The Red White and Blue Pill
Lindsey Graham: Iraq And Syria ‘Coming Here’ To U.S. Mainland If Obama Doesn’t Go To War
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned on Sunday that militants in Iraq and Syria would attack the U.S. mainland if President Barack Obama did not immediately take military action to stop them.
I guess we can assume that all those Republicans that called on Obama to attack ISIS will now rally around the president? Probably not.
Explaining the GOP Reagan cult
the outsize Republican idolatry of Reagan is explained in part by the fact that there’s no one else in their history of whom they can really approve. The Bushes are a bad memory for most, Ford was a non-entity and Nixon was Nixon. Eisenhower looks pretty good on most historical rankings, but he’s anathema to movement conservatives: Eisenhower Republicans were what are now called RINOs.
Never thought of that but it totally makes sense. They must compare everyone to Reagan because there is no one else they can compare to.
Rand Paul: GOP Can’t ‘Completely Flip’ On Gay Marriage
He went on to say that when it comes to the GOP, “the party can’t become the opposite of what it is” on social matters.
Paul is basically admitting that once the homophobes and bigots in the GOP base start dying off, the GOP will have to change its stance in the culture wars. Liberals have been saying this since the start of the southern strategy.
Rich Kid, Poor Kid: For 30 Years, Baltimore Study Tracked Who Gets Ahead
a study published in June suggests that the things that really make the difference — between prison and college, success and failure, sometimes even life and death — are money and family.
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They found that a child’s fate is in many ways fixed at birth — determined by family strength and the parents’ financial status. The kids who got a better start — because their parents were married and working — ended up better off. Most of the poor kids from single-parent families stayed poor.
At this point this a typical story about how poverty self perpetuates. Bad options, bad choices leading to bad results.
Then I got to this part:
The researchers found that more affluent white men in the study reported the highest frequency of drug abuse and binge drinking, yet they still had the most upward mobility.
Great options, bad choices, great results. How do you explain that?
Charles Koch: The people I pay agree with me, so should you.
According to George Mason University’s Mercatus Center,
calculated the Competitive Enterprise Institute
Mr. Koch failed to mention that he funds the people he is quoting. I for one am not surprised the people he pays to reach the conclusions he supports are in total agreement with him.
C.I.A. Hires Yossarian to Censor Torture Report
In Joseph Heller’s anti-war satire, “Catch 22,” the hero, Yossarian, is assigned to a censorship detail. He amuses himself by deleting all the adverbs and adjectives from soldiers’ letters, then all the articles, then everything but the articles, and so on. His job was to delete details that threatened operational security. The result was gibberish. It seems the Central Intelligence Agency was inspired by Yossarian’s example.
This will eventually come out and like always, the coverup will be worse than the crime.
Fox News Hasn’t Mentioned the GOP Report That Says There is No Benghazi Scandal (Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
CEO pay for performance: This graph shows why it’s a sham.
I think it’s debatable if stock price is the best way to judge CEO performance, let alone the only way, but this is a response to a really odd claim from Businessweek that attempts to link the two.
CIA admits to spying on US Senate computer network
Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between SSCI (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) and the CIA in 2009
This will go not be investigated because the GOP is too busy being outraged by Obama’s fictional abuses of power.
Can we start discussing Israel’s actions as possibly motivated by a little more than pure defense yet? Can we agree that it’s possible to be critical of Israeli overreach without being opposed to Israel’s right to exist? The Times of Israel published an article on “when genocide is permissible.” Here’s their funder – Vox
