Brennan is not a national security threat. He is in fact a role model for patriotism in its highest form.

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Just Grow Up

Bottom line  is that it doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong six months ago, a year ago, two years ago. What does matter is the we absolutely stop trying to travel forward while keeping our eyes on the rear-view-mirror.

The next day an insecure U.S. president – apparently terrified of being held accountable for his overall personal behavior and his failure to model wise governance and genuine love of country –  pulled Brennan’s security clearance.

The truth of the matter is that were a former U.S. President still living, he would have repudiated the sitting president brutally.

Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt, How to Criticize the President

“Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where the people are themselves free. Our Government is the servant of the people, whereas in Germany it is the master of the people. This is because the American people are free and the German people are not free.

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole.

Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right.

Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”

The Story Behind Jeff Flake’s Teddy Roosevelt Quote on Why Criticizing the President Matters

Bottom line  is that it doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong six months ago, a year ago, two years ago. What does matter is the we absolutely stop trying to travel forward while keeping our eyes on the rear-view-mirror.

Just Grow Up

let’s be real and honest and recognize … the man has lost all credibility with almost 70 percent of the country.

Arthur Ruger 2 Comments

Here’s a meme image that presents a stark reality of President Trump’s situation vis a vis all the voters with whom he needs to accomplish a positive referendum in November and avoid the blue tsunami building almost hour by hour.

His tweets, his speeches, his criticisms of others, his change-the-subject tactics aimed to distract from where fate is taking him … all these and more … let’s be real and honest and recognize … the man has lost all credibility with almost 70 percent of the country.

He cannot say anything that will persuade otherwise. He cannot dodge the legal runaway train coming directly at him.

He drives his own staff and administration crazy with his selfish and self-interested performances.

Our sitting President has said and done more than any other person or group to make himself into the silliest president, silliest pretender and above all silliest non-role-model any of us have or will ever see on our national stage.

You’d better believe that the GOP is running scared. They have no new ideas, just the same old talking points. I’ve seen Congresswoman McMorris Rodger’s recent re-election fundraising letters. They are full of cliched dog whistles and transparent assumptions that the recipients are gullible sheep who are dumb and will respond to the whistle cliches.

The anti-liberal anti-progressive memes seem to be slowing down or growing more hysterical in their messages and it seems to me due to the fact that Trump is now such an epitome of silliness, no meme can make a point supporting Trump, MAGA or GOP by attacking past presidents, candidates and incumbents of the other parties.

Qanon now typifies the MAGA-ite in the street who makes the most noise. There is no mystical power in the nonsensical rumor that consitutes Qanon.

That’s all it is folks is noise.

There is nothing of socially redeeming value coming out of the White House, out of the GOP, not out of the conservative think tanks and certainly not in the streets where the media had to struggle to even make a little hay about the Unite The Right handful of demonstrators last weekend.

We cannot demonstrate wisdom by deferring in any way to the antics of the narcissist who has so badly besmirched his own party. Perhaps one day organized progressives will celebrate a holiday honoring the man who rode his own ineptitude into what will be a profile in foolishness as his legacy.

He will be remembered only for the messes he created that the rest of us will have had to clean up.

A fair and interesting article as to why possibly some 62% of U.S. Mormons voted Republican.

Arthur Ruger 2 Comments

Image result for mormons and liberals

This is my culture. A fair and interesting article as to why possibly some 62% of U.S. Mormons voted Republican. I have frequently encountered the “S” word among Mormons who are willing to talk politics.

Commentary: Mormons hate socialism, but only in the United States

The main reason Mormons in the United States rail against anything socialist is because so much of their “doctrine” is derived from the Republican Party.

Republicans hate any form of universal health care, not because it’s ineffective but because it’s socialist. Yet Mormons in England, and France, and Japan, and all the other countries with such programs, don’t have to denounce their country’s health care system and insist on for-profit health care in order to obtain temple recommends, do they?

 

“When it comes to citizenship, I believe no one gets to stay on the sidelines.”

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Hate

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)

I agree with and endorse the article written by retired Marine Scott Cooper the the leader of Veterans for American Ideals.

 

“I cannot just watch these racists with disgust from afar. I’m working with my fellow veterans to champion our values at home now that we’ve taken our uniforms off. When it comes to citizenship, I believe no one gets to stay on the sidelines.”

“Veterans for American Ideals, which I’m proud to lead, works to champion the same values at home that motivated us to serve in the first place. We are building an anti-Charlottesville vision of America, rooted in strengthening our communities and forming relationships with our neighbors of all walks of life.”

One of my role models

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“Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself” — Robert Green Ingersoll

Among other things he spent some of his time trying to restore Thomas Paine’s reputation after a large gaggle of prominent 19th-century Christian ministers cursed and sullied Paine for what he wrote in Age of Reason. Paine said what he believed and Christianity’s hurt feelings made him a pariah. Paine died a pauper.

Washington’s Fifth Congressional District election is becoming a microcosm of what what is slouching toward the G O P’s Bethlehem with every party misstep.

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I know, I’m showing no mercy. I believe that if the narcissist-in-chief and his party are not on the run, they are on a path getting to that point.

The party continues to lose credibility and cave to it’s white nationalist dominators. The G O P is accomplishing very little of socially or civically redeeming value right now – trying to survive headline after headline. All they can do in every direction is damage control, not effectively manage the country.

Washington’s Fifth Congressional District election is becoming a microcosm of what what is slouching toward the G O P Bethlehem with every party misstep.

Boomers who paid attention 45 years ago will remember the famous Saturday Night Massacre.

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Devin Nunes

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Susan Walsh / AP)

I really like Shawn Vestal’s writing in the Spokesman-Review.

Shawn Vestal: Ruckelshaus reminds us what Nunes and company have forgotten
Boomers who paid attention 45 years ago will remember the famous Saturday Night Massacre.

Forty-five years ago, the president tried to fire an independent special prosecutor who was investigating him.

Two men of principle – the attorney general and his deputy – refused. They quit rather than carry out President Richard Nixon’s clearly improper order, an order later ruled illegal.

They stood on principle against a president who had none.

The question of principle versus political self-interest is hotly relevant in light of the release of comments made by the president’s chief congressional justice obstructer, Devin Nunes, at a recent Spokane Club fundraiser for 5th District Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. Nunes talked about how important it is for the GOP to keep Congress in order to “clear” the president, and his desire – which is surely no secret – to impeach the deputy attorney general, Ron Rosenstein.

“If Sessions won’t unrecuse and Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones, which is really the danger,” he can be heard saying on the recording, first aired by “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

“I mean, we have to keep all these seats. We have to keep the majority.

On the recording, Nunes talks about blocking the Mueller investigation as if he were plotting an advertising campaign. Just political spadework. Nunes has been shoveling continually as the chief misleader in Congress on behalf of the president’s frantic “witch hunt” hysteria.

He’s done all this, remember, about an investigation into the possibility that the president teamed up with a dictator who was manipulating our elections – a possibility that seems less preposterous every day. Even if turns out to be nothing, though, the only way you could know right now that the president should be cleared is by having inoculated yourself against hearing the facts when they emerge.

Further down …

“The question of principle versus political self-interest is hotly relevant in light of the release of comments made by the president’s chief congressional justice obstructer, Devin Nunes, at a recent Spokane Club fundraiser for 5th District Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. Nunes talked about how important it is for the GOP to keep Congress in order to “clear” the president, and his desire – which is surely no secret – to impeach the deputy attorney general, Ron Rosenstein.

‘If Sessions won’t unrecuse and Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones, which is really the danger,’ he can be heard saying on the recording, first aired by “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

‘I mean, we have to keep all these seats. We have to keep the majority.’

On the recording, Nunes talks about blocking the Mueller investigation as if he were plotting an advertising campaign. Just political spadework. Nunes has been shoveling continually as the chief misleader in Congress on behalf of the president’s frantic “witch hunt” hysteria.

He’s done all this, remember, about an investigation into the possibility that the president teamed up with a dictator who was manipulating our elections – a possibility that seems less preposterous every day. “