Tesla is trying to do, SolarCity is tapping into innovations to create entirely new markets, as Ford did. Of course, there are a couple of significant difference between the SolarCity of 2015 and the Ford Motor Co. of 1915. Sales of the Model T didn’t rely much on government subsidies; SolarCity and other installers have been huge beneficiaries of a federal tax credit for investments in solar power that is scheduled to end after 2016. Henry Ford made a ton of money on an operating basis even as he invested in manufacturing capacity and hired thousands of workers. SolarCity? Not so much. At least not yet. In the second quarter, while revenues grew 67 percent from the year before, the company reported an operating loss of $132 million. In the meantime, it is fortunate to be growing rapidly at a time when cash is available to fund the construction of solar panel systems. On Tuesday, the company announced plans to raise another $124 million in debt backed by solar leases.
Theodor Geisel (March 2, 1904–September 24, 1991), better known as Dr. Seuss, is one of the most beloved children's book authors of all time. Maurice Sendak called him "a creature content with himself as animal and artist, and one who didn’t give a lick or a spit for anyone’s opinion, one way or another, of his work.” Geisel was also a creature besotted with animals, in his art and his life. One of literary history's greatest pet-lovers, he had more pets throughout his life than he did accolades, and accolades he had many – including a Pulitzer Prize, three Caldecott Honors, and eight honorary degrees. Animals populated his many children's books, his secret art, and even his wartime propaganda cartoons.
In the spring of 1957, almost two decades after his little-known "adult" book of nudes, it was an animal book – The Cat in the Hat – that led critics to declare Dr. Seuss an overnight success, despite the fact that he had been writing for twenty years and this was his thirteenth book. That fall, How the Grinch Stole Christmas sealed his status as a celebrity of creative culture and he joined Random House as the editor of a new imprint for young readers.
But the book into which Dr. Seuss poured his most exuberant love of animals, created sometime between 1958 and 1962, was never made public in his lifetime.
In 1991, shortly after his death, Geisel's widow Audrey and his longtime secretary and friend Claudia Prescott discovered among his papers the manuscript and finished line art for what is now finally published asWhat Pet Should I Get? (public library).
Although the story, on the surface, is about a classic practical dilemma of childhood, it has – like all Dr. Seuss books, and like all great children's books, for there is no such thing as writing "for children" – a deeper philosophical undercurrent. At its heart is a meditation on two all too common maladies afflicting modern grownups – the paradox of choice, which Geisel witnessed closely as the Mad Men era ushered inconsumerist society and which continues to fascinate psychologiststoday, and the fear of missing out, so pervasive in contemporary culture that we've shorthanded it into the buzzwordy acronym FOMO.
We meet a brother and sister who arrive at the pet store, enraptured by their father's permission to choose one – and only one – pet to take home. But as soon as they enter, a growing chorus of lovable animals make their irresistible appeals. The common binary choice of cat or dog soon expands into an overwhelming array of increasingly fantastical creatures, beginning with other less common real-life pet options and eventually tipping over into Dr. Seuss's famous imaginary beings.
Recurring throughout the story and interjecting the otherwise first-person narrative is an omniscient voice urging the kids, "Make up your mind"– the quintessential refrain of the mind paralyzed by the paradox of choice and tortured by FOMO.
The cat?
Or the dog?
The kitten?
The pup?
Oh boy!
It is something
to make a mind up.
Then I looked at Kay.
I said, "What will we do?
I like all the pets that I see.
So do you.
We have to pick ONE pet
and pick it out soon.
You know Mother told us
to be back by noon."
The ending is both playful and profound: Under the use-it-or-lose-it proposition of the time they were given to choose a pet, the kids do as the refrain urges, make up their minds, and choose – except we never find out which creature they chose.
Undergirding this open-endedness is a poetic reminder that in the face of life's dilemmas, there is often no right or wrong choice – what matters is only that we do choose, that we make up our minds and march forward, for nothing dulls the little time we have more surely than the paralysis of indecision. One is reminded of Lewis Carroll's Alice, who tells the Cheshire Cat: "I don't much care where ... so long as I get somewhere."
"I will do it right now.
I will do it!" I said.
"I will make up the mind
that is up in my head."
The dog...? Or the rabbit...?
The fish...? Or the cat...?
I picked one out fast,
and that that was that.
The story's protagonists are the same kids that had appeared in Dr. Seuss's 1960 book One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. (Geisel, like Maurice Sendak and other children's book authors, sometimes recycled his characters.) Like most of the books Dr. Seuss created before 1963, One Fish was colored using basic CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow, and black – without mixing the inks to create other colors, such as green and purple, which would only appear in his later books.
Geisel was ordinarily meticulous about indicating what colors should go where in his line art, but he had left no such markings on this manuscript. To address the practical challenge while honoring Dr. Seuss's aesthetic, Cathy Goldsmith – the Random House art director tasked with bringing the manuscript to posthumous life – turned to the fish book as a color guide but bridged it with Dr. Seuss's later work to create a hybrid palette composed primarily of CMYK, enriched by a few additional colors. This would no doubt have pleased Geisel, a notorious perfectionist who belabored every detail and once professed:
I know my stuff looks like it was rattled off in twenty-eight seconds, but every word is a struggle and every sentence is like the pangs of birth.
A spread from 'What Pet Should I Get?' as it was originally found. Geisel estimated that he produced more than a thousand pages of text and images for a typical 64-page book, revising over and over. He always taped the text into position on the original line art, as seen here.
In the afterword, the editors at Random House add a thoughtful addendum to the otherwise timeless Dr. Seuss story, pointing out a critical aspect of how times have changed:
Pets are life-changing. They greet us like heroes when we walk in the door, comfort us when we are sad, and love us unconditionally. Dogs and cats are the most popular pets in the United States, but these wonderful, vulnerable animals can easily live for over a decade and are dependent on us for their needs. So committing to caring for a pet as a cherished, not captive, companion is a big decision.
Choosing where to get your pet is also very important. When Dr. Seuss wrote What Pet Should I Get? over fifty years ago, it was common for people to simply buy dogs, cats, and other animals at pet stores. Today animal advocates encourage us to adopt them from a shelter or rescue organization and warn us never to purchase pets from places that are supplied by puppy mills. We wholeheartedly agree and completely support this recommendation.
U.S. Marines arrive at Saudi Arabia's Dhahran Air Base on Aug. 21, 1990. The U.S. began a buildup in the region just days after Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2 of that year. The U.S. military has been active in Iraq virtually nonstop for the past quarter-century.
It started so well. When Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, the United States swiftly cobbled together a broad coalition, unleashed a stunning new generation of air power and waged a lightning ground offensive that lasted all of four days. Iraqi troops were so desperate to quit that some surrendered to Western journalists armed only with notebooks.
Kuwait was liberated, U.S. commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was a hero, and the pundits confidently declared the U.S. had buried its "Vietnam syndrome," the fear of being sucked into a quagmire. In the annals of war, it doesn't get much easier than this.
So on the 25th anniversary of that first Iraq conflict, how is it possible that the U.S. is still entangled in a messy, complicated war with no end on the horizon?
Iraq President Saddam Hussein is shown in Baghdad in January 1991, just before the first U.S. war in Iraq. The American forces would oust the Iraqi leader 12 years later in a second war.
AP
Aside from an intermission from December 2011 until August 2014, the U.S. military has been rumbling through the sweltering sands or soaring over the desert skies for this entire quarter-century, a military engagement unparalleled in U.S. history.
Before the first Iraq battle, the U.S. had never fought a large-scale war in the Middle East. Yet freeing a tiny Gulf emirate from Saddam's clutches has morphed into a seemingly permanent state of war, metastasizing to so many countries it's tough to put a precise number on it.
Here's one way to count: President Obama has ordered airstrikes on seven Muslim countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya and Somalia) in less than seven years in office.
"Before 1990, the region was a secondary or even tertiary area of importance to Washington. The United States had rarely deployed military forces in the region," Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official now at the Brookings Institution, wrote recently. "What had been a backwater for the U.S. military has become since 1990 the principal arena of conflict. This shows no sign of ending anytime soon."
The U.S. military involvement has spanned four presidencies and a panoply of evolving goals.
In rough order, the shifting aims have been to reverse Saddam's aggression, ensure the safe flow of oil from the Gulf, contain Saddam, oust Saddam, search for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, build democracy, pummel al-Qaida in Iraq, and currently, suppress the self-proclaimed Islamic State. If there's a unifying theme, it's the U.S. forecasts that have consistently been too optimistic.
"It's been a 25-year-long enterprise, with different aims and approaches, none of which have yielded the results promised," said Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who served in Iraq and now teaches international relations at Boston University.
The U.S. policies have included five distinct phases. Here's a closer look at them and their consequences:
1. Overwhelming Force (1991): The world was turning America's way when, after a six-month military buildup, the U.S. began bombing Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union would crumble by year's end and the U.S. was the lone superpower.
The brief war only reinforced the notion that the U.S. was uniquely positioned to remake the global order in the wake of the Cold War. The only debate at the end of the first Iraq war was whether the U.S. squandered an opportunity by not advancing all the way to Baghdad, ousting Saddam and occupying Iraq.
Iraqi antiaircraft fire lights up the skies over Baghdad in response to U.S. warplanes that bombed the Iraqi capital in the early hours of Jan. 18, 1991. The U.S. campaign drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait in a little over a month.
Dominique Mollard/AP
But President George H.W. Bush cautioned against the risks of taking over Iraq. His top military adviser, Gen. Colin Powell, summed it up with the "Pottery Barn rule"– if you break it, you own it.
Bush wanted to withdraw the troops as quickly as possible to avoid any potential complications. His successors have had similar instincts, yet each American drawdown in Iraq has been followed by a fresh wave of forces at a later date.
"The 1991 war was quick and easy and created the myth that this is how we could fight wars now," said James Dubik, a retired general and Iraq veteran who's now at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. "This set us up for a misunderstanding of how to wage war in the years that followed."
There were other unanticipated consequences. Osama bin Laden would cite the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia — sent in the run-up to the war and remaining in its aftermath — as one of his main grievances against the U.S.
Iraqi soldiers cross a highway carrying white surrender flags on Feb. 25, 1991, in Kuwait City. The U.S.-led coalition overwhelmed the Iraqi forces and swiftly drove them out of Kuwait.
Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images
2. Keeping Saddam 'In A Box' (1990s): If the U.S. wouldn't overthrow Saddam, at least it could neutralize him. President Clinton's mantra was to keep Saddam "in a box," which was essentially the policy it inherited. This included a combination of international sanctions and the no-fly zones that the U.S. Air Force patrolled daily over the north and south of Iraq from the end of the first war in 1991 until the start of the second in 2003.
Clinton, instinctively cautious when it came to using American military force, is the only one of the past four presidents not to launch a new military campaign in Iraq. But his tenure was not exactly a period of calm. Iraq's antiaircraft forces often challenged the U.S. warplanes, and the Americans responded.
"Most people forget this period, but there were frequent low-level hostilities," noted Bacevich. "It was containment with guns blazing."
Saddam played cat-and-mouse with U.N. weapons inspectors and reasserted his authority at home despite the constraints. His economic mismanagement, combined with the tough sanctions, impoverished Iraq. As the leading proponent of the sanctions, the U.S. faced criticism over the pain felt by ordinary Iraqis, yet the punitive measures did not improve Saddam's treatment of his people or weaken his grip on power. The overall result was a muddled standoff and a sense that a showdown loomed.
3. Regime Change (2003): In ousting Saddam in 2003, as with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 2011, the U.S. greatly underestimated the turmoil that would follow.
The U.S. captured Baghdad in less than a month with a far smaller force than it employed in the first Gulf War. President George W. Bush and his administration expected the U.S. forces to be welcomed as liberators. The plan was for the U.S. troops to pack up and depart almost as quickly as they came.
"This was supposed to be a video replay of the 1991 war — a quick victory, then we leave," said Dubik. "But we miscalculated when we saw the war as just fighting. It's also a political act that you have to get right."
An Iraqi boy cheers as a statue of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is set ablaze during an impromptu celebration on the streets of Baghdad on April 12, 2003.
Scott Nelson/Getty Images
Saddam's Iraq epitomized the autocratic Arab states dominated by a single leader. No real institutions existed, aside from the security forces, which the Americans disbanded. All that remained was a huge, gaping void.
In Iraq and elsewhere, it's been a challenge just to keep the lights on, let alone build a modern state.
Iraq, along with Syria, Libya and Yemen, have all been consumed by civil war. Other Arab states are shaky and none can claim to be a full-fledged democracy. The regional debate is focused on defensive measures to keep the chaos from spreading. Anyone preaching nation-building would have a tough time finding an audience.
4: The Surge (2007): The surge would feature prominently in any American highlight reel from Iraq, as a fresh influx of U.S. troops helped to dramatically change the trajectory of the war and introduced a modicum of stability to Iraq.
The surge was striking for two reasons, representative of the larger U.S. effort in Iraq.
A U.S. soldier turns his back to the helicopter carrying Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. commander in central Iraq, as the chopper takes off from a patrol base south of Baghdad, in 2007. A surge in U.S. troops that year changed the course of the war and helped stabilize Iraq, at least temporarily.
David Furst/AFP/Getty Images
First, the U.S. military operations have consistently had a rapid, clear impact. By increasing the force by some 30,000 troops, the U.S. quelled much of the sectarian violence that was dragging Iraq into civil war.
Second, the political part of the equation has always proved elusive. The success of the surge contributed to the notion that Iraq was sturdy enough to stand on its own. When the U.S. and Iraq couldn't reach a deal on a continued U.S. presence, all American combat forces left the country at the end of 2011.
Obama, referring to both Iraq and Afghanistan, said at the time the U.S. "was departing these wars in a way that will make American stronger and the world more secure."
Iraqis wave at a departing U.S. armored vehicle from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. The vehicle was part of the last U.S. military convoy to leave Iraq on Dec. 18, 2011. Iraq was relatively stable at the time the U.S. pulled out, but the rise of the Islamic State would lead President Obama to launch an air campaign in Iraq in August 2014.
Lucas Jackson-Pool/Getty Images
But once the U.S. forces were gone, the gains slipped away under Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his policies favoring his fellow Shiite Muslims. His moves included purging the military of many Sunni military officers that the U.S. had trained for years.
5. Confronting The Islamic State (2014-?): Obama's oft-stated goal in Iraq is to "degrade and defeat" the Islamic State. Under the current approach, which relies on U.S. air power and Iraqi partners on the ground, the "degrade" part of the mission appears realistic, but the "defeat" part will be much more difficult, according to many analysts. U.S. officials estimate it could take three to five years or maybe longer to defeat ISIS.
Overall, ISIS has been pushed back a bit since the air campaign began a year ago, but the group remains entrenched in western Iraq as well as eastern Syria.
An Iraqi woman stands amid the debris following a suicide car bomb attack carried out by the Islamic State north of Baghdad, on July 18. The extremist group still holds much of western Iraq despite the U.S. air campaign that began a year ago.
Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images
Obama's limited approach befits his wariness of military adventures in the Middle East and American skepticism about what can be achieved and maintained.
So what's the best way forward?
There's no consensus. Obama's critics on the right saying he isn't doing enough in Iraq and should send in special operators on the ground to bolster the air campaign.
Bacevich, the retired colonel turned professor, sees the best option as an updated version of Cold War containment, with the U.S. seeking to restrict or roll back the Islamic State — but steering clear of a full-scale ground war that includes a trillion-dollar, decade-long exercise in overhauling a dysfunctional state.
The hope is that over time, Islamic radicalism would burn itself out and groups like the Islamic State will lose their appeal when they fail to deliver. But optimism is in short supply.
Some young Americans who fought in the first Iraq campaign served full 20-year military careers and retired without ever seeing a conclusion to the Iraq campaign. Most of those joining the military today were not even born when that first war began.
"Perhaps the biggest error was overstating the importance of the Persian Gulf," said Bacevich. "I don't think it was a critical strategic interest. Yet here we are, after all these years, in a conflict from which we can't extricate ourselves in a satisfactory manner."
Greg Myre is the international editor of NPR.org and first covered Iraq in the 1991 war. Follow him @gregmyre1.
He has been heroic, persistent, and twice as illuminating as the purportedly real news that fuelled “The Daily Show.”
Political life in America never ceases to astonish. Take last week’s pronouncements from the Republican Presidential field. Please. Mike Huckabee predicted that President Obama’s seven-nation agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear capabilities “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Ted Cruz anointed the American President “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” Marco Rubio tweeted, “Look at all this outrage over a dead lion, but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies.” And the (face it) current front-runner, the halfway hirsute hotelier Donald Trump, having insulted the bulk of his (count ’em) sixteen major rivals plus (countless) millions of citizens of the (according to him) not-so-hot nation he proposes to lead, announced via social media that in this week’s Fox News debate he plans “to be very nice & highly respectful of the other candidates.” Really, now. Who’s writing this stuff? Jon Stewart?
Over the decades, our country has been lucky in many things, not least in the subversive comic spirits who, in varying ways, employ a joy buzzer, a whoopee cushion, and a fun-house mirror to knock the self-regard out of an endless parade of fatuous pols. Thomas Nast drew caricatures so devastating that they roiled the ample guts of our town’s Boss, William Marcy Tweed. Will Rogers’s homespun barbs humbled the devious of the early twentieth century. Mort Sahl, the Eisenhower-era comic whose prop was a rolled-up newspaper, used conventional one-liners to wage radical battle: “I’ve arranged with my executor to be buried in Chicago, because when I die I want to still remain politically active.” Later, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, and Joan Rivers continued to draw comic sustenance from what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk.”
Four nights a week for sixteen years, Jon Stewart, the host and impresario of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” has taken to the air to expose our civic bizarreries. He has been heroic and persistent. Blasted into orbit by a trumped-up (if you will) impeachment and a stolen Presidential election, and then rocketing through the war in Iraq and right up to the current electoral circus, with its commodious clown car teeming with would-be Commanders-in-Chief, Stewart has lasered away the layers of hypocrisy in politics and in the media. On any given night, a quick montage of absurdist video clips culled from cable or network news followed by Stewart’s vaudeville reactions can be ten times as deflating to the self-regard of the powerful as any solemn editorial—and twice as illuminating as the purportedly non-fake news that provides his fuel.
Stewart grew up in New Jersey. He was schooled at William & Mary, in Virginia. Adrift for a while, he took odd jobs. He tested mosquitoes from the Pine Barrens for encephalitis. He put on puppet shows for disabled children. At the Bitter End and other clubs around the city, he studied all the varieties of standup. He proved especially fluent in a meta-Borscht Belt post-Friars Club rhythm. As a performer, Stewart is nearly as connected to Molly Picon and Professor Irwin Corey as he is to George Carlin.
On January 11, 1999, he made his début as “The Daily Show’s” host, replacing a less political wisenheimer named Craig Kilborn. Initially, Stewart seemed ill at ease with the trappings of his position. He wore a suit that first night, and, in the midst of an interview with the actor Michael J. Fox, he blurted, “Honestly, I feel like this is my bar mitzvah. I’ve never worn something like this, and I have a rash like you wouldn’t believe.” The evening was rounded out by a report on the Clinton impeachment hearings by Stewart’s “chief political correspondent,” a young improv comic named Stephen Colbert.
Stewart soon found his footing, and what he became, with the help of his writers, his co-stars, and a tirelessly acute research team, was the best seriocomic reader of the press since A. J. Liebling laid waste to media barons like William Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert R. McCormick. Stewart demonstrated that many of the tropes favored by the yellow press of Liebling’s day have only grown stronger. “There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor,” Liebling wrote. The contempt that he found in the plutocrat-owned, proletarian-read press, Stewart found on Fox News—particularly in ersatz journalists like Stuart Varney, a sneery character out of Dickens who regularly goes on about “these so-called poor people” who “have things” but “what they lack is the richness of spirit.” Stewart’s evisceration of Varney was typically swift and unforgiving. Perhaps his greatest single performance came in 2010, with a fifteen-minute-long bravura parody of the huckster and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck.
There was always something a little disingenuous about Stewart’s insistence that he is a centrist, free of ideological commitment to anything except truth and sanity. In fact, his politics tend to lean left of center. He’s been aggressive toward, and ruthlessly funny about, unsurprising targets from Donald Rumsfeld to Wall Street. His support for L.G.B.T. rights, civil rights, voting rights, and women’s rights has always been unambiguous. His critique of Obama is generally that of the somewhat disappointed liberal, particularly on issues like Guantánamo and drones. But Stewart is a centrist only in this sense: he is not so much pro-left as he is anti-bullshit.
At the same time, he has occasionally dropped the nightly gagfest to reveal flashes of earnest anger and unironic heart. Just after 9/11, he began his program with a personal monologue: “The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center. And now it’s gone. And they attacked it, this symbol of American ingenuity and strength, and labor and imagination and commerce, and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that.” More recently, after a grand jury on Staten Island failed to bring any charges related to the death of Eric Garner, an African-American whose crime was the sale of loose cigarettes, Stewart declared himself dumbstruck. “I honestly don’t know what to say,” he told his audience. “If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more [bleep]ing time. But I would really settle for less [bleep]ing tragedy.” Similarly, after this year’s mass murder in Charleston, Stewart said, “I honestly have nothing other than just sadness, once again, that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist.”
Stewart set out to be a working comedian, and he ended up an invaluable patriot. But the berserk never stops. His successor, Trevor Noah, will not lack for material. As Stewart put it wryly on one of his last nights on the air, “As I wind down my time here, I leave this show knowing that most of the world’s problems have been solved by us, ‘The Daily Show.’ But sadly there are still some dark corners that our broom of justice has not reached yet.” ♦
Political life in America never ceases to astonish. Take last week’s pronouncements from the Republican Presidential field. Please. Mike Huckabee predicted that President Obama’s seven-nation agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear capabilities “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Ted Cruz anointed the American President “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” Marco Rubio tweeted, “Look at all this outrage over a dead lion, but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies.” And the (face it) current front-runner, the halfway hirsute hotelier Donald Trump, having insulted the bulk of his (count ’em) sixteen major rivals plus (countless) millions of citizens of the (according to him) not-so-hot nation he proposes to lead, announced via social media that in this week’s Fox News debate he plans “to be very nice & highly respectful of the other candidates.” Really, now. Who’s writing this stuff? Jon Stewart?
Over the decades, our country has been lucky in many things, not least in the subversive comic spirits who, in varying ways, employ a joy buzzer, a whoopee cushion, and a fun-house mirror to knock the self-regard out of an endless parade of fatuous pols. Thomas Nast drew caricatures so devastating that they roiled the ample guts of our town’s Boss, William Marcy Tweed. Will Rogers’s homespun barbs humbled the devious of the early twentieth century. Mort Sahl, the Eisenhower-era comic whose prop was a rolled-up newspaper, used conventional one-liners to wage radical battle: “I’ve arranged with my executor to be buried in Chicago, because when I die I want to still remain politically active.” Later, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, and Joan Rivers continued to draw comic sustenance from what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk.”
Four nights a week for sixteen years, Jon Stewart, the host and impresario of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” has taken to the air to expose our civic bizarreries. He has been heroic and persistent. Blasted into orbit by a trumped-up (if you will) impeachment and a stolen Presidential election, and then rocketing through the war in Iraq and right up to the current electoral circus, with its commodious clown car teeming with would-be Commanders-in-Chief, Stewart has lasered away the layers of hypocrisy in politics and in the media. On any given night, a quick montage of absurdist video clips culled from cable or network news followed by Stewart’s vaudeville reactions can be ten times as deflating to the self-regard of the powerful as any solemn editorial—and twice as illuminating as the purportedly non-fake news that provides his fuel.
Stewart grew up in New Jersey. He was schooled at William & Mary, in Virginia. Adrift for a while, he took odd jobs. He tested mosquitoes from the Pine Barrens for encephalitis. He put on puppet shows for disabled children. At the Bitter End and other clubs around the city, he studied all the varieties of standup. He proved especially fluent in a meta-Borscht Belt post-Friars Club rhythm. As a performer, Stewart is nearly as connected to Molly Picon and Professor Irwin Corey as he is to George Carlin.
On January 11, 1999, he made his début as “The Daily Show’s” host, replacing a less political wisenheimer named Craig Kilborn. Initially, Stewart seemed ill at ease with the trappings of his position. He wore a suit that first night, and, in the midst of an interview with the actor Michael J. Fox, he blurted, “Honestly, I feel like this is my bar mitzvah. I’ve never worn something like this, and I have a rash like you wouldn’t believe.” The evening was rounded out by a report on the Clinton impeachment hearings by Stewart’s “chief political correspondent,” a young improv comic named Stephen Colbert.
Stewart soon found his footing, and what he became, with the help of his writers, his co-stars, and a tirelessly acute research team, was the best seriocomic reader of the press since A. J. Liebling laid waste to media barons like William Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert R. McCormick. Stewart demonstrated that many of the tropes favored by the yellow press of Liebling’s day have only grown stronger. “There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor,” Liebling wrote. The contempt that he found in the plutocrat-owned, proletarian-read press, Stewart found on Fox News—particularly in ersatz journalists like Stuart Varney, a sneery character out of Dickens who regularly goes on about “these so-called poor people” who “have things” but “what they lack is the richness of spirit.” Stewart’s evisceration of Varney was typically swift and unforgiving. Perhaps his greatest single performance came in 2010, with a fifteen-minute-long bravura parody of the huckster and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck.
There was always something a little disingenuous about Stewart’s insistence that he is a centrist, free of ideological commitment to anything except truth and sanity. In fact, his politics tend to lean left of center. He’s been aggressive toward, and ruthlessly funny about, unsurprising targets from Donald Rumsfeld to Wall Street. His support for L.G.B.T. rights, civil rights, voting rights, and women’s rights has always been unambiguous. His critique of Obama is generally that of the somewhat disappointed liberal, particularly on issues like Guantánamo and drones. But Stewart is a centrist only in this sense: he is not so much pro-left as he is anti-bullshit.
At the same time, he has occasionally dropped the nightly gagfest to reveal flashes of earnest anger and unironic heart. Just after 9/11, he began his program with a personal monologue: “The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center. And now it’s gone. And they attacked it, this symbol of American ingenuity and strength, and labor and imagination and commerce, and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that.” More recently, after a grand jury on Staten Island failed to bring any charges related to the death of Eric Garner, an African-American whose crime was the sale of loose cigarettes, Stewart declared himself dumbstruck. “I honestly don’t know what to say,” he told his audience. “If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more [bleep]ing time. But I would really settle for less [bleep]ing tragedy.” Similarly, after this year’s mass murder in Charleston, Stewart said, “I honestly have nothing other than just sadness, once again, that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist.”
Stewart set out to be a working comedian, and he ended up an invaluable patriot. But the berserk never stops. His successor, Trevor Noah, will not lack for material. As Stewart put it wryly on one of his last nights on the air, “As I wind down my time here, I leave this show knowing that most of the world’s problems have been solved by us, ‘The Daily Show.’ But sadly there are still some dark corners that our broom of justice has not reached yet.” ♦
Conservative billionaire Charles Koch told his ultra-rich friends that they face a “life and death” decision whether to keep lobbying for tax breaks and government subsidies.
“Business leaders (must) recognize that their behavior is suicide, that it is suicide long term. To survive, long-term, they have to start opposing, rather than promoting, corporate welfare,” Koch told about 450 allies at an Orange County, Calif., summit that began Saturday.
With the Pacific Ocean behind him and friendly CEOs sipping wine nearby, one of the biggest political donors in the country said it is time for conservatives to start eschewing tax breaks.
“Obviously, this prescription will not be an easy pill for many business people to swallow. Because short term, taking the principled path is going to cost some companies some profits, as it will for Koch Industries,” the 79-year-old Koch said. “But long term, it will allow business people to continue to own and run their businesses, which none of us will be able to do, in my view, in the future otherwise.”
He pointed to big banks that took “virtually free money from the Fed” and bailouts in exchange for regulations. “Now, the chickens are coming home to roost,” Koch said. “The Fed is taking control of these banks. The Fed now decides what businesses they can be in and how they run those businesses.” Koch said “regulators, auditors, controllers” are implanted at the banks to keep tabs. The banks, Koch argued, end up making political donations to avoid too much oversight.
Koch warned that other businesses would be next if their leaders continue taking government subsidies. “This means stopping the subsidies, mandates and special privileges for business that enriches the haves at the expense of the have-nots,” Koch said.
Words spread like weeds—seemingly at random but actually governed by invisible forces. Look away for too long, and suddenly new ones are emerging from who knows where.
The uncertain and gradual growth of words makes it nearly impossible to pinpoint where they started or how they caught on. But that is starting to change, as linguists draw on a wealth of data about word usage from social media services like Twitter.
Jack Grieve, a forensic linguist at Aston University in Birmingham, England, has been examining a dataset of nearly 9 billion tweeted words to identify the new American vocabulary. In a forthcoming study, he looked for words that were rarely used on Twitter in late 2013 but became common throughout 2014. Many of these “emerging words,” from baeless to xans, are included in the above graphic.
Identifying these words is interesting enough, but it doesn’t tell us how they came to be. Quartz worked with Grieve to visualize how these new words spread across the United States, using millions of tweets that had the user’s location attached to them. The maps reveal how common a word is in each county in a given week and how it spread over the course of the year.
“We know almost nothing about how new words spread, and this is a way of really seeing it.”
“We know almost nothing about how new words spread, and this is a way of really seeing it,” Grieve said. “It’s pretty exciting to see real-time how words that are current are spreading out.”
You can see, for example, how on fleekexploded almost simultaneously across the country last year. The phrase, which roughly translates to perfect or on point, was a linguistic surprise hit. It didn’t start with a celebrity or brand trying to coin a new phrase. What set it off was Kayla Newman, a not-yet-famous Vine user, saying, “Finna get crunk. Eyebrows on fleek.”
From there it took off, fast. On fleek got picked up by IHOP, Taco Bell, and Kim Kardashian. Now it is fully in the lexicon, used regularly on Twitter as though it existed for many years, not just one. It is fundamentally a borderless word, native to the internet. The same is true of some other emerging words identified by Grieve, like amirite(“Am I right?”) and faved (to favorite a tweet).
That is not how most words spread. There is no clear inflection point, backed by bandwagoning celebrities, skyrocketing the word into wider usage. More commonly, words start in a particular region of the country and spread steadily from there. Fuckboy (loser) came out of coastal urban centers. GMFU (Got Me Fucked Up) was at first heavily concentrated in Louisiana.
“Unbothered” is heavily concentrated in the south.(Data: Twitter, Grieve, Guo)
One region is particularly influential: the south. Several of Grieve’s emerging words got their start there. It’s true ofboolin (chilling), baeless (single), bruuh(bro), unbothered (happily oblivious), to name a few.
This tells us two things. First, it is evidence of the “north-south split,” a linguistic divide separating two dialects of American English at the Mason-Dixon Line. Grieve called it the “strongest dialectical pattern in the United States.” Some of these fast-growing words, like unbothered, have barely left the south at all. Perhaps it will reach the north this year.
Second, we can see how African-American English is largely responsible for the coinages that secure a place in the lexicon. New words on Black Twitter grow to be used on the rest of Twitter. Some words—famo(friends and family) and tooka (marijuana)—appear particularly born of black communities in the south and certain northern cities like Chicago and Detroit.
The maps also show that successful new words can grow exponentially. As more people use a word, more people hear and learn it, leading more to use it, and so on. This is especially true of a phrase like on fleek, which spread like a meme:
Twitter offers an unprecedented dataset, or corpus, of language use in close to real-time. It probably over-indexes for certain words, but that is more of an asset than a liability in the case of this research: People using a platform like Twitter may also be early adopters of new words. In any event, tweets are a more natural representation of word choice than many other possible corpora.
“If you’re talking about everyday spoken language, Twitter is going to be closer than a news interview or a university lecture,” Grieve said.
The tweets he analyzed were collected by Diansheng Guo of the University of South Carolina. To identify emerging words, Grieve first sorted all words in his dataset by county and removed any that were used fewer than 1,000 times throughout the 9-billion word corpus. He then calculated the relative frequency of the remaining 67,000 words, identifying “rare” ones—those used fewer than once per million words. This helps remove some noise, but lower thresholds could reveal other fast-moving words.
Finally, to make sure the words could be considered new, Grieve threw out any found in another important dataset: the dictionary.
“I urgently appeal…for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all…Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity….All of us can cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents,” according to the 
