ISIS claims that its caliphate is a paradise. All these refugees leaving puts the lie to this. That’s why ISIS loves all the dumb governors in the US that don’t want refugees from Syria. So yes, our Republican refusal to accept refugees helps ISIS narrative. But here’s also the concept that accepting those people is the right thing to do.
If someone from ISIS wants to sneak into this country and do damage, coming in as a refugee isn’t the way to do it. If you want to blow up a building you want to do it now, not in two years, which is how long it takes a refugee to go through the vetting process. It’s really very simple, come in as a tourist, disappear in the crowds and go about your business of bombing. Of course the anti-refugee types are too ignorant to process this deep and complicated piece of information.
This one simple issue illustrates the problems that exist between the Left and the Right in this country and it can all be boiled down to bigotry and ignorance. That’s pretty frightening when you realize that those two negative aspects of the human condition are what stands firmly between a functioning country and one that wallows in suspicion, hate and negative religious fervor.
One can bring these same aspects to almost any issue of controversy between the Left and the Right. Add greed and you have them all covered. But ignorance and bigotry are the principle items pushing the Right on immigration, healthcare, unemployment insurance, food stamps, minimum wage and free college for those who deserve it,
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Watched a man named Alan Lichtman a professor at American University talk about Woodrow Wilson and certain racist policies that existed while he was president and how they relate to the demonstrations that Princeton students are having against Wilson now.
Princeton is a top University, which produces many of our elite students. So why are these supposedly superior kids wasting everyone’s time with this useless demonstration about a man who has been dead for years? Why aren’t they doing something constructive like demonstrating for Black Lives Matter or against police brutality or even better for refugee quotas to be enlarged or a hundred other causes that actually matter, that actually could mean something today? What the hell is Princeton teaching these useless legacies? What Wilson did or didn’t do is frat house nonsense, no longer real in the prospective of today’s problems.
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Watched a discussion on UP of the shooting at the Planned Parenthood site in Colorado. Unlike the gunmen, the discussion never hits the right target. This guy had an assault weapon. Whether he was crazy or not, has nothing to do with the fact tat he was armed for war. There is no reason for any citizen to have a weapon of war in this country. There is no war going on here, not unless you consider the fight against guns a war.
It doesn’t matter whether or not this guy was nuts. Sane or crazy there is no reason for him or anyone else to own an AK47 or any other assault weapon. Sane or crazy, those people are still dead. The only reason for the existence of such weapons is to kill people. Even as I’m writing this, there is a mass murder going on in San Bernadino, CA. If we want to stop or slow the 30,000 odd deaths we have in this country every year we have to take away the tools of death. There is no other answer.
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John Kasich, who I believe, is the best choice of a bad party comes out with a very clever anti-Trump ad and then refuses to take credit for it. What’s with that? He accurately points to many of Trumps deficiencies and all the reasons to abandon him, but when it comes time to step up and say he wouldn’t vote for Trump he cops out, Very disappointing.
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Adolph Trump claims that on the days the twin towers were destroyed he saw groups of Muslims on the New Jersey side of the Hudson cheering over the destruction. Can you imagine what great eyesight he must have, to be able to discern that someone was a Muslim from over a mile away, What Trump doesn’t understand is that if anyone was in truth cheering it would be supporters of good architecture who would have recognized the twin towers as probably the ugliest buildings erected in NYC in the last couple of hundred years.
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R. James Woolsey, former head of the CIA was interviewed this week and he gave the most intelligent answers about the San Bernardino killers that have been heard to date.
He refuses, like most of the GOP, to start with a conclusion and work back to uncover the evidence he needs to get to that conclusion. He points out that there really are no understandable categories that encompass all terrorists or even all killers. He looks at the backgrounds of the killer and his wife and points out that they are so different that it is impossible to put either into the other’s category and most of all he says that there is no categorizing most terrorists.
This is, of course, true. Our reporters love to ask. ”Why did he do this?” Well there isn’t always a logical reason. Sometimes there is no reason at all, of which, we can logically conceive. Of course there is always one reason that is apropos to all these massacres; it’s that they all had guns, mostly, assault weapons, so if we really want to know what happened, the answer is that this guy had a gun he shouldn’t have had, a gun that enabled him to kill people, people who would probably be alive today if he hadn’t had that gun. But congress won’t respond to that answer because they are handsomely paid not to.
Both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, in the wake of this horrendous situation have come out with exactly what we would expect from them. They both want everyone to have a gun to protect against the bad guys with guns. That’s what we need a firefight by amateurs, no one would get killed in one of those, would they? How about instead of everybody having guns, no one has a gun. You think maybe that would slow the death toll?
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Republicans love to pick out something that The president has said, often out of context and use it as a flag to wave for political, as opposed to national purposes. Did the President really think that ISIS was the JV when he said it? Probably, and that’s what they were at that time. Does he think so now? Of course not! Does he seem to refuse to use the descriptive phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” sure, but there’s a reason for that, maybe not the right reason but a real reason unlike the reasons for the GOP problems with his stance. Obama realizes that we are on a precipice of hate, with almost all the Right Wing war-mongers calling for an American jihad against all Muslims. Fascists like Trump and Rubio, spend all their time looking for ways to invade the freedom of anyone outside the norm. Obama sees that if he is not reserved in his words it will only inflame the bigoted following of those demagogue type hate mongers. Obama knows that we are at war with a small aspect of the Muslim religion but he can see the fascist type attacks from the Right that want to paint all Muslims with the same broad brush and he knows, unlike the Trump’s, the Rubio’s or the Cruz’s that this is wrong, un-American, contrary to everything that this country stands for. In the end it’s really about what the people want. Do they want to live in 1939 Berlin, or 1950 McCarthy land; or do they wish to continue to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave? If they choose the latter they will reject the hate mongering demagogues in the primaries.
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Jeb Bush is upset because we haven’t been killing enough people in this war with ISIS. He wants to “take the lawyers off the fighter’s backs,” by which, he means that we should be open to killing everyone as long as we kill some ISIS fighters along the way. That was his brother’s policy and we saw how well that worked. We’re still trying to live with the results of that policy.
Then Matthew Dowd starts off his bit on the tube by stating that he doesn’t think the country feels safe. Really? They don’t seem to feel unsafe when we are killing off 30,000 of our own citizens a year by our own hand. What the hell do a couple of Muslims killing fourteen people mean? There is no logic in this whole mess. Why are we afraid of a couple of Muslims doing a tiny portion of what our own people do to each other every day?
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Donald Trumps attack on the religion of Islam seems to have been the last straw for his opponents, all of whom have attacked him. This speaks well of this gaggle of clowns but what speaks louder is their cowardice in the face of the fact that they know some percentage of their voters agree with Trump and none are willing to lose a single vote, no matter how much they have to skew their moral stances. So when asked if they will support Trump if he gains the nomination, they all babble about the fact that he will never win, which is ridiculous when one realizes that he is beating the living crap out of all his opponents, who absolutely refuse to stand up in their hind legs and state that they won’t support him. Yes, they’re in a tough position but that’s what denotes leaders versus losers.
Those who oppose fascists but refuse to stand up and condemn them are worse than fascists because their position is built on greed and cowardice rather than on the true if faulty emotions that drive the fascists.
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The Global Warming Talks in Paris seem to have come to some kind of agreement. It includes a resolution that calls for reducing carbon, 1.5% per year, pledges of funding for poor countries to move ahead with cleaner fuels and a binding resolution for all to submit to. This last will not pass mainly because of the U.S. congress which kisses the asses of the American dirty fuel oligarchs. We like to act like we are an exemplary nation but there is so much in which we lag behind the more intelligent more moral nations of the world. We are so busy surrendering to the greedy, immoral corporations that run this country that we are fast losing our humanity and that will lead to our children losing heir lives.