End of SOU Speech

The end of President's State of the Union speech is a quote from Martin Luther King:

"Optimistic that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."

Amen!
NOW WORK TO ELECT AND RETAIN A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT AND A CONGRESS WITH WHOM SHE/HE CAN WORK!

Explosion Near Pakistan Polio Eradication Center Kills At Least 15

IDIOTIC, MORONIC, INSANE, RIDICULOUS, MALEVOLENT, EVIL MOVE (Link below.) This is with whom we are dealing!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pakistan-bombing-polio-center_56960779e4b09dbb4bad485e

The Sailors and the Speech

Republicans made a big deal and uttered virulent criticism of Obama for this latest incident with Iran before they even knew if it would be resolved.  They, of course, want Obama and the Iran nuclear deal to fail. Iran released the sailors and the Iran deal will not fail.

Thank you, Iran, for releasing the sailors.  I do not know what happened that this event ensued. Iran CLEARLY does NOT want Donald Trump as president or any other Republican who will, at the least provocation real or imagined, bomb them to start a war.  Moreover, Iran may have avoided another Reagan over-inflated-presidency ... so far.

One simple thing to say about the last State-of-the-Union Obama speech:  EXCELLENT!

The Rebuttal Speech:

Niki Haley, the Republican South Carolina governor, who ordered the Confederate flag near the capitol in Charleston taken down after 9 persons of color were killed in church by a white supremacist, is facing Republican criticism for her rebuttal speech.  In my opinion, for a Republican, her rebuttal speech was quite good.  She actually placed some of the blame for the intractability of Congress on her own Republican Party.  In fact, ALL of the blame belongs on them.  Obama is a compromiser.  For those Republican miscreants to criticize her was shameful when she gave most cogent rebuttal speech any Republican has given throughout the Obama presidency.

The proof:

Bobbi Jindal, former Governor of Louisiana, gave the first rebuttal speech.  He lost his election and now is unemployed.  McDonnell, the law breaker ex-governor of Virginia and second rebuttal speech giver, resigned in disgrace facing jail time convicted for his illegalities while in office.  Rubio, the water guzzler, who looked humorous reaching for ad infinitum bottles of water when he gave his allegedly serious "rebuttal speech." Niki Haley, Governor of South Carolina, gave the last and best Republican rebuttal of the Obama years yet know-nothing Republicans can only criticize her!

I wish the president could serve another 8 year term with a Democratic Congress.  Now on to November and without fail elect another Democratic president!

LAST STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH

GREAT!!

Original Sin

Thank you, Professor Tribe, for your always insightful and brilliant analysis (linked below.) I saw Professor Tribe on Larry O'Donnell and as usual his opinion was elegant. His progressive opinion is always a breath of fresh air. 

Yes, these so called constitutional "originalist" sinners like Ted Cruz are so when it suits them otherwise it's "settled law." Of course, Cruz thinks his Canadian birth means nothing even though constitutionally it says he cannot hold the presidency because he was born in a foreign country.  He thinks it's settled law except it is NOT settled law.  

Just listen to Justice Scalia's inhumane opinions to see what Professor Tribe means by originalists when it suits them it is settled law and how much they hate the Court making law except when they like it. "Conservatives" believe in states rights and settled law until they don't and ask the big bad federal government to intervene when it comes to small business insuring their employees or when it's a woman's right to chose the medical procedures she wants. 

Worst of all Cruz blatantly said he believes the Supreme Court does not make law. Well, Mr. Cruz, you are an attorney? If the Supreme Court does not make law then what does it make, pancakes? Guess Cruz would have loved the Supreme Court's ugly Dred Scott decision -- once a slave always a slave. Then, for Cruz, it would have been settled law. 

If the decision is humane, Cruz and the SCOTUS five will be against it. If it's pro property rights they will be for it. You know corporations are people after all -- NOT. Shame on them (with the exception of, perhaps, at times, two.) The so called "originalists" are brimming with hypocritical contradictions. 

I have a fantasy that will never be reality but I so wish it were. Think of it, all my progressives compatriots, -- instead of Scalia occupying his chair on the Supreme Court what if it were Professor Tribe as it should have been? I call that Nirvana. Okay, so time marches on and that will not happen but it is my First Amendment right to dream it!

 http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/01/11/through-ted-cruz-constitutional-looking-glass/zvKE6qpF31q2RsvPO9nGoK/story.html#comments

An Uplifting documentary --There is hope

Recommendation: UPLIFTING documentary about the engineer Dean Kamen, the creator of the Segway: On Netflix entitled "Slingshot."

If you have children, grandchildren, and/or are an educator you will love this documentary and even if you do not but are a person of curiosity and want to make a better world go to Netflix and search for "Slingshot." You will be amazed to see there is hope for us yet!

Another Zeitgeist doc film recommendation

Another Zeitgeist recommended Netflix documentary film: "Moving Forward" .... thought provoking and excellent.

No long diatribes

Just a recommendation of two Netflix films that challenge it all:

"The Unbelievers" I wrote about and "Zeitgeist." Zeitgeist Part I and II. Part II I just don't know the truth of it but Part I is amazing and I think believable. Fascinating stuff. The moral of the story: Question everything.

North Korea Says It Successfully Tested Hydrogen Nuclear Bomb

N. Korea tests an H Bomb that registers on the Richter scale as a 5.1 earthquake (link below.) It may be a lie. Who can assess the truth of international blather. The more important question of the instant moment is where is the human race heading?

J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists involved in the Manhattan Project, constructors of the nuclear bomb dropped in 1945 by this nation twice -- once on Hiroshima and once on Nagasaki obliterating everything in its path and turning humans who were near ground zero into vapor quoted, after it was dropped, from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I become death destroyer of worlds."

Between global climate change related ad infinitum catastrophes, eternal war spanning the globe, religious tyranny's choke hold including in our democratic nation, the hate of racism polluting our media's message what are the odds our species will eternally inherit the earth?

I once had a professor who, in 1968, said he thought the chances of the human species reaching the turn of the century was zero to nil. When our calendar reached century 21, I thought his prediction in error. Maybe, though, he was merely off by a decade or two or three.

Even though I am religiously secular there are some Biblical quotes that possess heft which I use in my literary arsenal. "They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind." Hosea 8:7 is one of them.

WOULD YOU WANT DONALD TRUMPET OR ANY REPUBLICAN MAKING LIFE AND DEATH DECISIONS ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR?   NEITHER WOULD I.  GET OUT THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE IF YOU CARE ABOUT LIFE!

Film recommendation--Watch, learn and know!

I have a very academically oriented cousin. He knows my points of view and how the intellectually curious mind is so highly prized by me. Because of that he recommends films he finds mostly on Netflix which he thinks I will enjoy.

He surely knows me well as he suggested a documentary film gem entitled "The Unbelievers" which threw a strike right over my cerebral plate. It is a wonderful documentary which I would like to distribute on street corners telling electoral ignorance the ever important difference between truth and fiction.

The film involves snippets of a variety of world-wide talks and discussions between Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of "The God Delusion" and his colleague Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and cosmologist author of a "Universe from Nothing."

I offer the following quotes from the documentary to whet your appetite for it:

"If we live in a world where certain things are not subject to question we live in a world where thinking has stopped"

"One might think that the religious beliefs of political candidates should remain off limits in public discourse. I don't think so, at least not when candidates wear their religion on their sleeves; then it becomes fair game."

"Before Darwin life was a miracle so one could not ask "Where did the diversity of life come from?" What Darwin showed were very simple laws of biological beginnings with NO miracle. Did he prove it? No, but it was plausible. Now there has been 150 years of proof that natural selection and genetic mutation essentially could produce all the complexity of life from very simple beginnings to the most complex over billions of years"

"How can how the universe works upset people? Instead of being threatened or having our faith threatened by the discoveries of science we should force our beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality instead of the other way around. People shouldn't be threatened by science."

I cannot recommend "The Unbelievers" strongly enough. Watch it, learn and know!

President's speech on guns

One word: FABULOUS.  I have never seen the president cry so emotionally in the 8 years of his presidency.  It was a gorgeous speech.  If you have not seen it I urge you to do so.

Let he who has not sinned

The nerve of the blowhard Trump insulting Secretary Clinton with the past marital indiscretions of her husband.

She and the former president SHOULD STRONGLY answer Trump's attacks. She must not appear weak. The fact that she is a woman helps her immoral Republican windbag opponent tag her as "weak with no stamina and no strength." Trump says this about a woman who has more experience in positions of monumental power of which Trump can only dream.

I believe she MUST break her New Year's resolution and strongly respond to his vicious attacks. I even believe she and the president must ask about the three-marriages into which Trump has entered. How spotless are his relationships with women? Moreover, her staff should research the history of those relationships in which Trump has engaged and, if possible, find sources who will support their assertions. I suspect there are numerous moral faux pas Trump has committed. The secretary and her allies should respond to Trump the only way he respects -- hard and with strength.

Secretary Clinton and the president kept their marriage together. That is more than one can say about Trump. Since Trump's alleged favorite book is the Bible I quote Jesus in whom Trump, purports to believe: Matthew 7:3 "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone." John 8:7

Militia and More: Gunmen Seize Federal Building In Oregon

Who are these Clive Bundy allies and occupiers of a federal building in Oregon?  (Link below) Look into the "Militia movement" to see who many of these people are and what they believe. They are violent, right wing uber nationalists who would not give two thoughts about taking life for the so called "just cause" of property rights they fold into their "Don't Tread on Me" flags.

Just what are they kvetching (Yiddish complaining) about now?  They do not want the federal government to create a nature and bird preserve.  It seems they have a problem with the federal government protecting animals and nature by restricting the use of certain lands in particular to those who would abuse them. 

In general, whether it be guns or private property rights they are for them and against the government if the government desires to control human excess.  When it comes to guns, too, they are for them and against government regulatory intrusion but when it comes to gays or a woman's right to choose her reproductive fate and insurance they are for big bad regulatory government.

The right wingnuts seem to think it's more important for one to be able to buy pristine land and put up, well, whatever one wants -- say an oil smoke stack.  Who cares if it pollutes the drinking water bison, birds and humans ingest.  It's the property rights that matter doncha know whether it's the East India Company owning humans of color, Standard Oil owning all the oil or the 1% richest owning 98% of the wealth property rights rule. 

Oh yes, these are the same true believers that think if one owns a lunch counter one should have the right to exclude persons of color from it on Constitutional property rights grounds, of course.  Yes, let's go back to 1789 when men of property could legally own slaves as they were property after all.  To hell with Constitutional Amendments especially the 13th banning slavery.  Some Amendments are there to be repealed because some Orwellian things like property rights are more equal than other rights like human rights.

Okay, while they are in the business of repealing amendments maybe they should start with the Second to take guns away from violent people who should not possess guns -- namely them!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oregon-militia-federal-building_568959dfe4b06fa688829f2c

Richard Engel Offers 10 Predictions for 2016

[My comment: As I was saying: Engle talks about Europe's rise of the far right. We played this game before didn't we? It put Europe in ruins though the good guys won. Still, would you want to repeat it? The radical right wing nationalists are dangerous. They have NO moral compunction for the value of other groups' rights ... just their own white ones. The right is a DANGEROUS thing do NOT be tempted by their nationalist rhetoric. Make no mistake about it they are violent, love guns and will not hesitate one inch to use them against this time another "other" and who knows maybe the same as WWII Europe!

GOTV for Democrats across the nation!]

ISTANBUL — It's been a rough year.

ISIS erupted across the world, making even al Qaeda look tame. Syria got so bad that millions decided to leave and walk to Europe. Libya collapsed. The war in Afghanistan got longer. Terrorists rampaged in Paris, twice.

There were bright moments too, but they were harder to pick out amid the darkness. The United States and Cuba agreed to let bygones be. The European Union held together despite deadbeat Greece, which as S.J. Perelman wrote, invented democracy but never got paid for it. In Paris, much of the world agreed to get greener and cleaner, but will they stick to it?

So what's next?

Here are a few guesses about what may be in store for international news in 2016. It's not all bad, but much of it is, particularly in the Middle East, which seems unable to pull itself out of its swamp of religious and ethnic divisions.

1. Rise of the far right in Europe

In 2015 the migrants and refugees flooded into Europe and are still traveling there. It was a shock. Germany opened its doors. But Europe's doors are closing. In 2016 this profound change will to settle in. There may be anger and resistance to the demographic changes and more xenophobia, which of course helps ISIS; and it may not be just happening in Europe.

Supporters of "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West" (PEGIDA) gather at a protest in Dresden, Germany, on Oct. 12. ROBERT MICHAEL / AFP - Getty Images

2. More consensus against ISIS

Russia, the U.S., Iran, Europe, and pretty much every one on the planet everyone agrees ISIS is a universal threat, yet there is no united approach to fight the group although coordination is clearly needed. The year ahead may be when nations realize they can actually degrade and defeat ISIS if they work together.

An ISIS militant holds the group's flag as he stands on a captured Syrian tank in an image posted on Facebook on August 5. Militant website via AP

3. More domestic terrorism

I hope it doesn't happen, but the husband and wife team of Muslim fanatics in San Bernardino proved how easy it was to get high-powered guns in the United States and attract a lot of attention for a cause. It's hard to stop this kind of violence. Copycats might try again, especially in an election year.

Authorities investigate the scene of a police shootout with Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik on Dec. 3 in San Bernardino, California. Jae C. Hong / AP

4. More U.S. involvement in Iraq and Syria

U.S. involvement in Iraq and Syria has been steadily ramping up. U.S. policy shifted from advisers in Iraq, to airstrikes in Syria to American special forces in Syria. It seems the U.S. is an event away from a big increase.

U.S. Army paratroopers maneuver through a hallway as part of squad level training at Camp Taji, Iraq on Aug. 3, 2015. Spc. Paris Maxey / U.S. Department of Defense

5. Chaos in Middle East keeps rumbling

The region isn't out of it its mire of yet. Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turks, Arabs, Persians still see more differences than commonalities. Next year may be the culmination of this mess before new leaders emerge offering other ways forward.

Yemenis search for survivors under the rubble of old buildings allegedly destroyed by an airstrike carried out by the Saudi-led coalition in Sanaa on June 12. YAHYA ARHAB / EPA, FILE

6. Big changes could be coming to Iran

The Iran nuclear deal comes into effect in 2016. Money should start pouring into Tehran. There are elections in 2016 as well. Will the money help the reformers who signed the deal, or the hardliners who want the cash but no change? The answer could shape Iran's future.

Iranians sing and wave Iranian flags during celebrations following a landmark nuclear deal in Tehran on July 14, 2015. Ebrahim Noroozi / AP, file

7. A hard year for Russia

If oil prices stay low, which analysts predict, Russia may be in for a long 2016 — and could react with more military moves. Russia diverted a lot of attention away from domestic woes by taking Crimea, going to war in Syria, and punishing Turkey — so far just economically — for shooting down a Russian jet. Will there be a new Russian crisis in 2016?

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his annual press conference on Dec. 17. Sasha Mordovets / Getty Images Contributor, file

8. China gets serious about the environment; India does not

China has had its first code red day, when people were told it was actually a threat to their lives to breathe. No regime can survive if its people don't have the freedom to breathe, a human right so basic no one thought to include it on the Bill of Rights. China seems to have woken up and is investing big in solar, realizing clean energy can be profitable. India, however, seems to believe it needs to do what China did: pollute more now to pull its masses from poverty.

Both Beijing and New Delhi face serious air pollution problems. Above left, Beijing on Nov. 30, 2015, and New Delhi on Nov. 24, 2015. Getty; AP

9. Warming Latin American relations

First Cuba, Venezuela next? Political changes are underway in Venezuela that could see the end of the failed system put in place by the late Hugo Chavez. Could it mean better relations with Washington across the region, a new page?

Lilian Tintori, center left, wife of jailed Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, celebrates next to candidates of the Venezuelan coalition of opposition parties in Caracas on Dec. 7. Venezuela's opposition won control of the National Assembly by a landslide, trouncing the ruling party and altering the balance of power after almost 17 years of socialist rule. CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS / Reuters, file

10. Turkey takes center stage

Turkey is the main pathway for ISIS fighters flowing in Syria and refugees flooding out. Turkey controls, or has the potential to control, both of those vital taps. Turkey was prominent in 2015; it could be pivotal in 2016.

President Barack Obama and Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan attend a press conference after their meeting within the G20 Summit on Nov. 15. Anadolu Agency / Getty Images Contributor, file

Opening Statement of Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg Trial on Nov. 21, 1945

Justice Jackson's eloquent statement sums up why I am a left of center and vehemently anti-right wing nationalist. The Opening Statement of Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg Trial on Nov. 21, 1945 is one of the universally determined greatest pieces of judicial oratory. Here are excerpts as presented by Court TV.

It should be heard by everyone but, of course, is probably known by but a few.  Listen, heed and know why this nation's extremist right wing Republican nationalists reflected in our midst are now a curse on this nation, racist, cruel, dangerous and should be soundly rejected by the humanity of our nation. 

The Nazi authoritarian regime was first won by Democratic means and then day-by-day usurped power.  The Republican Party, I believe, has the seeds of that malevolence within it directed by the few for the direct elimination of the "other" and, I aver, by any means necessary.  If they gain power and do what they have professed to do make no mistake many will be killed.  Do the right thing and do not let this happen.

For further information see www.roberthjackson.org.

Robert H. Jackson (1945) Opening Statement

Robert H. Jackson delivered his Opening Statement at the Nuremberg Trial on Nov. 21, 1945. Here are excerpts as presented by Court TV.

Making a Nation Great Again

In response to the William Labarge letter of December 31 in the Metro West Daily News entitled "Trump Exposes Republican Depravity" linked here I could not have expressed it better. Trump appeals to the very same know-nothings to whom the Republican Party has continually appealed except the so called "establishment" candidates do so in, perhaps, more acceptable form.  The message essentially is the same as it has always been since the transformation of the Dixicrat-Democrat south to Republican during the Nixon moral majority law and order camouflage years.

The Republican Party has now, though, morphed into something worse.  As our first black president took office in 2008 Republicans decided to obstruct everything he wanted to do even if it was their own Republican policy they touted before he took office. He was the nation's first black president and Republicans simply could not tolerate that. Add to the racist animus the nation's economic convulsions due, in pertinent part, to Republican trickle down duplicity, Wall Street Republican crony fraud and Republican foreign policy based lies and eternal war. Presto, one gets our present-day noxious Republican Party. Trump, Rubio, Bush, and Cruz are all the same because the Republican Party is all the same -- the Party of Trump.

My letter writing has become less frequent with each national catastrophe most especially the climate never ending disasters (watch Missouri and the west being obliterated by climate change storms in extremis) and I give up. Al Gore, a decade ago, was utterly correct and posed a very inconvenient truth. Republicans, yet again, are on the wrong side of that truth as they almost always get every other issue wrong as well. It is nauseating.

Republican Party, as Shakespeare might have said, do not blame the stars for your anger blame, indeed, yourselves. Republicans are not making this nation great again they are killing it!

In the Year of Trump, the Joke Was On Us -- By Matt Taibbi

It started out as a joke: Donald Trump running for president! What better way to spoof the thinness of the Republican field than to shove a bombastic reality star with orange hair, a sixth-grade vocabulary and no behavioral filter onto the debate stage with the likes of Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker and Lindsey Graham? The only thing more perfect would have been to add a head of lettuce and Koko the signing gorilla to round out the candidate slate.

Trump seemed like a perfect foil in particular for Jeb Bush, a hesitating, gelatinous aristocrat who lacked the cocksure brainlessness the previous Bush used to sell himself as a "regular guy." In an era when Republican voters were more distrustful than ever of the Same Old Politics, stiff, birthright-bearing Jeb was exactly the wrong candidate for the party elders to back.

And they seemed to realize it, too. Once the Republican race got going, the party appeared too disorganized and fractured to throw its institutional weight behind anyone. This left a comically enormous cast of hopefuls to duke it out in the equivalent of a schoolyard rock fight. And without the gravitas of party and media support, the candidates on the Republican side turned out to be just a bunch of chattering, defenseless, fourth-rate flesh-bags, exquisitely vulnerable to any strong personality. The entrance of Trump into the race on June 16^th therefore offered the potential of an entertaining car wreck of awesome proportions.

But things turned ugly less than 45 minutes into his run. In his announcement, Trump told the world that Mexican immigrants were "rapists" who needed to be stopped. Then, in an interview with CNN's Don Lemon, he doubled down on the remark instead of recanting. "Well, somebody's doing the raping," he seethed. A week later, Mexicans, to Trump, were not just rapists but "rapists and killers," and he was now adding a proposal to build a giant wall across the Mexican border to stop the Army of Darkness-style invading rape-murder horde. The wall would be "tall" and building it would be "easy," he said, adding that he would get Mexico to pay for it, because he knew the "art of negotiating" and wasn't a "clown."

To the astonishment of most observers, Trump soared to second place in Iowa and New Hampshire, and was the clear frontrunner by mid-July. Except for a brief surge by crazy-ass Ben Carson in the fall, he's remained there ever since. Heading into the holiday season, he was pushing 40% in some national polls, more popular than ever.

The appearance of a onetime Spy magazine punchline and WWE performer as the real leader of a real screwball nationalist movement has been at least partly an accidental phenomenon.
The ancient report that he used to keep a book of Hitler's speeches by his bedside notwithstanding, it's very likely that Donald Trump never in his life thought seriously about things like nativism, fascism, eugenics, or any kind of ideology at all. This was not someone who likely ever dreamed of cattle cars and rivers of blood. Trump is a narcissist, not a demagogue; his pathology is himself, not politics.

A pre-2015 Trump fantasy was probably something like romping with models after simultaneously winning the Nobel Prizes for Peace, Literature and Physics (they love me in Sweden – scientists were amazed by the size of my skyscraper!). He almost certainly would have been grossed out by a Ghost-of-Christmas-Future-style image of his 2015 self being feted by crowds of rifle-toting white power nerds.

But shortly after Trump jumped into the race, he stumbled onto a secret: whenever he blurted out forbidden thoughts about race, ethnicity or gender, he was showered with the attention he always craved.

A sizable portion of the country seemed appalled at the things he said. But at the same time he was suddenly attracting huge and adoring crowds at down-home sites like Bluffton, South Carolina and Mobile, Alabama, pretty much the last places you'd ever expect the Trump brand to take off.
Trump had spent his entire career lending his name to luxury properties that promised exclusivity and separation from exactly the sort of struggling Joes who turned out for these speeches. If you live in a Trump building in a place like the Upper West Side, it's supposed to mean that you're too cosmopolitan, stylish, and successful — too smart-set — to mix with the rabble.

But the rabble — white, working-class, rural, despising exactly those big-city elites who live in Trump's buildings — turned out to be Trump's base. They're the people who hooted and hollered every time he said something off-color about Muslims or Mexicans or Asians ("We want deal!" Trump snickered earlier this year, in a Chinese-waiter voice) or "the blacks."

It was a bizarre marriage, but it made sense from from a clinical point of view. Attention is attention. Patient with narcissistic personality disorder discovers massive source of narcissistic supply, so he sets about securing its regular delivery.

So one comment about Mexicans turned into another about Megyn Kelly's "wherever," which turned into a call for a Black Lives Matter protester to be "roughed up," which turned into an insane slapstick routine about a Times reporter with arthrogryposis, and so on. By December, you had to check Twitter every few hours just to see which cultural taboo Trump was stomping on now.

The presidential campaign Trump began as just the latest in a long line of zany self-promotional gambits has now turned into the long-delayed other shoe dropping from the American civil rights movement. This goofball billionaire mirror-gazer has unleashed a half-century of crackpot grievances about the post-civil rights cultural landscape that a plurality of seething white people felt they never had permission to air, until he came along.
White America has been talking about race in code for more than half a century. You can trace the practice back to Barry Goldwater's 1964 acceptance speech, when he talked about "law and order" and the need to restrain "marauders" after a series of race riots in east coast cities. The speech struck a chord with white voters.

Goldwater's discovery that you could use crime as a proxy to talk about race helped define the next half-century of major-party politics in America. Later generations of pols used other issues like immigration, tax reform and "income redistribution" to achieve the same end.

We called it "dog-whistle politics" because after the Civil Rights Movement, the party line was that we were now all partners in Dr. King's famous dream of racial harmony. So there were certain things you were no longer supposed to say out loud.

You couldn't just come out and say black people were lazy anymore. But you could talk about how "good people" in "small towns" do "some of the hardest work," as Sarah Palin did in 2008. And you could hint that there was another group of people who preferred just to get "free stuff," as Mitt Romney said in 2012.

But people get tired of talking in code. In this sense Trump's campaign isn't repudiating the Civil Rights Movement per se, but the Republicans who give fake lip-service to it. Even the worst race-baiters of the recent Republican past conceded that racial appeals had to be cloaked.

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger,'" strategist Lee Atwater, the creator of George H.W. Bush's infamous Willie Horton ad, once said. "By 1968 you can't say 'n__gger' — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights."

Trump made the Republican field look weak by blurting straight-out what they would only say in code (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie parroted Romney's pathetic "free stuff" line this year, for instance). This part of Trump's act has to thrill Democrats, since he's stealing away from Republicans the illusion of centrism. Future Republican nominees will have a tough time remembering how in the world George W. Bush ever won 44% of the Hispanic vote, as he did in 2004.

But Trump's act isn't all about race. He's also scoring points by mining the same mainstream frustrations over language-policing and political correctness that made Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay famous. Trump's broadsides about Megyn Kelly aren't that far off from the Dice-Man's "Pattycake" routine.

The difference is, Clay and Kinison and comedians like them were trying to make a point about the absurdity of policing away forbidden thoughts, while Trump is basically a cretinous dinosaur who doesn't understand why slurs about periods or the disabled or "the blacks" were ever made taboo in the first place. He's not pushing back with a laugh, from a nightclub. He wants to do it from the Oval Office. Even Dice Clay thinks he's nuts.

All comedy is about misunderstandings. A little town gets word that a government inspector is coming, so it mistakenly rolls out the red carpet for a visiting drunk on a gambling spree.

2015 was the same kind of mistaken-identity tale. The Silent Majority has been waiting 50 years for a prophet, but this year it settled for a billionaire loudmouth with a comb-over and a personality disorder. Like all comedies, this one is bound to end with an explosion of unintended consequences. What we won't know until 2016 is whether this joke will end up being on all of us — or just those of us who waited too long to take Trump's accidental war seriously.

Why, among other things, I love Pope Francis

Zionism, Christian history, and the pope

By Kevin Madigan   December 28, 2015

Pope Francis recently declared that attacks not just on Jews but on the State of Israel are equally anti-Semitic.(emphasis added) In a late-October address to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II decree that transformed relations between Jews and Catholics, the pontiff concluded: “The State of Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity.” Largely lost in the coverage of his remarks was any historical perspective on the degree to which Francis decisively overturned statements made by influential Catholic theologians, and by popes, on Zionism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

What had been the authoritative Catholic view on Zionism reaches back to the fifth century and to the church father, Augustine of Hippo. For Augustine, Jews had been exiled from their land and dispersed among the gentiles for their guilt in the death of Jesus. There they would be condemned to wander and to live, until the end of time, in a state of anxiety, misery, and servitude to gentile emperors and kings. This “doctrine of Jewish witness,” which underscored the sole responsibility of Jews for the death of Jesus of Nazareth, tried to explain why they had been exiled from their homeland (though the historical truth, little known, is that large numbers of Jews lived in the land in Augustine’s time).

It would be hard to exaggerate the catastrophic impact of this line of thinking. Not only was it the ideological seed for a history of calamities, a history in which Jewish communities, over the centuries, were murdered in the first three crusades, killed by the thousands for supposedly poisoning wells and causing the Black Death, forced to convert or emigrate, ghettoized, and made to wear stigmatizing clothing by popes. This Augustinian “theology of the Jews” was also the dogmatic ground for Catholic opposition to Zionism. Indeed, the Vatican did not recognize the State of Israel until December 1993. When Theodor Herzl, perhaps the most important father of modern Zionism, asked Pope Pius X to lend his support to the establishment of a Jewish homeland, the pontiff infamously responded, “Non possumus” (“We cannot”)(emphasis added). This was the beginning of what seemed, until Francis’ historic remarks, to be indefinite papal opposition to Zionism.

No pontiff was as actively opposed to the establishment of a Jewish homeland as the controversial wartime pope, Pius XII. After successfully persuading many that Jews were aggressors and belligerents — this just years after the few survivors of Hitler were struggling to establish a homeland to ensure them basic security — he issued no fewer than three encyclicals opposing the State of Israel. The Church began to associate Zionism with Communism and other impious movements and to regard Israelis as contestants for the same territory: what the Church proprietarily regarded as “the Holy Land.” The statements of Pius XII put a seal on anti-Zionist attitudes that began with Herzl’s unhappy meeting with the pope in the early 20th century.

While Pope Francis visited the State of Israel in 2014, he made no statement like the one he recently expressed. But in his October remarks, he stated, “To attack Jews is anti-Semitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also anti-Semitism.” (emphasis added) Only against the lachrymose background of centuries of theological anti-Judaism, persecution, ghettoization, genocide — and, above all, papal opposition to Zionism — can we appreciate the import and novelty of the Holy Father’s declaration on anti-Semitism and the State of Israel. In historical context, Francis’ statement must be perceived for the welcome and fundamental reversal it is.

Kevin Madigan is professor of ecclesiastical history at Harvard Divinity School and author, most recently, of “Medieval Christianity.’’

 

 

 Why I, among many other things, love Pope Francis. Where is the left when the those that want Israel's throat threaten Nazi-like violence. I hear only silence!

I am NOT anti-Palestinian BUT unless they can guarantee the survival of the state of Israel with no more attacks upon it then I cannot fully justify their BDS movements (boycott, divest and sanctions)

"It's a Wonderful Life" -- A Wonderful Timeless Film

Turning the channels on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas day can be an unrewarding endeavor. The channels are dedicated to a great deal of silliness, infomercials and repeats of news stories seen over and over again.

As luck would have it, though, I tuned onto a film that, yes, I have seen many times before but this time I looked upon it with different, perhaps, more mature eyes. To be honest, there are times when I have not been happy with my life, not happy with the difficulties of aging, losing so many I love and surely not happy I contracted a malady at 5 years of age which no one in this nation, thankfully, need suffer from again. I am glad for them, of course, but honesty must be spoken as I admit I wish I were born a mere six months after a vaccine for my malady was produced. When I kvetch (Yiddish for complain) about it I was told by one wise person in my life that I really should view James Stewart over again as George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life" and that it might teach me the essence of what is so valuable about my own life. On Christmas Eve “It’s a Wonderful Life" was shown again.

The film speaks to people – really most people – whether one is a believer in a supreme being or not. George Bailey, ready for suicide as his life’s events spin out of his control and is ready to jump off a bridge into icy waters below. Ultimately, he is shown by Clarence, his guardian angel, why he should not cease to exist and what life would have been like had he never existed at all; had he not even been born.

George Bailey's life, despite its overwhelmingly disastrous turn of events, counts. Yes, disbelief must be suspended but if one does suspend it the film teaches us that lesson. Most all lives count because in each life a person touches others in good ways one might never have imagined. The metaphor of a pebble thrown into a lake creating ripples far off from its point of origin is apropos. It says you mean something and you change lives – hopefully for the better – simply by your existence.

“It's a Wonderful Life” is a wonderful timeless film that has a message, I think, for many of us whether we get the things in life we wanted, and most especially, if we do not.

The Real Attack on the Spirit of Christmas -- 2015

Fabulous article by Mr. Creamer. I could not have said it better myself.

here or http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/the-real-attack-on-the-sp_b_8876954.html