I lied to myself for years about who my allies were. No more. By: Ben Howe (Diary)

GREAT OPINION!!!!|

Donald Trump is my fault as much as anyone else’s.

It started way back in 2009-2010 when the Tea Party erupted on the scene. At the core of the tea party was a principle that I agreed with so much that I became a conservative activist during that time period. That core was principled, fiscal conservatism and a desire to return to the things that had made America great.


We said it lots of different ways back then. “Take our country back.” “Return to the Constitution.” It really is embodied quite nicely in Donald Trump’s motto: Make America great again.



That’s what we wanted. A budget that the country’s federal government had to live within. A shrinking bureaucracy. An end to exploding entitlements.

Social issues weren’t discussed that much in the very early stages of the Tea Party. We all knew that there was some disagreement on these issues and we wanted to stay singularly focused. We could sort out our differences after we’d stopped the runaway train of government largesse.

By 2011 there were some cracks in the movement. There were groups that seemed to just be profiting off of it without actually helping. There were politicians who’d won on tea party rhetoric in 2010 but seemed less inclined to stop the growth of government once they got to Washington.

It was frustrating. This was compounded by the fact that Mitt Romney became the nominee and then lost in 2012. It was at that point that I believe a lot of people simply put down the signs and went home.

Through it all, my own career was burgeoning in politics. Not only did I begin writing for RedState, I started doing some television appearances and owned a video production company with a laundry list of clients from the movement.

When your life becomes politics and you are surrounded by people in the industry, you learn a key term: allies.

Allies aren’t friends. They may not even be colleagues. They are simply people that you find enough agreement with on enough issues to not go after each other. You don’t have to overtly support one another but you certainly don’t try to hurt each other.

As more and more people knew who I was and I fostered relationships and allies, I found myself more and more having to look the other way. Moments where I would cringe at something someone said, or quietly roll my eyes at a post they wrote, thinking “Gosh, I can’t believe they think that way” or “I swear that person is one tweet away from saying Obama is from Kenya.”

I justified it quietly to myself the way we had at the beginning of the tea party when such things would happen. People would say outlandish things and I would find myself nodding my head and awkwardly walking away, not calling them out for their silliness.

After all, there were more pressing matters.

And so, as I said, I kept quiet about these allies in new media and in Washington. People who I thought I agreed with only 70% of the time. Which normally is a great reason to consider someone an ally, but not when the other 30% is cringe-inducing paranoia and vapid stupidity.

I chose peace over principle. I chose to go along with those I disagreed with on core matters because I believed we were jointly fighting for other things that were more important. I ignored my gut and my moral compass.

The result is that, almost to a man, every single person I cringed at or thought twice about, is now a supporter and cheerleader of Donald Trump.

I looked the other way, and I’m sure many others did too, as these people rose to prominence and their microphones got louder. I ignored it at times because I hate self-righteous liberals who tell anyone they disagree with that they don’t want to be around them and I didn’t want to be like that. At other times because, well, it was easier than standing against foolishness.

I’m done with that now. Albeit a bit too late.

I’ll never be like the indignant pricks I’ve dealt with on the right who judge harshly anyone who doesn’t automatically parrot the Republican leadership. I’ll also never be like the virtue-signallers who feel the need to put rainbow flags over their avatars to prove how socially progressive they are.

But my days of watching crazy people gain readers & listeners right in front of me are over.

Ann Coulter, Gateway Pundit, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, Breitbart News, Matt Drudge, and scores of others, too many to list here. They are all people that at one time or another caused me to bury my face in my hands. Caused me more than once to say “wait…we ARE the stupid party?” I’m done with it and I’m done with all of them. They are in this for money and power and influence and they think Donald Trump is their ticket. Hell, they may be right. And I’ll go down in flames with my principles befor

My email to Bernie Sanders

Dear Senator Sanders: I am a STRONG Democrat and a believer in most every political policy you hold. I am old enough though to surely remember Ralph Nader and his ruinous third party campaign against Bush. It divided Democrats. It cost THOUSANDS of lives first on 9/11 and then proceeding with the Bush/Cheney ruinous Iraq War dismembering and destabilizing the Middle East. It would not have happened with a President Gore.

If I thought you were the Democratic front runner I would vote for you BUT reality speaks and you are not and I think never will be. It will NOT, one hopes, be a "contested contest" as you aver it will.

I ask you, NO I PLEAD with you NOT to play into media hands by giving them the fuel of discord and division they have seen in the Republican Party and the Trump campaign of which they have taken advantage handing Trump the Republican nomination by infinitely covering him because he is more entertaining. That is NOT how to select a president. Now they look to Democrats to provide them the entertainment of discord which was heretofore the Republican proxy. Do NOT allow that.

PLEASE do not hand Trump a general election victory. Please think about what you say and temper your remarks against Secretary Clinton who will be no doubt our Democratic nominee. Your remarks against her hand the Republican Party just what they want and WILL use all that you say to impugne her.

PLEASE do not let this be a repeat of the 2000 election when defeat was pulled out of the jaws of victory by a divided Democratic Party and progressive movement. Think how different and how many lives would have been saved and importantly what a head start we would have gotten on climate change with an Al Gore as president.

We WILL get the start we need on the ugly reality of man's contribution to climate change by electing the Democrat who will be the most likely nominee of the Democratic Party. I believe that nominee will be Secretary Clinton.

One reaps what one sows and IF you sow discord we will lose this race to the demagogue Trump relegating our nation to a catastrophic fate. We WILL lose lives and many of them through climate change and a reckless even deadly foreign policy by a know nothing god forbid President Trump.

Hillary Clinton has the knowledge, foresight and a plethora of experience to do an effective and professional job as president. As she has said there is more that unites our two political camps than divides us. PLEASE, I beg you, do NOT contribute to Democratic division. Unite us and your followers as only you can do to ensure not only victory to attain this ever so powerful office and election but to see a Supreme Court that finally will decide policy OPPOSITE to what heretofore this right wing extremist court has so destructive to the middle class and the poor bestowed. Justice Scalia is gone. That seat should now be filled with a fair-minded progressive who can make life easier for the poor, the powerless, women and the disenfranchised persons of color. End Citizen's United by uniting us under one Democratic umbrella geared to the probable nominee Secretary Hillary Clinton who will do just that.

PLEASE DO THE RIGHT THING AND UNITE US!
In Harmony,

One of the most interesting opinions I think I have ever read

Andrew Sullivan's piece in "New York" magazine entitled Democracies End When they are too Democratic is one of the most interesting, contemplative, and provocative articles I think I have ever read or at least have read in a long time. His thoughts circulate around Plato's "Republic" written around 380 BC. Yes, it is lengthy, but it is synaptic extending. In other words, it makes one think, expand and exercise one's brain -- a perfect antidote against dementia. I post it below and think you should read it as it is an article written for our fearful Trumpian times inspired by a man, Plato, who could never have envisioned our existence.



http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

We the Living Must Remember

Kudos, to Jeff Jacoby for his thoughtful editorial in the May 1, 2016 Boston Sunday Globe (linked below) entitled "The End of Holocaust Remembrance." There has been no other event in my historical memory that has had more of an impact on me than the Holocaust. The near annihilation of the Jewish people hit me hard as a Jewish child of 10 years old when I watched my first documentary about it as a prelude to a movie in a local movie theater in Framingham.

The sight of human remains pilled like refuse one on top of the other so that those Allies who liberated the camps could do so quickly with bulldozers lest the stench and disease dead bodies could spread would threaten the living was more than a 10 year old child could bear. I became literally nauseated and nearly threw up especially because I, a Jew, was looking at something that could have befallen me. On some level I knew that one of those bodies could have been my relatives had they not had the foresight to leave Eastern Europe for America at the turn of the 20th century. The Russian pogroms against the Jews of the late 19th century from which they fled in a strange way saved my grandparents from an even worse fate that would have befallen them forty years later.

A relative visited Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel and looked up the statistics of my grandparents' small village of Shepatovka, Ukraine from where they emigrated. 50,000 souls perished there. Luckily they were not among them but they surely could have been.

There is no other single event in history that did more to shape my liberal left of center politics than the Shoa as later after considerable thought I knew the extremist right wing spelled fascist inhumanity. I discerned then the difference between leftist politics and those of the right. It is hard, in view of our people's torturous history during that period for me to understand how anyone with a shred of humanity could attach themselves to that side of the political spectrum for which inhuman cruelty is its logical extension.

The Holocaust shaped who I am, what I believe, and shaped even what side of the political spectrum I was to sit. It is hard for me to see how any Jew can feel comfortable taking a seat on the American right with its racist saturated thought even prevalent today in one of our nation's major Parties and the cruel brutality of it in its extreme. For those of us who must and will remember until we ourselves die it is mandatory that we who can only account for what we do never forget our own people's experience at the hands of man's inhumanity to man lest it be repeated over and over again. We the living must tell of it through the ages, always to remember and never to forget.

http://townhall.com/columnists/jeffjacoby/2016/05/02/the-end-of-holocaust-remembrance-n2156601

Hope Amid a Sea of Violence

The news is, of course, distressing; violence and hate seem to be all around us. Electorally we have never, I think, been as divided since the Civil War but nothing, no political system and, certainly, no one person is perfect. George Orwell knew that dystopia is the usual reality and utopia a fantasy which is why he wrote "Animal Farm." Nearly all revolutions ultimately fail. It is why the French Revolution had its Robespierre, the Russian Revolution had its Stalin, China its Mao, and North Korea its brutal Kim Jong-Un. It is why Cambodia had its slaughter by the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot, why the Shah of Iran fell and why a brutal religious dictatorship of the humorless Ayatollah Khomenini took hold. Free speech for so many is a quiet dream of those who dare not speak its possibility. There are, of course, dozens more examples of revolutions that sour. Hope in the beginning of a revolutionary political movement feels so good and all things seem possible but as humans are prone to do they often take a wrecking ball to it.

I am going out on a limb to say it is why the American Revolution of 1776 looks so good to me, a fervent criticizer of American power. Have we had our wrecking balls throughout our short nearly 250 year history? Absolutely, we have. Still, the ideals for which the colonials fought are, I believe, still very much alive and its goals for which we strive are still possible because we have a process. Persons of color were freed by that process, a Civil Rights and a Voting Rights Act passed, a Depression overcome, two Word Wars won with a little help from our friends and later adversaries. Women got the vote and women's rights are expanding with every decade. People with a different sexual orientation can now love and marry whom they choose, the disabled obtained rights and our nation licked polio. Most importantly a black man became president and a woman just may (I hope) take the presidency as well. At the very least she will win the nomination of one of the two main political Parties of this huge nation. Is our nation perfect yet? No, of course not and with our competing interests it never will be but we strive and hope the demagogues and religious fanatics are not given power. Well, I can hope they are not.

In the end it is amazing that a nation of 350 million human beings is still alive and stuck together with an invisible glue. There are many good things to save about this nation and many bad things we must throw out. But there is a process to do so and I want to see this nation, no matter who it elects, live understanding one cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Indeed, it is why I devote my years now to try to be an advocate for causes that are humane, fair and just whether for humans, animals, or the planet which gives all of us life. I live since the late 1960's in hope that, as Martin Luther King said, we will overcome one day. We must, I think, at least try. There is hope amid this sea of violence and Lady Liberty still shines her light in that sea beckoning others to light their own lamp with her torch!

My Letter to Rachel Maddow -- Murder in Flint

Rachel, I just heard on Amy Goodman’s "Democracy Now" broadcast (linked below) about the murder of two young mothers in Flint, Michigan one of whom was at the center of the legal action she brought against the City of Flint for the lead poisoning of their children. One of the first to file suit and murdered at her town house was Sasha Avonna Bell. I do not know the name of the other murdered woman. I had to replay the story again to see if I heard it correctly. I did. See video below of Amy Goodman's broadcast.

Only you, Rachel, can expose the Flint lead-poisoning-in-water issue you revealed against the noxious Republican Snyder administration and his self-appointed Emergency Managers answerable only to him. They have produced this water-in-lead poisoning crisis impacting thousands of children (as well as adults) into eternity stealing their future if not, ultimately, their lives. It now involves the alleged murder of a woman or women seeking damages for the injustice the Snyder administration has perpetrated.

We need the truth. This cannot and must not be swept under the rug. Who murdered Sasha Avonna Bell? Perhaps you can pull back the opaque curtain of hidden things to reveal those things to the light of transparency on Snyder and the actions of his deceitful administration. 

http://www.democracynow.org/

Why the Presidency needs to be kept in Democratic hands: The House Just Voted To Give Wall Street Billions From Americans’ Retirement Savings

Enforcement of the Fiduciary Rule

This article attached here or below is not long but it behooves you to read the link. I also provided a summary of it below to know why the Presidency MUST be kept in Democratic hands. This bill has been lobbied by the Wall Street immorals and will overturn the Obama administration's proposed "fiduciary rule." Luckily, for those who rely and will rely on their 401Ks and retirement accounts the House vote will ultimately get a presidential veto by the DEMOCRATIC President Obama. In short, if it passed it means Wall Street can continue to sell you any investment it wants no matter the risk without telling you of the risk and without telling you the fees associated with it, legally. The Obama proposed "fiduciary rule" would ensure they must tell you about the risk and their fees but Republicons want to undo it.

A Republicon presidential signature would allow investment banks to continue to NOT tell you the risk and the fees associated with an investment so retirees and those who will become retirees could and do lose billions. It would ensure Wall Street can continue to make huge profits legally at your expense through your investments no matter the risk of which you probably now may not know or even know the fees it attaches (sometimes through the back door) because they do not have to tell you. What Wall Street wants to continue to do and does do is wrong, it is immoral and it is what Republicans -- the hypocrite usurious good religious Fundamentalists they SAY they are -- will ensure. Read the short summary I have cut and pasted and then go to the link below it and read the rest of the short article. Also read about the "fiduciary rule" by clicking on the link within the article. READ and HEED!!!!!

The House voted 234 to 188 Thursday to undo a rule proposed by the Labor Department earlier this month that would require anyone getting paid to provide retirement investment advice to act in the best interest of retirees. Many people think that’s already how things work, but it isn’t.

The way things work right now is that brokers who oversee retirement savings accounts can be paid extra to steer their clients into unnecessarily expensive funds or excessively risky investments, without disclosing that fact to their clients. That sort of conflicted investment advice costs Americans saving for retirement $17 billion a year, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

To remedy the situation, the Obama administration proposed a fiduciary rule to keep Wall Street from taking so much money in fees from retirement accounts. The financial industry has opposed the rule from the start.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/house-fiduciary-rule_us_57222ef1e4b0f309baeff11b

"If I Lose Friends Over Trump, So Be It"

Donald Trump’s candidacy isn’t really about politics, which is why it divides people so deeply. It’s about revenge.

By Tom Nichols

I have been thinking about Peter Wehner’s piece in the New York Times yesterday, in which he talks about the sadness of losing friends over Donald Trump’s candidacy. I have not—yet—lost any friends over Trump, but it’s possible. Unlike Wehner, I am less concerned about it. The Trump campaign is a test of character, and many Americans are failing it.

Put another way, if my opposition to Trump is going to cost me friends, then all I can say is: So be it.

I know people who are voting for Trump, including members of my family. I do not immediately find myself opposed to anyone who would vote for Trump; to the contrary, I find a lot of fertile ground for discussion and argument with conservative friends who disagree with me only about the lengths to which the “never Trump” movement should go. They might not be comfortable with Trump, but they will do anything to stop Hillary Clinton, and I understand that position.

By Now, You Know What You’re Getting

But I find almost nothing to say to people who are full-throated, enthusiastic Trump supporters, especially now. Back in August, I could console myself that most Trump supporters just didn’t know what they were getting into, and that they would return to their senses and regain their decency once they got a look at the unhinged huckster onto whom they’d signed.

All these months later, however, the pretense has to stop.

As Jonathan Last noted recently, an attorney and blogger who calls himself “Thomas Crown” summed up this kind of voter in a recent article. Crown discussed one of his clients, a pseudonymous “Mrs. Martin” who was supporting a Trump she mostly knew through bits and pieces of information, none of them too close to the truth about the actual man. “Mrs. Martin” seems a decent sort, even if I’m having a bit of trouble believing that she’s as untouched by Trump’s reality as she claims.

All these months later, however, the pretense has to stop. Trump’s supporters are voracious consumers of his public and television appearances, and they now know what kind of man he is. With my friends and family who still cling to Trump, I never waver from my insistence, directly and firmly, that they are making a terrible mistake, and that Trump is making them worse people for being involved in his message. I still love them, and they still love me. (I think.)

Friendship With Political Opponents Is Possible

In a lifetime spent in and around politics, I actually haven’t lost many friends over political disagreements. In my academic life, I have always been part of a political minority; I once did a campus radio show with a colleague who admitted happily that during the 1960s he had denounced his father as a class enemy on national television. (He settled into being somewhat more of a conventional liberal 30 years later.) I doubt that being a conservative helped my early career, but few of the people I knew in those days broke even a casual friendship with me.

Trump and his views are ghastly in a way that goes beyond politics.

I also have liberal friends from my days working in politics. We stayed friends even as they and I worked for opposite sides, and while I wrote articles (and speeches for a GOP senator) excoriating their ideas and their party. Much like the sheepdog and the coyote in the old Warner Brothers’ cartoon, we would fight each other during the day, punch the clock, then go out and enjoy a friendship based in a common interest in politics, even if from different sides of the field.

But Trump’s candidacy isn’t really about politics, which is why it divides people so deeply. Trump and his views are ghastly in a way that goes beyond politics. They challenge our human decency and patriotism. That’s why they test not only our political associations but our friendships.

A Rant Is Not a Policy

Yes, fellow conservatives: Trump is worse than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Their policies are liberal, even leftist, often motivated by cheap politics, ego, and political grandstanding. But they are policies, understandable as such and opposable by political means.

There are no real principles on the table here, only Trump’s demagogic stoking of incoherent and even paranoid rage.

Trump’s various rants, by contrast, do not amount to policies. They are ignorant tone poems, bad haikus, streams of words whose content has no real meaning. They’re not positions available either to the GOP or Democrats, because they do not contain a vision of the future over which those parties can fight.

In fact, Trump’s policies are not policies. They’re just feverish revenge fantasies. Trump, a scam artist whose entire career has been based on victimizing the working class, should be the target of that anger. Instead, he is encouraging Americans to turn their hostility away from him and against their fellow citizens, inviting us into a war of all against all over which he will preside as an amused dictator.

The division between Trump’s supporters and the rest of us is not about reconciling our political differences. It is not about opposing policies we hate. (Most of Trump’s policies are actually quite liberal, but that is irrelevant.) There are no real principles on the table here, only Trump’s demagogic stoking of incoherent and even paranoid rage.

Revenge Destroys Friendships

This is what destroys friendships. Trump’s supporters are now like roaring drunks in a bar fight, people who you might have tried to reason with five drinks earlier but now are just lashing out at everyone in every direction. Pumped up on talk radio conspiracies, overdosing on the venom of Sean Hannity and Judge Jeannine, comatose with irrational fury, they are no longer part of any sensible political debate in America.

Trump’s supporters are now like roaring drunks in a bar fight, people who you might have tried to reason with five drinks earlier.

This blind madness puts both political and emotional distance between Trump supporters and the rest of us. Most conservatives have already told Trump that we will not sell our character as Americans, and indeed our very souls, just to feel the pleasure of resentful anger for a few months. All we can do is to keep trying to talk our friends out of making that very mistake, or at best to hope that buyer’s remorse will set in.

Still, if anyone who knows me really believes I am now a traitor to my country because of the way I’m going to vote, then I can do without their friendship. If they end their relationship with me because Donald Trump has identified people like me as the source of their problems, then maybe we were not that close in the first place.

In the end, I can only say it again: if I lose a friend only because I am opposed to man who is, in my view, a mortal enemy of everything American, then so be it.

Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct professor in the Harvard Extension School. Views expressed here are his own. Follow him on Twitter, @RadioFreeTom.

Preliminary Thoughts -- Primary April, 26, 2016

Hillary did well. She is, in my eye, the Democratic presumptive nominee. BUT ALL Democrats must UNITE lest the enthusiasm Trump engenders, god forbid, wins the presidency for him. A few of Sanders's supporters incredulously even have said they might vote for Trump. That, if true is, yes, hard to believe.

Sanders's supporters, whose hearts are in the right place, must embrace the rest of those in the Democratic Party who supported Hillary. We are ALL in one Party -- the Democratic Party. Either we rise with Hillary Clinton or sink to the depths of an explosive perhaps even nuclear swamp with unqualified Trump.

Reality speaks. I loved much of what Sanders said but thought him too old. He now, after the grueling primary pace, looks even older. The arduously demanding job of the presidency significantly ages even the youngest who occupy it. More importantly, though, I thought Sanders's rant was ear numbing preachy, sermonizing, didactic and a one track record. He was, to a large degree, a one issue candidate, most importantly, with little foreign policy experience and no plan as to how he would get that for which he advocated done.

I do, though, understand why he engendered the support he did. He speaks truth on the issue of economic inequality and the 1% usurpers of our national wealth. We must embrace that truth, be our own citizens united and elect the Democratic Party's soon to be nominee, Hillary Clinton. She has experience in all venues and will not eviscerate the sacred Constitutional and Bill of Rights principles of our nation -- liberty and justice for all men, for all women, for all minorities, immigrants, the disabled and those LGBT citizens of this nation who have fought so long and so hard for those rights that should be increased and not taken away!

NOW GO OUT, WORK FOR HER AND ALL DOWN TICKET DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES. LET'S TAKE THE PRESIDENCY, TAKE BACK THE SENATE AND MAKE GAINS OR EVEN TAKE BACK THE HOUSE. WE CAN DO ALL OF THAT IF WE STICK TOGETHER AND GET OUT THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE!

FABULOUS READING--"The GOP's Eve of Destruction" by Robert North Patterson

This is such an insightful article it is my required reading here or below!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-north-patterson/the-gops-eve-of-destructi_b_9701880.html

After you read it GET OUT THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE!

READ AND HEED -- A NATIONAL NIGHTMARE -- GET OUT THE VOTE FOR A RATIONAL PRESIDENT

NATIONAL NIGHTMARE: TRUMP AT WAR! Military Preps For Prez Donald... 'Greatest Crisis In Civil-Military Relations Since The American Civil War'... CIA Employees 'Terrified,' Fear 'Exodus'...

Charles Koch Compares Donald Trump To A Nazi

Yeah sure. Don't TRUST anyone who has been a rightwing extremist killer of the environment and promoter of climate change to come out and say he may support Hillary Clinton. OH SURE, believe that one and I have a George Washington Bridge I'd like to sell you.

Get one of the most DESPISED rightwing extremist Koch Brother John Birch Society aficionado to come out in support of a progressive. Good way to turn off Sanders's and other progressive voters? DO NOT TAKE THE BATE, progressives. Get out to vote en masse for whomever the Democratic nominee is and tell Koch to .......[fill in the blank]

GET OUT THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE AND UNITE!

Ted Cruz and John Kasich Team Up to Stop Donald Trump

The dynamic due are a day late and a dollar short (see link below.) In reality, Ted Cruz is the worst of the worst of the worst. Cruz is a mean, cruel, sickening, loathsome, vicious, insane, moronic. Fundamentalist fanatic idiot who cares about one thing--Cruz and that's it. How Harvard gave him a degree I will NEVER know. Shame on you Harvard what a sorry representation of an Ivy League school.Cruz is. This jerk would repeal the Affordable Healthcare root and branch,knock MILLIONS off of health care, kill thousands and wreck our relationship abroad while he is at it. He is a MENACE to life. Kasich, although not great, has a few redeeming qualities -- not many but a few. How he can make a deal with the devil Cruz I will never know. By body language alone it appears Cruz's own daughter finds him repulsive as she squirmed to get away from his hold. Moreover,, one wonders about the Enquirer story shown on Rachel Maddow on his sexual hypocrite escapades. Is the Enquirer just a scandal sheet or telling the truth and whose number IS on the deceased DC Madam list? Inquiring minds want to know..

The Republican slate is an abomination. There is NOT one who has presidential qualities because the Republicrat Party has turned into the I hate government party, stands for deregulating everything, doesn't mind lead in drinking water, wants to get rid of regulatory agencies that really do protect the little guy. Ironically, the Republican Party itself should be ripped apart root and branch and think of some other rationale for governing a nation without crucifying the poor and the middle class.

Shame on ANYONE who votes Republicon. No matter who their nominee is they will lose BIG time in November and they know it. They are breathing their last breath and not soon enough for me!

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/cruz-kasich-team-shock-stop-trump-partnership-n561431

Our Cultural Connection

Kudos to one of the most insightful, cogent and sensitive looks at the American cultural connection or non-connection to our modern-day eternal Middle East War. I laud Andrew Bacevich's April 24th Boston Globe Op Ed article entitled "War out of sight, sacrifice out of mind." Why am I not surprised this article, linked below, was so good? I am not surprised because it was written by one of my favorite academic historians, Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich. He is also a retired career officer in the Armor Branch of the United States Army, retiring with the rank of Colonel. This man is a plethora of insight into America's changing cultural face of war and expresses it so well. Moreover, he has lost a son in the Iraq War as well.

In sum, there surely is a difference between our fathers' fighting World War II or World War I, for that matter, and our post Vietnam PTSD and protest fostering a new age of a volunteer military for all post Vietnam succeeding wars. Our warriors now are engaged in combat because they want to, volunteer for it, it does not hurt that this nation offers monetary incentive to do so and puts the cost of it on a credit card. This obviates the hysterics of national protest once seen during the Vietnam years that split this nation in two, the malady from which we never did entirely heal.

Protests, as Professor Bacevich astutely understands, is limited to present day civil rights and economic struggles but has waxed non existent when it comes to the anti-war movements so prevalent during the Vietnam years. Now we can fight perpetual eternal wars because the majority of our nation is far removed geographically and psychologically from the combat front.

That would change, of course, if the draft were again reality but then, of course, many who would be subject to the draft would rail vociferously against war as so many did during Vietnam decades ago. How more divided can a nation grow from civil rights protest to eternal permanent war protest without splitting the nation in two permanently as well!

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/23/war-out-sight-sacrifice-out-mind/uqOjapPimqk4hLQAXU8UaK/story.html#comments

[Republican] Delegates face death threats from Trump supporters

This is why Democrats and others who support humanitarian policies need to unite under one banner: The Democratic Party. It is the ONLY vehicle this nation has at this moment in our time for the continuance of the humane policy we have honed over many many decades and even for over a century!

You can read the story here or below.


http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/delegates-face-death-threats-from-trump-supporters-222302

Now is the Time -- Plowshares of Possibility

Hillary Clinton scored an impressive victory in the New York Democratic primary. She significantly exceeded the expectations of the most politically knowledgeable. Now we must unite the forces in the Democratic Party which when united will win the White House and, with work, retake the Senate and even win the House. The words of Dr. Martin Luther King come to mind:

Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity … Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

This significant victory by Hillary Clinton in the New York Democratic primary should be the time for all those in Senator Sanders’s impressive movement to be united with Hillary Clinton to win the general election. Now is the time to unite the Democratic ranks, who as Secretary Clinton said, have more in common than the differences that keep us apart. Let us come together in unity of purpose most in the Democratic Party and others who support our causes share.  Not to do so invites more Republican obstructionism, more suppression of the vote, more money in politics, more racist hate, millions of cruel deportations, more persons of color imprisonments, economic politics and trade deals that are impossible to keep. It will mean alienation of important allies no matter the flowery Trojan horse sounds that emanate from the Trump campaign. He cannot and never will do what he says he can. In fact, his ignorance of foreign policy even invites nuclear war.
 
If that is not bad enough a Republican stranglehold on the U.S. Supreme Court would be entrenched probably surpassing my lifetime and yours. Last but not least a woman's reproductive control of her own body would cease taking us back to the glory days of illegal unsanitary abortions killing women who, out of desperation, sought them.
 
I said that if Senator Sanders was the ultimate nomination winner he would have my support and he would. Through this significant New York win by Hillary Clinton the path to the nomination for Senator Sanders is very difficult and, in truth, nearly impossible.

Those who vociferously supported Senator Sanders began a movement to erase the choke hold of money that corrupts the very nature of this nation, the democracy of which we try to advocate for others to attain. This movement Senator Sanders began will live long after the efforts he made. I know this movement is not lost on Hillary Clinton. She has heard it. Senator Sanders began a movement that will go beyond the 2016 election into the vast future of our nation if it survives Republican attempts to create a 1% winner take all country leaving nothing for the majority middle class who historically have been its true strength.

Now is the time for those who vociferously supported Senator Sanders and began that movement to have a lasting effect. Now is the time to unite with the other half of the Democratic Party who, I believe, want the same things and that is to make this nation true to the tenets of its origin the words of which lie in New York Harbor at Lady Liberty’s feet:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Now is the time, indeed, to turn the swords of discord into the plowshares of possibility, work together and live out the true egalitarian creed of our nation.

We can do this and we can do this together if we unite. We merely have to will it so by working for it and, I believe, we will mightily win the day.

A Place in Hell

This is, as I have said, what the world must confront in its Herculean attempt to eradicate polio. It is ignorance at its MOST sickening. Religious fanatics are attempting to interfere with those who valiantly try to stop the spread of one of the most debilitating viruses often occurring mostly in children. Is this possible?

I am usually not a vindictive person but I will confess I can only hope those who kill human beings who are attempting to eradicate the dreaded disease of paralytic polio, should know what it means to suffer permanent paralysis of their limbs and/or the ability to breathe that the virus causes. The global effort to permanently erase the disease from the face of the earth is miraculous but is roadblocked by noxious actions like those described in the article below.

May the killers of those risking their own lives to save others -- especially children -- from this potentially life-long ruinous disease have a special place in hell reserved for them. The story is here or below.



http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/police-officers-guarding-polio-workers-killed-karachi-pakistan-n559041

Polio could be history? I wonder

A vaccine swap is being enacted to use a new and allegedly better formulated polio vaccine. See link here or below for the complexity of the story all need to know.

When man tries to perfect biology that has heretofore worked I always ask what could possibly go wrong when such a Herculean effort as this is attempted. I know, too, that there are some in third world countries especially in the Middle East who will not give their children the vaccine as they think it a western plot, With that being said I simply HOPE the scientists involved in this polio vaccine swap effort know what they are doing.

All vaccines, no matter for what they are administered, carry risk. It is, however, ever-so-small compared to not being vaccinated at all. In our era of vaccination hysteria and misinformation I worry that some parents who have no idea the devastation the polio virus monstrosity can cause (ask me as I know well) and, therefore, will not trust a new vaccine for polio or, indeed, most anything else. This vaccine swap of a new polio vaccine in place of the old one better work. The task of doing this is massive.

I spoke at length about viruses to my relative who is a doc. I asked him if he thought the polio virus will always be there. He said an unequivocal yes. In other words if some refuse vaccination the virus will be there ready to enter its modality of transportation -- the gut. If one thinks the virus can be eliminated entirely I am quizzical. As Jurassic Park taught "life finds a way." Whether it's the AIDS virus or polio -- despite the simplicity of the polio virus -- it could mutate and evolve again to try to survive to live another day. I would hate to be at the bottom of Everest after I had just climbed that mountain only to see I must climb it again.
https://www.statnews.com/2016/04/18/polio-vaccine-the-switch/

Fear Of Aging Alone--Aging: NO WAY OUT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ken-solin/fear-of-aging-alone_b_9647362.html?utm_hp_ref=fifty&ir=Fifty

Damned if I do and damned if I do not. If I accept aging and death then all well and good, it still does not obviate the fear of it. Debilitating aging is unacceptable to me. I'd rather be dead? Maybe or maybe not. If old friends die or god forbid a partner does then all well and good I just make new friends. Sorry, not that easy. Old friends are made over decades and a LOT of effort and time goes into making them. If some die the pain is excruciating. If I make new friends the cold hard reality is they may die too. So it's a constant bereavement I may have to endure OR worse think on my own death and missing the life I had more while I'm living it. I see no way out!

Greased palms--"New Documents Show Oil Industry Even More Evil Than We Thought"

Remember the coverup by big tobacco when it knew its ugly product killed by cancerous torture millions and never would admit it? Aux contrare it hired "scientists" to cover it up saying there was no conclusive evidence that showed tobacco killed until decades later in our present time when no one could cover it up anymore. The evidence is overwhelming. Executives of big tobacco who lied before Congress should have been convicted of perjury and ultimately manslaughter. They have, though, happily so, been sued in the hundreds of millions, perhaps, billions of dollars. There were consequences to their misery-inflicting coverup.

Big oil has taken many pages out of big tobacco's book KILLING THE EARTH and us along with it by the consequences of climate change caused by man and his filthy fossil fuels. Climate change is melting ice caps responsible for rising oceans faster than anyone thought. It is responsible, too, for extreme weather events that number by multiples of hundreds each year all over the globe and in the US from Hawaii, and California to Maine. It is especially visible in our western states and in the American south. All life on earth, animals that inhabit it and its ecosystem that depend upon a clean environment have felt its impact.

Those CEO's of big oil who deny it are criminals and those legislators with other know nothings who support them are accessories to murder! As Naomi Klein says in the title of her new book "This Changes Everything!" Keep electing those immoral unconscionable Republican Cretans who deny climate change and hand a nation off to your progeny who will be decimated by it. See link here or below.

IN OUR TIME IT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER TO ELECT DEMOCRATS WHO WILL ACKNOWLEDGE MAN MADE CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE FOSSIL FUEL CONTRIBUTORS OF IT. ALL OF OUR LIVES AROUND THE GLOBE IN OTHER NATIONS, TOO, DEPEND UPON IT. THOSE NATIONS ARE WATCHING OUR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WITH FEAR AND TREPIDATION. THE ELECTION OF A REPUBLICAN WOULD BE UNCONSCIONABLE. ERASE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IN ITS PRESENT FORM WHILE CONSIDERING ALL OF THIS AND WORK HARD FOR DEMOCRATS EVERYWHERE!  


 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../oil-cover-up-climate_us...