Donald Trump’s rageful white cult: Race, fear and the GOP front-runner’s slick manipulations. Donald Trump, the political necromancer, has been able to manipulate the death anxieties of right-wing voters for his own political gain.
Trump won the New Hampshire primary by a substantial margin. If current public opinion polls are accurate, he will also win the Republican South Carolina primary as well. Trump’s base of white working-class authoritarians is scared of what they view as a “new” America, one in which they believe that the psychological and material wages of Whiteness will not be as great. The Forum – Democracy or Decision-Making by Experts?
Fabienne Peter on whether difficult political decisions should be made by experts Can democracy be trusted to make the right decisions?
Critics of democracy tend to argue that democracy cannot be trusted in this way. David Barton's Appalling Lie that the Constitution Puts God's Law Above Man's Law. From the Religious Right’s response to Kim Davis’ arrest, you would think none of them had ever heard of the United States Constitution.
David Barton, the Religious Right’s premier fake historian, in Houston to attend Deputy Darren Goforth’s funeral, proclaimed that “the Founding Fathers made it real clear that the laws of God are higher than the laws of man.” According to Barton, “This is a law of God. Man’s law is not allowed to contradict God’s law.” When does your religion legally excuse you from doing part of your job? Several hundred people demonstrated their support for County Clerk Kim Davis in Kentucky as she spent her third day in jail on contempt charges.
Davis has refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. (AP) Can your religion legally excuse you from doing part of your job? America’s silent-but-deadly billionaires: How our tight-lipped overlords are waging stealth campaigns against the middle class. Teddy Roosevelt famously argued that, when it comes to foreign policy, one should “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.”
Similarly, an apt summation of the political inclinations of billionaires might be, “Speak softly, and carry a big check.” While some billionaires, like Warren Buffett, are outspoken on political issues, most tend to say very little, or speak in vague generalities. Here's How Religious Exemption Laws Can Hurt Women And The LGBT Community. Susan Jacoby on American Ignorance. BILL MOYERS: It's not only the reality of our finances we are running from.
In her new book published just this week, one of America's most prolific and provocative free thinkers says we are in a headlong flight from reason. The book is The Age of American Unreason, and it couldn't be more timely. Here's an excerpt: The Transformation of American Democracy to Oligarchy The United States has the world's largest economy, is the most important contributor to scientific advancements, has the most powerful military and some of the best universities in the world, is a democratic state, and accepts more immigrants than any other nation.
But, over time the democratic foundations of the United States, equality of the citizens and their human rights, have been eroding. It is impossible to make inequality a pillar of the structure of the state and deepen its roots, and yet to be proud and claim that the citizens have equal voting rights. When all types of inequalities take deep roots and expand, citizens lose their power to influence the political process. Chinese Government Arrests Dozens Of Lawyers In Unprecedented Sweep - BuzzFee... “Race is being used to wreck the middle class”: The silent bigotry of America... Progressives have long argued that conservatives play up racial resentments to undermine the welfare state.
Conservatives tend to respond to such accusations with their own charges of liberal “race baiting.” But whatever right-wing voices might say on the matter, a new analysis of the data suggests that racism does, in fact, strongly predict welfare spending. Using two surveys from 2008, Douglas Spencer and Christopher Elmendorf estimated racial resentment across the states by measuring responses to questions about the work ethic, intelligence and trustworthiness of blacks Americans. They estimate the portion of whites in each state that are in the top quartile of racial resentment (so a state with large amounts of racism would have more than 25 percent of whites espousing racially biased views).
Welcome to feudalism, America: How the 1 percent is systematically destroying... People Agree with Jon Stewart More Than Any Conservative Commentator, Poll Finds. 6 Political Theorists Introduced in Animated "School of Life" Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More. “It may come as a surprise to some academics,” writes leftist political theorist Michael Parenti in his sprawling textbook Democracy for the Few, “but there is a marked relationship between economic power and political power.”
Parenti exaggerates—I have never met such an academic in a humanities department, though it may be true in the worlds of political philosophy and political science. Yet in centuries past, philosophers and scholars had no trouble drawing conclusions about the intertwining of the political and the economic. One may immediately think of Karl Marx, who—according to the above video from a new School of Life series on famous political theorists—was “capitalism’s most famous and ambitious critic.” A Point of View: Is the US president an elected monarch? President Obama has been accused of acting like a monarch.
But the US presidency has been an elected kingship since 1776 in all but name, argues the historian David Cannadine. After five weeks of campaigning, which may have seemed unending and interminable at the time, but which in retrospect passed relatively quickly, the British general election is over, and David Cameron is once again ensconced in 10 Downing Street. But although the votes will not be cast until November 2016, the battle for the American Presidency has already begun, as several Republicans and Democrats, with varying degrees of plausibility, have recently declared themselves as candidates for their party's nomination.
Yet there are 18 months to go until that election, and Barack Obama will not actually vacate the White House until his successor is inaugurated in Washington DC in January 2017. TR's distant cousin and eventual successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was no less kingly a president. Taiwan and Strategic Security. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it also simultaneously attacked the Philippines, triggering World War II in the Pacific. It was the opening salvo in the Japanese Empire’s campaign to invade and subjugate Southeast Asia in pursuit of its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The bombers were launched from the island of Taiwan, which was then under Japanese military rule. It was the jumping-off point for the attacks on both the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Throughout the war, Taiwan served as the staging area and major supply base that sustained Japan’s armies in Southeast Asia and as the control point for all shipping through the Taiwan Strait.
The U.S. “Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?” “Never during my three years as a law student or two years as a law clerk at federal courts did I hear of the ‘Insular Cases.’ Yet the series of US Supreme Court decisions gathered under this name established a doctrine, in force to this day, determining that the US Constitution does not apply fully to territories acquired through conquest after the Spanish-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1898.”
So writes Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow in her Preface to Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of the American Empire, the latest publication from Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. The volume grew out of a February 2014 conference at Harvard that was organized to interrogate this century-old series of Supreme Court decisions that, judging by Minow’s experience, aren’t often given the attention they deserve. As Juan R. These Studies Show How 'The Fox Effect' Pushed Congress, Country To The Right. Since Fox founder and chairman Roger Ailes opened shop in 1996, the effects of the powerhouse conservative channel on the media landscape have been widely noted. Bartlett, a onetime advisor to Rep. Ron Paul and President Ronald Reagan and official in the administration George H.W. Bush, cites several studies showing how Fox broke into an untapped market for a single conservative news source after years of FCC regulations which required equal time for political debate (the so-called "fairness doctrine" ended in 1987 under President Reagan.)
But Barlett also surfaced studies which show that that the Fox Effect changed not only Americans' media diet, but their political behavior as well — boosting turnout for the GOP and pushing both Republicans and Democrats rightward in Congress. Meanwhile, a 2014 study by The National Bureau of Economic Research found that the likelihood of voting Republican increased by 0.9 points among viewers who watched "four additional minutes per week. " China's War against International Law in the South China Sea. In medieval times, alchemists sought to transmute base metals into gold. Chomsky: 'International law cannot be enforced against great powers’ FULL INTERVIEW. Uk.businessinsider. Pew Finds Americans Value Privacy, Distrust Government, Tech Firms - BuzzFeed News. Britain resigns as a world power. On Monday, the Right Honorable David Cameron, prime minister of Great Britain, gave his first major speech after being reelected to his high office — once held by Pitt, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill and Thatcher.
Former North Korean spy reveals tactics. Agents from the most isolated country on Earth are not a thing of the past, said one man who claims his job once was to infiltrate South Korea on missions for the Kim regime. Chosen for the job while still in high-school, Kim Dong-shik told CNN he was sent to a specialized university for four years where he learned skills including martial arts, scuba diving, how to shoot and rig explosives. Only years later when he was fully trained was he told why he had been chosen. "When I was told I was going to be a spy... I felt stunned," Kim said. "There have been many accidents in the past with spies. The physical training was only one part, Kim said; the psychological preparation was key.
"We were taught to be ready to die for the Kim regime and if caught, to make sure we were not taken alive," he said. Kim was shot by South Korean officials, in 1995, while on a mission in Seoul so was unable to commit suicide, he said. READ: From traitors to poster children Life of a spy How they're enticed. What Causes Poor Uneducated White People Vote Republican? According to a recent article by Quite Mike.org, Republicans like to claim they are all about liberty.
Then, they support the recent SCOTUS decision where five conservative appointed judges took responsibility away from citizens and placed it in the hands of the corporation. Their politicians lie to get our country into a war with these nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and now are trying to blame the current situation in Iraq on Obama. Democracy by Force: US Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World (London School of Economics Mathematics)
It’s Time To Talk About ‘British Values’ Lawrence Lessig: The problem with American democracy in three charts. The Illusion Of Democracy. Reason Roundtable: Is Reform Conservatism a Friend or Foe of Limited Government? China’s military has declared war on Western thought on the internet. Chinese Army newspaper calls for military role in Internet culture war. PressTV-‘US making arms for possible China war’ Bin Ladin's Bookshelf. Constitution Revolution: How One Amendment is Actually Unraveling the Constitution. As Americans become more liberal, will Supreme Court follow on gay marriage? DOX: How Scientology ensnares the unsuspecting in a series of binding contracts. How the United States Economically and Politically Strangled Puerto Rico. Napoleon: the Emperor Distilled.