In the temples of today's neo-puritanism the sentence has been passed: Ted Cruz speaks with "pagan brutalism". Worse, he utters "dark and satanic tones". Others, like the bright-eyed Mark Rubio, are pulled into the devilish vortex emanating from the spawn-child.

The "pagan brutalism" characterization appeared January 12 in the hallowed transepts of The New York Times. The "satanic tones" accusation was preached from the lofty pulpit of the public television temple, specifically, the "PBS Newshour" on January 8.

The Cotton Mather who stood in those auspicious institutions of puritanical political correctness was David Brooks, a writer of much skill, distinction, and erudition. I am serious in those accolades, and that makes Brooks' over-the-top characterizations of the Cruzes in the Times and on PBS sadder.

Though he's probably gotten a bad rap, Cotton Mather is depicted in Arthur Miller's, The Crucible — the staged cliché foisted on scores of high school drama students and their long-suffering parents (I have seen it more than once) — as the epitome of the heartless Puritan.

Audiences leave at high levels of alert, scanning the horizon for the modern puritanical tyrants who will deprive people of free speech and belief. Everyone knows today that they mass on the far end of the right wing. The high priests of secular culture tell us so endlessly.

Miller's audiences would never expect to find authoritarianism in the ignoble, disguised progressivism of our age that kidnapped and executed classical liberalism. Thus one is surprised that a writer as smart as David Brooks...

Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/david-brooks-ready-to-burn-ted-and-raf...

Well, David Brooks is correct... Ted Cruz speaks with a forked tongue in which religion is mixed with more guns. Meanwhile The surgeon, Carson, is pissed off that there are no civility "anymore" especially on the internet... He remembers the "Good Book"...:

At Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate in North Charleston, South Carolina, Ben Carson made a surprise appeal for civility in American political discourse, decrying the internet’s lack of manners as ungodly.

“You go to the internet, you start reading an article, you go to the comments section, you cannot go five comments down before people are calling each other all manner of names,” the retired neurosurgeon said.

“Where did that spirit come from in America? It did not come from our Judeo-Christian roots, I can tell you that.”

One biblical scholar, however, disagreed.

“Comments in news articles don’t even aspire to the beauty of some of those insults in antiquity,” Dave Barnhart, pastor and founder of Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, told the Guardian on Friday.

“There’s some delicious insults in the Bible. And to say that’s not part of Judeo-Christian roots is just to ignore history.

“Because these guys were preachers and they were authors and poets, they can spin an insult that is just really mind-blowing. Martin Luther was one of the best smack talkers in history.”

A German priest who kickstarted the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, Luther’s cutting insults live on as internet memes. Barnhart’s personal favourite, he said, was Luther’s description of the pope as: “a fart-ass and enemy of God”.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/15/ben-carson-internet-comments-abuse-bible-insults-republican-debate
Meanwhile Trump is fazed that Cruz was born in Canada... Christie is annoyed that the police does not have the right to shoot anyone they dislike without an inquiry into the police, Kasich stands for the oldies, Rubio is for god Himself and Jeb says Trump is unhinged...

As Ted Cruz tells it, the story of how he financed his upstart campaign for the United States Senate four years ago is an endearing example of loyalty and shared sacrifice between a married couple.

“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” he says he told his wife, Heidi, who readily agreed.

But the couple’s decision to pump more than $1 million into Mr. Cruz’s successful Tea Party-darling Senate bid in Texas was made easier by a large loan from Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz works. That loan was not disclosed in campaign finance reports.

Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012 Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” as Mr. Cruz described it in an interview with The New York Times several years ago.

A review of personal financial disclosures that Mr. Cruz filed later with the Senate does not find a liquidation of assets that would have accounted for all the money he spent on his campaign. What it does show, however, is that in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year. There is no explanation of their purpose.

Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/us/politics/ted-cruz-wall-street-loan-senate-bid-2012.html?_r=0

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The bromance is over.

Once Donald Trump and Ted Cruz complimented each other and spoke of mutual respect, an island of civility in the rancorous GOP primary. But that was before Cruz pulled even with Trump in Iowa and the mogul launched a birther attack on the Texas senator, repeatedly questioning whether Cruz—who was born in Canada—is eligible for the presidency.

This isn't the first time Trump has turned on Cruz, but this time Cruz is fighting back. In interviews on Tuesday, Cruz questioned the businessman's competence and said he "embodies New York values," essentially branding the Donald as an out-of-touch Yankee. Princeton- and Harvard-educated Cruz's retaliation comes just in time for a clash with Trump at tomorrow's Republican presidential debate in South Carolina.

Cruz has been working hard to woo Trump and his supporters, who are a natural fit for Cruz's own virulent conservatism. The strategy appears to have worked: In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, two-thirds of Trump supporters said they would consider voting for Cruz.

But Trump's attacks on Cruz have risen along with the Texas senator's polling numbers, and, taking a page out of the unsuccessful attacks on Obama, Trump has started tweeting.

Sadly, there is no way that Ted Cruz can continue running in the Republican Primary unless he can erase doubt on eligibility. Dems will sue!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2016

Cruz at first dismissed the claims. But that was before Laurence Tribe, who was once his Harvard law professor, wrote in the Boston Globe that Cruz's reading of the presidential eligibility clause of the Constitution was at odds with his usual originalism. Cruz's campaign fired back with a memo Tuesday accusing Tribe of "flip-flopping" on the issue and then started in on Trump.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/here-comes-trump-cruz-showdown-weve-all-been-waiting

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Shortly after the Paris climate agreement  was reached, both the Republicans and Democrats held presidential debates in the US, and not once in either debate was the Paris accord or the overall issue of climate change addressed by the moderators of those debates. The media doesn’t believe that climate change is a marketable idea, so they focus on issues that are more divisive and sensationalized in order to attract more viewers.

Another factor driving this selective coverage is the mentality of our aging politicians.

As infamous political advisor Karl Rove recently pointed out, why should they care about climate change when we’ll all be dead in the next sixty years or so? While that may be true for our elected officials, that isn’t true of everyone alive today, and that’s why ScienceDebate.org has enlisted the help of young children to help force a desperately needed conversation about climate change.

From a ScienceDebate.org press release:

ScienceDebate’s argument is simple—that it’s time for a presidential debate dedicated to the major science, health, tech, and environmental issues. They argue that these issues are now influencing all of life, and that it is time to broaden national discussions past seeing everything only in terms of economics and foreign policy, since science has become the dominant human quality. These issues are getting short shrift, they argue, but are really the ones controlling our fate, and so we should be focusing more attention on them in our political dialogue.

 

read more: http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/01/10/presidential-debates-ignore-climate-change-so-children-are-demanding-answers

It's true: campaign finance law is absurdly difficult for media to explain to American voters. The numbers are abstractly large, the rules are complicated, and everyone wonders if American voters actually care.

The polls certainly seem to say Americans are concerned. Across the political spectrum, voters consistently tell the media the tidal wave of money in politics is a grave problem and the case that opened the flood gates -- Citizens United --  should be overturned. Whether it's Republicans complaining about the "special interests" of Washington, D.C. or Democrats warning about the billionaires running our campaigns, the message is clear: clean elections matter.

The editorial boards and television pundits seem to agree. Like clockwork, with every new discouraging development handed down by the courts on campaign finance law, every new revelation of the monied power brokers pulling politicians' strings, every new failure to effectively enforce the election regulations on the books, solemn editorials are written and monologues are delivered warning American voters that the system has become at-risk to rampant corruption and conflicts of interest.

And yet here we are: live on Fox Business Network during their televised presidential debate, under questioning from FBN's Maria Bartiromo, a major presidential candidate just admitted he violated a basic campaign finance transparency rule in a fashion that runs antithetical to his core political image and he seems to think no one cares. He certainly doesn't seem to be afraid of the media calling him out, although some are trying. How else do we describe the embarrassing image of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), ostensibly one of the most intelligent legislators in Congress, brazenly admitting in a live presidential debate he broke the law as a senatorial candidate by taking a roughly million dollar campaign loan from Goldman Sachs and Citibank without properly disclosing the sources to the Federal Election Commission (FEC)?

Maybe the reason Bartiromo didn't follow up her original question with anything more than a "thank you" was that she was as stunned as the rest of us.

Yes, the candidate also misled about the details of his election violation on national television and media fact checkers duly called out the bait-and-switch after. Disclosing the possible conflict of interest in receiving a million dollars from Goldman Sachs (this Goldman Sachs) and Citibank while you're campaigning as a man of the people railing against the big bad establishment is not the same thing as disclosing the possible conflict of interest after you've been elected, a conflation the candidate nevertheless attempted to sell with a straight face during the debate. That's like a voter explaining they didn't properly register before they cast a ballot but did so afterwards, so it's all good.

That's not how it works.

Election disclosure laws are supposed to inform Americans before they vote so they can make an educated decision. In fact, this principle of mandated disclosure may have been the only reason Citizens United was allowed in the first place -- as a counterbalance to the obvious conflicts of interest the Supreme Court was about to tempt politicians with. The entire point behind the legal argument that led the conservatives on the Supreme Court to allow the 1% more unfiltered access to campaigning politicians was the idea that at least Americans would know who was potentially buying influence. In the case of Cruz, who rails against big money and the elite as a point of pride, such information may have been particularly interesting to the Tea Partiers who voted for him.

But again, here we are. A major presidential candidate seems to think either voters are idiots, or the media are.

So it's a challenge. The number is a cool million, easy for the typical news consumer to grasp. The case law and implementing disclosure regulations are cut and dry -- if you take money from a bank for your campaign, you have to identify the bank to the FEC. It boils down to the third problem of campaign finance reporting -- does the American public care? They say they do, over and over again, and the media keeps telling us this is an important part of American democracy, so what's the disconnect, if any?

With this ridiculously clear campaign finance violation on display for all to see, we're about to find out.

If media can't get the American public to understand why this sort of behavior, certainly not unique to Cruz, is a big problem, it's no longer the fault of the American public. They aren't the experts. It's the media's job to provide the expertise. But if the media can't effectively explain this one to its audience -- it's time to rethink how campaign finance reporting is done.

After all, Cruz is basically daring you.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/01/15/if-media-cant-explain-this-clear-campaign-finan/208009

US Republican Rand Paul has suspended his 2016 presidential bid after his small-government campaign failed to gain traction with voters.

The Kentucky senator was the second Republican candidate, behind former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, to drop out of the race since Monday's night's Iowa caucuses.

That contest launched the parties' process to nominate candidates for the November election.

"It's been an incredible honour to run a principled campaign for the White House," Senator Paul said in a statement.

"Today, I will end where I began, ready and willing to fight for the cause of liberty."

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-04/us-republican-rand-paul-suspends-2...

Rick Santorum, the deeply conservative former senator who won nearly a dozen contests in the 2012 race for the Republican nomination, is expected to announce Wednesday that he will suspend his latest and long-struggling run for the presidency.

read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/03/rick-santorum-to-drop-out-of-2016-presidential-race/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_santorum-245pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

From Paul Krugman

 

Ted Cruz had a teachable moment in Iowa, although he himself will learn nothing from it. A voter told Mr. Cruz the story of his brother-in-law, a barber who had never been able to afford health insurance. He finally got insurance thanks to Obamacare — and discovered that it was too late. He had terminal cancer, and nothing could be done.

The voter asked how the candidate would replace the law that might have saved his brother-in-law if it had been in effect earlier. Needless to say, all he got was boilerplate about government regulations and the usual false claims that Obamacare has destroyed “millions of jobs” and caused premiums to “skyrocket.”

For the record, job growth since the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect has been the best since the 1990s, and health costs have risen much more slowly than before.

So Mr. Cruz has a truth problem. But what else can we learn from this encounter? That the Affordable Care Act is already doing enormous good. It came too late to save one man’s life, but it will surely save many others. Why, then, do we hear not just conservatives but also many progressives trashing President Obama’s biggest policy achievement?

Part of the answer is that Bernie Sanders has chosen to make re-litigating reform, and trying for single-payer, a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. So some Sanders supporters have taken to attacking Obamacare as a failed system.

 

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/opinion/who-hates-obamacare.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

 

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Don't worry... Here in Australia we've had Medicare for more than 40 years. The present government of Liberal (CONservative) persuasion in its various incarnation over the years has been trying to destroy it ever since. Slowly but surely, they gnaw at it bit by bit, and with a change of government to Labor some bits are restored, but less and less... destroying medicare or Obamacare is a bad bad right wing policy... Good luck. 

After a disappointing sixth-place finish in the New Hampshire Republican primary Tuesday night, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will suspend his campaign for president, multiple outlets are reporting. CNN reported Wednesday morning that Christie is "a realist" who realized that he probably wouldn't qualify for the main stage in Saturday's GOP debate, and "also realized that the fundraising was going to dry up."

After the results came in Tuesday night, Christie told a crowd of supporters that his message was "stood for by a lot of folks in New Hampshire, just not enough. Not enough tonight. And that's okay." Christie said that after speaking with his wife, they'd decided to go back home to New Jersey on Wednesday to "take a deep breath, see what the final results are...and make a decision about how we move from here in this race."

 

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/chris-christie-suspending-campaign

 

The second question of the skeptics is: show me the money! Where is the cash to pay for free public college tuition and a single-payer healthcare system?

Sanders has said he would cover the $75 billion per year cost of his college reform program by imposing a tax on Wall Street speculation. He would almost certainly increase taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals as part of moving the tax code back to a more progressive, pre-Reagan structure. Everyone would pay a higher tax rate to cover Berniecare, though working-class people would pay less than they’d save.

At the risk of sounding like a Republican, there’s waste throughout the federal budget. There is, for example, no evidence that the NSA has ever done its job by preventing a single terrorist attack. Meanwhile, as Edward Snowden informed us, they’re spying on all our phone calls and emails. Shut them down; save $10 billion a year or more. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security could be trimmed to a fraction of its current size or eliminated, with its tiny portion of useful activities transferred to other agencies, including law enforcement.

Last year’s defense budget was nearly $600 billion, or 54% of discretionary federal spending. That’s more than the next nine countries combined, including China and Russia. Conservatively, at least half of that is spent on waste and fraud by DOD contractors, so there’s $300 billion right off the bat. I bet we could cut it 90% and still not have to worry about a foreign invasion, something that hasn’t happened since 1812.

These cuts could easily cover the several hundred billion shortfall between Bernie’s tax increase on the rich and the cost of his healthcare plan.

http://rall.com/2016/02/08/bernie-sanders-cut-defense-to-pay " target="_blank">http://rall.com/2016/02/08/bernie-sanders-cut-defense-to-pay

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The Devil's advocate:

Cutting US defence budget would raise unemployment figures by about 5 per cent to at least 11 per cent. Defence is the best way to employ young silly people who don't know what to do with themselves apart from robbing the local corner store.  Furthermore, imagine, all those profiteers made redundant from having no more wars to plunder the loots of the result thereof. Imagine the stock market plunge, as the market presently is relying on the gross sales of weapons to be blown up, thus replaced ad infinitum, in the near future in Syria or Woopwoopland. 

Save American by increasing the defence spending, funding more wars and arms manufacture, the only real manufacture left in the entire USA apart from Wall Street number crunching and Silicon Valley cooking chips ...

Mayhem would ensue...

 

South Carolina delivered another telling victory for billionaire businessman Donald Trump, who is gradually proving that his campaign is the real deal, while Hillary Clinton bounced backed in Nevada.

Key points:

• Donald Trump takes out Republican vote in South Carolina followed by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio
• Hillary Clinton wins Democratic vote in Nevada with 52.5 per cent to Bernie Sanders' 47.4 per cent
• Jeb Bush suspends campaign after placing fourth in Republican race

In the same week that Mr Trump denounced former president George W Bush and got into a media stoush with Pope Francis over his Christian faith, the brash contender again shocked the political world with another big win in South Carolina.

The win consolidated his reputation as "Teflon Trump" after the brash businessman secured one-third of the total vote and all 50 of the delegates up for grabs in South Carolina.

It also greatly increased the possibility that Mr Trump will become the eventual Republican presidential nominee; no-one has ever won both New Hampshire and South Carolina and failed to win the Republican nomination.

"It's tough, it's mean, it's nasty, it's vicious, it's beautiful," Mr Trump told supporters after his second consecutive win.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-21/bush-suspends-campaign-as-clinton-trump-take-caucuses/7187288

 

Should the Republicans decide to get rid of Trump, they have only few options. The best one would be to Tell Rubio to give up and let Cruz take his votes. That should do it.

 

by Andrew Bacevich

 

Once a self-identified conservative, New York Times columnist David Brooks has for some time now been engaged in a personal journey of sorts. To judge by a recent column bearing the title “The American Identity Crisis,” that journey has now concluded: Brooks has found a new home in the progressive camp. Yet where he has landed and how he got there invite reflection.

“For most of the past century,” his column begins, “human dignity had a friend — the United States of America.” After a brief check-the-block acknowledgment of our nation’s imperfections, Brooks returns to celebrating its achievements abroad, assigning to the United States primary credit for defeating the evil ideologies of the 20th century and thereby spreading peace, freedom, and democracy around the world.

This self-congratulatory interpretation of America’s recent past has long found favor not only among newspaper columnists, but also with politicians campaigning for high office, our current president not least among them. It is our national equivalent of sacred scripture—a secular version of the salvation history in which Christians profess to believe.

Alas, Brooks continues, “Then came Iraq and Afghanistan and America lost faith in itself and its global role.” The audacity of that sentence—equivalent perhaps to “Then came bin Laden and the Towers fell”—brought me up short. In the blink of an eye, context disappears as Brooks skirts past the question of how and why the United States enmeshed itself in two unwinnable wars. He chooses instead to focus on America losing its faith.

Pursuant to its global role, Brooks contends that until Iraq and Afghanistan “came,” the United States had shared with others “vital ideals” that define the American way of life. Those ideals include “democracy and capitalism,” of course: so far, so good. But Brooks’s inventory of operative ideals does not stop there. Also included are “feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice.” All of these together, Brooks writes, come “intertwined in a progressive package that puts individual dignity at the center.”

Credit Brooks with accurately describing the contents of that “progressive package,” particularly its present-day preoccupation with race, gender, and sexuality. Yet the conservative that Brooks once professed to be would have balked at the reference to “individual dignity.” In a progressive context, individual dignity is a euphemism. It is a leftwing equivalent of “free enterprise,” a term employed by some right-wingers to provide a moral gloss to policies that exalt market values over human values.

As a practical matter, today’s progressives have no intention of contenting themselves with mere dignity. They aim to redistribute power in ways that will play to their own preferences on matters related to race, gender, sexuality and a host of other issues. No surprise there: Politics ain’t beanbag.

Ultimately, the progressive camp that Brooks now inhabits seeks to dismantle existing limits on individual choice. It is intent on rendering obsolete and then destroying traditions and inherited practices that inhibit autonomy. Examples of traditions that have already been demolished are not hard to find: monogamy, two-parent families, marriage as a union til-death-do-us-part.

On that score, the team that Brooks has now joined is obviously winning. For that very reason, his departure should prompt some conservative soul-searching.

The actual locus of “The American Identity Crisis” to which Brooks’s essay alludes has nothing to do with reviving the missionary project of exporting American values to a world peopled with the likes of Iraqis and Afghans stubbornly clinging to their own traditions and perhaps less than impressed with our stories of how we defeated Nazi Germany and won the Cold War. Rather, the ongoing identity crisis has everything to do with resolving our own internal kulturkampf.

As an episode in that larger struggle, the defection of a famous New York Times columnist figures as a minor but telling event. Perhaps in jumping to the other side, Brooks is bowing to the inevitable. I am fully prepared to consider that possibility, even while having no intention of following his example.

Certainly the values that figure prominently in my own conception of conservatism—duty, obligation, and fidelity—have fallen out of fashion, except, of course, when they happen to coincide with personal preference. (It’s cool if you want to join the Marine Corps; it’s equally cool if I limit my military service to playing Call of Duty: Black Ops). As for the Republican Party, as long as it remains enamored with Donald Trump, it can have nothing useful to say on anything related to the values to which Americans in the present century should subscribe.

That Americans will resolve their crisis of identity any time soon appears improbable. Certainly no such resolution will occur in my own lifetime. In the meantime, the best we can hope for is a bit of breathing room to sort out our differences. This will be best achieved by avoiding more costly and needless wars.

Perhaps if David Brooks reflects a bit more on how Iraq and Afghanistan “came,” he will also revise his views on that score as well. We should welcome his thoughts.

 

 

Andrew Bacevich, TAC’s writer-at-large, is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. 

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/individual-dignity-and-the-progress-of-david-brooks/

 

Read from top. 

 

see also: where’s the money?...

 

 

assangex