The GOP Debate of December 15, 2015

While the debate was not a major change event I predict the further decline of Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina in the polls. The discussion on foreign affairs was beyond their understanding as reflected in their answers.

There were at least two answers at last night’s GOP debate that should disqualify these candidates as contenders for the presidency. Their supporters will overlook the remarks as if they had no consequence.

1. Chris Christy said he would enforce a no fly zone over Syria and would shoot down Russian aircraft that would challenge that enforcement even if it meant World War 3. In other words he would take the United States into war over Syria that could bring on worldwide devastation.

2. Donald Trump was asked “What’s your priority among our nuclear triad?” by Hugh Hewitt. Trump clearly did not understand the question because he launched into a diatribe into about he would have handled Syria and the Middle East.

Hewitt: “Of the three legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority? I want to go to Sen. Rubio after that and ask him.” Trump: “I think – I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.”

Senator Rubio new exactly what the question was about and informed everyone on the stage and in the audience.

 

I know that Rand Paul was out of step with the rest of the candidates but his answers were the best thought out.

The debate was primarily about hate and fear and who could best address those issues.  The candidates offered nothing positive.

Providing the Fighting Forces in the Middle East

Memorial Day is meant to honor those who sacrificed life, limb, body, mind, and soul in the wars that the United States has waged. It is the right thing to do.

Many older Americans remember WWII and to a lesser extent the Korean War as evidence that if the United States brings a military response to a situation the war will be won by America. We are the nation with the most advanced military hardware and we have soldiers that are second to none is the supporting evidence to confirm these beliefs. When it came to Vietnam we saw our views shattered.

The reason is obvious to me. The wars we won were almost unanimously supported by the people we helped. They fought along with us to obtain victory.

Vietnam was different. We fought but many of the South Vietnamese did not support our vision. That opinion is shared by many who were there. Bill Plante, who was a CBS correspondent in Vietnam had this to say this morning on Face the Nation. From the transcript, I marked in bold the words that caught my attention.

BILL PLANTE, CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT: When I first went there, Bob, in 1964, there were American advisers. We knew that they were helping out and sometimes actually fighting, but we basically bought the notion that they were there to help South Vietnamese.

And by the time I came back a second time in 1967, it was pretty apparent that the Americans were doing all the fighting and the South Vietnamese not doing much.

And the other thing was that what we were seeing in the field didn`t match what the government of the United States was saying both in Saigon and in Washington. Lyndon Johnson was fighting a limited war and they had to sell it to the American public as such, but you could just go on any battlefield or out in the country and see that the facts didn`t match the story.

So, we got what they called the credibility gap. Our — and Morley Safer used to wear a badge that said “I was ambushed at Credibility Gap.”

That brings us to ISIS and the war in Syria and Iraq. Reports appearing on the news just this past day tell and show the Iraqi army that was not outnumbered but were shown driving their vehicles with all their solders away from the battle for control of the city of Ramadi.

So President Obama wants the people of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other Arab states to put their armies on the ground to do the fighting. This would not be fighting for a day or a week but for an extended time, perhaps years. After all it’s their nations that are at risk.

John McCain, Lindsay Graham, John Bolton, and others would have the United States permanently stationed in the Middle East to protect nations that as of now do not want to commit their own citizens to a fight with ISIS. Until they do, why should the United States?

Say NO to New Free Trade Agreements

Are you all asleep?  Haven’t you noticed that all of your clothes are not made in America?  When did you see any item that was made in America? I have found a few but they are rare and have had only the smallest effect on our country.  Think Cutco Knives and American Apparel.   Call for technical help and you speak to someone in India or the Philippines.  Southern California Edison is reportedly bringing in Indian workers to be trained here, then return to their home country to take the jobs of those who did the training.  Honda and Whirlpool are just two of the many manufacturers who have built factories in Mexico that will save those companies millions of dollars in labor costs.  The average worker pay in a Mexican auto assembly plant is $5.64 per hour versus $27.78 per hour in the United States.  All of this is today, before a Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is put into place.  Where are the jobs that NAFTA was forecast to bring to America?

The jobs did come to America.  They just aren’t the jobs we had hoped for.  It’s called Logistics. That’s a fancy word for distribution and warehouse jobs.  Those are the jobs of truck drivers, unloading and loading trucks, putting away and pulling products using hand carts, fork lifts, and other warehouse equipment.  Those mostly poor paying jobs are going to the poorly educated including illegal aliens.

Democrats talk a good line but they need the contributions that big business supplies.  Hillary Clinton, as of this date, refuses to take a position on the TPP.  For reasons that are a mystery to me many people believe the Democratic Party is concerned about the shrinking American Middle Class.  There is no evidence that either political party cares one iota.  They do care about money for their next campaign.  Everyone needs to put pressure on their representative (congressman) to stop sending jobs out of the country.

A Blueprint for Middle-Class Economics

This is a DOA (Dead on arrival) plan that has little to no chance of passing into law. Frankly it does nothing to stop the wealthiest in our country from becoming even wealthier.  The president seems to be unaware that his political party is now in the minority.  This is all about his legacy.  His ideas will be prominently posted in his library.

Released statement by the president of the United States, Barack Obama

America’s resurgence is real. With a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production, we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth.

Now we have to choose what we want that future to look like. Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and rising chances for everyone who makes the effort?

In my State of the Union Address last week, I focused on making sure middle-class economics helps more Americans get ahead in the new economy. As a country, we need to do more to make working families’ paychecks go farther, give Americans of every age the chance to upgrade their skills so they earn higher wages, and build the world’s most competitive economy for our businesses.

On Monday, I will present Congress with my budget, a plan for bringing middle-class economics into the 21st Century. First, I’m proposing we make the kinds of investments we need to continue to grow our economy and enhance our national security. We would establish new advanced manufacturing hubs, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and lead a new age of precision medicine that uses cutting-edge science to find new treatments for diseases like diabetes and cancer. We would give working parents a chance to get ahead with guaranteed paid sick leave, and we’d give Americans of all ages a chance to earn new skills by making community college free for responsible students. And we should invest in a 21st century military to confront global challenges with strong and sustained American leadership. These proposals are pragmatic; they’re the types of things both parties should be able to support.

But where Democrats and Republicans often disagree is in how to pay for these kinds of ideas. I’m proud that since I took office, we’ve experienced the fastest period of sustained deficit reduction since the end of World War II. My budget will build on that progress with reforms to health programs, our tax code, and our broken immigration system. It would eliminate the trust fund loophole that allows the wealthiest Americans to avoid paying taxes on their unearned income, and use the savings to cut taxes for middle class families. If Congress passes my budget, our country would meet the key test of fiscal sustainability, with our debt declining as a share of our GDP.

Of course, to make these common-sense investments in our future without adding to our deficits, we need to turn the page on the manufactured crises that have defined the debates over our budget in recent years. Our recovery was held back when Congress shut down the government and risked the full faith and credit of the United States. We can’t afford to do that again. And we have to build on the bipartisan budget agreement I signed in 2013 that helped us end some of the arbitrary, across-the-board budget cuts known as “sequestration.” Last year’s agreement helped boost our economic growth without undermining fiscal responsibility. We were able to invest in key national priorities while cutting our deficits to their lowest level since 2007.

In order to get wages and incomes rising faster, we need to take the next step. That’s why my Budget will fully reverse the sequestration cuts for domestic priorities in 2016. It will match those investments with equal dollar increases for defense funding. If Congress rejects my plan and refuses to undo these arbitrary cuts, it will threaten our economy and our military. Investments in key areas will fall to their lowest level in ten years, adjusted for inflation, putting American research, education, infrastructure, and national security at risk. But if Congress joins me, we can make sure that ending sequestration is fully paid for by cutting inefficient spending and closing tax loopholes.

The Budget I’m sending to Congress is a blueprint for success in the new economy. I know that there are Republicans in Congress who disagree with my approach, and I look forward to hearing their ideas for how we can pay for what the middle class needs to grow. But what we can’t do is simply pretend that things like child care or college aren’t important, or that there’s nothing we can do to help middle class families get ahead.

Because we still have work to do. As a country, we have made it through some hard times. But we’ve laid a new foundation. We’ve got a new future to write. And I am eager to get to work.

Follow Barack Obama on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/BarackObama

Legal Bother

The Weekly Sift

If the moral calculation is simply, “Did the ends justify the means?” it’s hard to see why we even bother with laws in the first place.

Chris Hayes (Wednesday)

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

The United Nations Convention Against Torture (1984)

Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner] … I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require … for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.

George Washington (1775)

This week’s featured post is “5 Things to Understand About the Torture Report“. A couple of Sift milestones: I moved the Sift…

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Meet the Press Nerd Facts

Meet the Press Transcript – December 7, 2014

Chuck Todd - Meet the PressHOST CHUCK TODD:

Nerd screen time about Congress and wealth. The majority of Americans, of course, think members of Congress are out of touch with average citizens. 81%, according to Gallup’s most recent survey. In fact, average Americans don’t think members of Congress understand their needs or concerns.

And that members of Congress are too beholden to special interests. Well, there’s a big reason why our representatives here in Washington appear to have a hard time relating to most of you. And it starts with a massive wealth gap. Let’s take a look at the numbers. First of all, members of Congress make a lot more money than the average American.

Typical household income, $54,000 annually. The annual salary for each member of Congress, it’s nearly $175,000, three times as much. And oh, by the way, that’s not household income. This doesn’t include spousal income. You included that, it’s even much higher. Not surprisingly, members of Congress are also doing better than average Americans when it comes to seeing their wealth grow.

On average, media net worth for average Americans grew just under 4% annually from 2004 to 2012. In that same period of time, members of Congress saw their income increase at a 15% clip annually. The result? By 2013, the average 55 to 65 year old, that’s about the average age of a member of Congress, had a net worth of just over $165,000.

And that includes real estate holdings. The average net worth for a member of Congress? Just over a million dollars. And that does not include real estate holdings. They don’t have to report that on their forms. If they did, that number would even be higher. All of which makes this next figure not so surprising after you see all these numbers. And that is, millionaire households.

Overall, nearly 6% of households in America are millionaires. And that number’s up, by the way. Members of Congress? Over half of them, remember there are 535 of them, over half of them are millionaires. So you wonder why the economy, income inequity, all of these issues, you don’t feel like Congress quite understands the urgency of it, this is all you need to know. Half of them are millionaires. We’ll be right back.

California Bullet Train is a Path to the Future

Driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles is a dreary six hour experience. Most people travel inland to use Interstate 5. It is a straight and boring ride. In the summer the heat in the Central Valley and the drive to the top of the Tehachapi Mountains (called the Grape Vine) causes many cars to overheat. The drive from Los Angeles does not include the steep climb but isn’t any fun either.

Today the flight from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to San Francisco International Airport takes about 1½ hours.  Airplane seats are narrow, poorly padded, and there is no leg room.  The time for check in and clearance through security is about 1½ hours. American Airlines recommends check in “At least 90 minutes prior to departure when checking bags.” Travel to LAX is about 1½ hours. Thus a 1½ hour flight requires 4½ hours. The flight costs $124.00 round trip. Currently the travel time by rail is about 12 3/4 hours.   Obviously train travel is not acceptable to most people as the train does not actually go into San Francisco. The last leg of the trip is a bus ride from Emeryville across San Francisco Bay.

The Bullet Train project plans that by 2029 the system will run from San Francisco to the Los Angeles basin in under three hours at speeds capable of over 200 miles per hour. If the train cost is competitive with air travel we will see a new era for travel. We will be able to reach the center of each city without a special effort. The airlines will cut their fares to continue drawing patrons.

Despite the naysayers, I believe Governor Jerry Brown is correct in perusing this project.

CA Bullet Train Map

Making Goodluck Look Good

Juju Films

President Goodluck Jonathan President Goodluck Jonathan

Nigeria is painted with the same paintbrush as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia by mainstream media, religious leaders who pedal fear in exchange for riches, and misinformed Nigerians in the Diaspora who trumpet everything wrong with Nigeria.

It is assumed that America can effectively fight terrorism within their borders, yet there was the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, Boston Marathon bombing and several mass murders of children in schools. Gov. Rick Perry high on Texas tea announced how prepared Texas was to effectively fight Ebola yet many costly mistakes were made.

I have no doubt that Nigerians are exceptional professionals and the men and women of Nigerian Armed and Security forces are no different. What we have always lacked is real leadership. Nigerian politicians spent years ignoring the threat of Boko Haram due in part to a mix of ignorance and arrogance in Aso Rock and the fact…

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