Random Politics & Religion #00

I've got two friends from college that pump it out pretty frequently. One conservative, one liberal. I occasionally toss them a comment.

I shy away from politics on FB these days, though I will repost the science vs. pseudoscience nonsense, because science.

I seriously wish the "Food Babe" would *** go away.

But yeah. You guys get all my political banter. Lucky you.

Did you know there are bacteria in your body?!? Who put them there?!? Did you ever give consent to this?!?!?!?!

Did you know there are bacteria in your body?!? Who put them there?!? Did you ever give consent to this?!?!?!?!

Did you know that the Una Bomber was considered a genius till he moved to the woods and start letter bombing people !

He spent too much time thinking about math meth and living in the woods !

Plus the anarchy probably didn't help.

I don't know if I lived alone in the woods for an extended period of time...I'd probably go crazy.

I'd probably go crazy.

it'd be a short trip.

BRING BACK ICQ.

Don't worry about the ACA guys. Obama just gave it an 8/10. Says there's room for improvement.

Vladimir Putin is facing a problem few could have anticipated: The ruble is becoming too strong.

Last year’s worst-performing major currency is this year’s best and while that’s buoying the nation’s bonds, driving yields to the lowest in four months, it’s also crimping Russia’s export revenue. Even though oil is little changed in dollars this year, the price when converted to rubles has plunged to the lowest since 2011.

The currency rout in 2014 helped Russia to keep its budget deficit within 1 percent of gross domestic product as the ruble weakened in lockstep with a 50 percent slump in oil. Now, with the cease-fire in Ukraine and the allure of higher-yielding assets attracting investors to ruble debt, the government is seeing the opposite effect.

The current ruble level is already uncomfortable for the budget considering the oil price in rubles is already low,” Vladimir Bragin, head of research at Alfa Capital in Moscow, said by phone on Thursday. “In order to reach macroeconomic stability, Russia needs to limit its budget deficit and a weaker ruble is an easy way to do that.”

The ruble’s 12 percent gain this month is making it easier for central bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina to push ahead with rate cuts this year after she hoisted the benchmark to 17 percent in December to stem the currency’s slide. Nabiullina lowered the rate by 3 percentage points so far in 2015.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff ordered an internal investigation Thursday into an arrest caught on NBC Los Angeles' NewsChopper4 video that showed deputies beating a suspect when they caught up to him following a wild desert chase on horseback.

Aerial footage showed the man falling off the horse he was suspected of stealing during the pursuit in San Bernardino County Thursday afternoon.

He then appeared to be stunned with a Taser by a sheriff's deputy and fall to the ground with his arms outstretched. Two deputies immediately descended on him and appeared to punch him in the head and knee him in the groin, according to the footage, reviewed several times by NBC4.

The group surrounding the man grew to 11 sheriff's deputies.
Deputies Beat Man After Horse Chase.

In the two minutes after the man was stunned with a Taser, it appeared deputies kicked him 17 times, punched him 37 times and struck him with batons four times. Thirteen blows appeared to be to the head. The horse stood idly nearby.

The man did not appear to move from his position lying on the ground for more than 45 minutes. He did not appear to receive medical attention while deputies stood around him during that time.

Another cop story of excessive force. Can't wait to see nausi's defense of this one, remember how the shooting in South Carolina was fabricated? Yeah. When are we gonna admit America has a real problem here between the police and the public.

A middle school student who said he was just trying to play a prank on a teacher he didn't like was charged with a cybercrime Wednesday after authorities said he hacked into his school's secure computer network.

The Pasco County Sheriff's Office has charged Domanik Green, an eighth-grader at Paul R. Smith Middle School, with an offense against a computer system and unauthorized access, a felony. Sheriff Chris Nocco said Thursday that Green logged onto the school's network on March 31 using an administrative-level password without permission. He then changed the background image on a teacher's computer to one showing two men kissing.

One of the computers Green, 14, accessed also had encrypted 2014 FCAT questions stored on it, though the sheriff and Pasco County School District officials said Green did not view or tamper with those files.

"Even though some might say this is just a teenage prank, who knows what this teenager might have done," Nocco said.

But Green, interviewed at home, said students would often log into the administrative account to screen-share with their friends. They'd use the school computers' cameras to see each other, he said.

Green had previously received a three-day suspension for accessing the system inappropriately. Other students also got in trouble at the time, he said. It was a well-known trick, Green said, because the password was easy to remember: a teacher's last name. He said he discovered it by watching the teacher type it in.

Green said that on the morning in question, he accessed the computer that stored the FCAT files and, realizing that computer didn't have a camera, found another.

"So I logged out of that computer and logged into a different one and I logged into a teacher's computer who I didn't like and tried putting inappropriate pictures onto his computer to annoy him," Green said.

The teacher he was targeting was out that day. Instead, the substitute teacher saw the picture and reported it to the school's administration.

The teen's mother, Eileen Foster, said she understands her son did something wrong, but doesn't think he needed to be arrested. Also, she said, it shouldn't have been so easy for students to access the system.

The school district is in the process of changing the network password, district spokeswoman Linda Cobbe said.

The sheriff said Green's case should be a warning to other students: "If information comes back to us and we get evidence (that other kids have done it), they're going to face the same consequences," Nocco said.

Green was released on Wednesday from Land O'Lakes Detention Center into the custody of his mother. He'll likely be granted pretrial intervention by a judge, sheriff's detective Anthony Bossone said.

Green also received a 10-day school suspension. It's unclear if he'll return to Paul R. Smith to complete the school year after the suspension.

U.S. foreign policy is a bipartisan fiasco. George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies gave the American people Iraq, the gift that keeps on giving. Barack Obama has proved to be a slightly more reluctant warrior, but he is taking the country back into Iraq.

Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, appears never to have met a war that he didn’t want Americans to fight. Hillary Clinton, the unannounced Democratic front-runner for 2016, supported her husband’s misbegotten attempt at nation-building in Kosovo and led the drive for war in Libya, which is violently unraveling.

Most of Clinton’s potential GOP opponents share Washington’s bomb, invade, and occupy consensus. The only exception is Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He stands alone advocating a foreign policy which reflects the bitter, bloody lessons of recent years.

The Islamic State of Syria and the Levant is the latest result of Washington’s incessant and counterproductive meddling in the Middle East. Nowhere has U.S. policy been more disastrous. Indeed, what intervention, under Republican or Democratic administration, has worked well in that region in the last three or so decades?

Support for the brutal Shah helped trigger Islamist rule in Iran. That led Washington to support Iraq in its invasion of Iran. That encouraged Baghdad to invade Kuwait, causing the U.S. to attack Iraq. That was followed by decades of sanctions and bombing after the war nominally ended.

Against Baghdad the U.S. also stationed troops in Saudi Arabia. That helped spur al-Qaeda. Which launched the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That caused Washington to spend some 13 years nation-building in Central Asia and served as the excuse to invade Iraq. The latter led to bloody sectarian conflict, empowered Iran, created a jihadist training ground, and spawned the precursor to ISIL. Which now threatens to destabilize much of the Middle East.

Along the way Washington backed rebels in Syria, promoting the rise of the very same ISIL. The U.S. blew up Libya, leaving another national wreck, fueling Islamic extremism, and dispersing weapons region-wide. Decades of support for dictatorship in Egypt ended with short-lived Islamic rule and now even more brutal dictatorship. American presidents routinely embraced the Saudi royals even as Riyadh promoted radical Islamic theology around the globe and repression in next-door Bahrain. Washington demanded the Palestinian elections which brought Hamas to power in Gaza. America was identified with the most controversial Israeli government policies.

What more could possibly have gone wrong?

But the usual suspects are calling for more intervention: more funding, more arms, more bombing, more combat, more war. A few even urge more boots on the ground. This time everything will go well. This time America’s objectives will be achieved. This time peace will reign. This time the lion will lie down with the lamb.

This is the Obama administration’s position. Although a reluctant interventionist, the president apparently plans months of limited bombing strikes and various training/humanitarian ground missions in Iraq, to be followed, possibly, with “offensive” military action. While fighting ISIL in that nation he plans to help it in Syria by increasing U.S. efforts to overthrow the Assad regime.

Hillary Clinton has begun maneuvering for 2016 by running to Obama’s right. Most dramatically, she turned on the Syria policy that she articulated and implemented, declaring that Washington should have armed the opposition much earlier. We are to believe that if only the people who brought us the Libyan imbroglio had the chance in Syria they would have given the right weapons to the right insurgents at the right time. The result would have been a united, democratic Syria with Islamists staying home and accepting the new order. It sounds like a Hollywood fantasy.

She consistently promoted a militarist policy in the Balkans and Middle East. She advocated war against Serbia, backed the Iraq invasion (a vote she repudiated only under political pressure in the 2008 campaign), and took a hawkish position on virtually every issue within the Obama administration: more troops for Afghanistan, continued military presence in Iraq, little compromise with Iran, war in Libya. While she mocked the president’s mantra of “Don’t do stupid stuff,” she spent her career doing just that.

Instead of offering an alternative leading Republicans are all in for war, more war, forever war. The dual donkeys of the apocalypse, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, naturally have been advocating that America go to war in both Syria and Iraq. The two also are hardliners toward Moscow and Tehran—in 2008 McCain actually sang a little ditty about bombing Iran. The question is, where don’t they want to go to war or risk war? It’s hard to say.

While McCain is only a spectral presence from presidential campaigns past and no one talks of Graham for anything, most plausible Republican candidates are running toward the interventionist sideline. They blame Obama for Iraq even though it was George W. Bush who invaded that nation and failed to win Iraqi approval for a permanent U.S. garrison. Said Texas Sen. Ted Cruz: “what’s happening in Iraq is the latest manifestation of the failures of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee wanted a status of forces agreement (and presumably troops) for Iraq and arms for the Kurds. He called Obama “naïve” and accused the latter of guessing wrong in Egypt, Iran, Libya, and Syria, even though the president acted on the traditional Republican script in all four cases: support for dictatorship, more sanctions and threats of war, war, and support for an insurgency dominated by radicals, respectively.

New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie has ostentatiously joined the most hawkish GOP elements. In March he gave a speech highlighted by the usual trite interventionist aphorisms about leadership, such as that American should “realize and act upon once again its indispensable place in the world.” Apparently that means 70 years after World War II and 60 years after the Korean War Americans still must pay to defend rich allies in Europe and Asia and engage in social engineering throughout the world. Yet Christie called Rand Paul’s philosophy “a very dangerous thought.”

Florida’s Marco Rubio has advocated military action against ISIL: “going after their command and control structure, that involves their ability to transit fighters and weapons and fuel and food and ammunition from their safe havens in Syria.” In recent years he’s given several speeches attacking the usual “isolationist” straw man (defined as not wanting to immediately bomb, invade, and occupy other nations at first provocation) and offering the usual meaningless blather about American “leadership.” Naturally we have to keep subsidizing our prosperous and populous allies in Europe, which shouldn’t prevent us from subsidizing even more our prosperous and populous allies in Asia. At least Rubio disclaimed interest in “being involved in 15 wars,” but he supported the usual plethora of recent interventionist disasters and disasters to come: war in Libya, more involvement in Syria, and now combat in Iraq.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz also pushed a strongly hawkish agenda while arguing that “It’s not the job of the U.S. military to do nation building or produce democratic utopias.” He explicitly placed himself between Senators Paul and McCain. But that isn’t saying much, since Cruz argued that America “has a responsibility to defend our values,” in practice an open-ended justification for war. Although he opposed bombing Syrian government forces he endorsed airstrikes against ISIL while blaming the president for its rise, suggested that a future president could repudiate any agreement reached with Tehran, and refused to offer an opinion on the wisdom of the original Iraq invasion. Cruz’s stance on Ukraine appears naively confrontational—accusing Obama of “weakness” and appeasement—despite America’s limited interests at stake.

Last month Texas Gov. Rick Perry jumped in with what Daniel Larison called “the usual hawkish combination of threat inflation, fear-mongering, lazy references to ‘isolationism,’ and stale Reagan nostalgia.” Paul was an isolationist, ISIL posed a “profound threat … to the United States and the world,” the U.S. should go back to war in Iraq, said Perry. Of course, the latter felt the need to decry “military adventurism,” and he acknowledged that “there are no good options in Iraq or Syria.” But in 2008 he endorsed Rudy Giuliani, most notable for no-nothing jingoism, and four years later when Perry ran for president he surrounded himself with architects of Bush’s disastrous foreign policy. Perry said Iran and North Korea were imminent threats and worried about the rise of India. Michael Goldfarb approvingly said of Perry “you have to assume he’d shoot first and ask questions later.”

Dramatically misguided was the latter’s contention that “isolationism”—in contrast to the promiscuous interventionism of the last three decades which has spawned so many vicious attacks—threatened to increase terrorism. Noted Bruce Fein, a former Reagan aide, “Perry’s indiscriminate bellicosity would create terrorists against the United States in places where they do not now exist—a strategy indistinguishable from stupidly poking a hornet’s nest with a bayonet.”

Underlying the torrent of Republican criticism of Paul is fear. The American people are tired of incessant war-mongering by the Washington elite. Paul rightly noted that “The country is moving in my direction.” That’s scary if your political future is tied to policies that have failed so flagrantly and frequently.

The GOP is like the royal Bourbon dynasty in France, which, said one-time Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, “had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Sen. McCain called Paul a “wacko bird.” Former Vice President *** Cheney, a co-author of the Iraq horror story, said “isolationism is crazy” in response to a question about Rand Paul. The former’s daughter, and failed Senate candidate, Liz Cheney said Paul is “dangerous.” Flaky uber-hawk Rep. Peter King—who dislikes terrorists except of the Irish variety—complained that Paul was unconcerned about Islamic terrorism. Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s official neoconservative blogger, has attacked Rand Paul more often than she has criticized Barack Obama.

While Paul currently is the only potential presidential GOP alternative to Republican extremists on foreign policy, he’s not his father: Ron Paul took a strong, principled, and predictable stance against Washington’s relentless war-making in all its forms. Despite the routine invocations of peace, the U.S. has been the most war-like nation since the end of the Cold War. And most of the conflicts, from the Balkans to Libya to Syria, had little relevance to fundamental U.S. security interests. Terrorist attacks on America, though monstrous and immoral, were mostly blowback from prior maladroit American interventions—bombing other peoples, occupying other lands. In Congress and while running for president Paul pere relentlessly attacked all of these, without heed for the political consequences.

Paul fils is more cautious in approach and moderate in position. On ISIL, for instance, he opposed sending in ground forces but opined: “I’m not saying I’m completely opposed to helping with arms or maybe even bombing, but I am concerned that ISIL is big and powerful because we protected them in Syria for a year.” It’s a stance little different from that of the Obama administration at the moment, though the latter likely will be drawn in inexorably by constant pressure to do more. On occasion Paul’s attempt to reassure the interventionist Right has created a perception of inconstancy and even pandering.

Nevertheless, he forthrightly takes on the mindless war-mongering which has consumed much of the GOP elite. He asserted that “when bombast becomes policy it can have long and disastrous consequences.” In particular, he added, “The let’s-intervene-and-consider-the-consequences-later crowd left us with more than 4,000 Americans dead, over two million refugees and trillions of dollars in debt.” In citing President Ronald Reagan’s maxim of “peace through strength,” Paul noted some Republicans “have forgotten the first part of the sentence: That peace should be our goal even as we build our strength.”

This point is critical. The American people are tired of their sons, brothers, fathers, and uncles—and increasingly daughters, sisters, mothers, and aunts too—being treated as gambit pawns in an endless series of global chess games, to be sacrificed whenever folks in Washington dream up a grand new crusade. As Paul asked Perry: “How many Americans should send their sons and daughters to die for a foreign country, a nation the Iraqis won’t defend for themselves?”

More likely than not, the Democratic Party presidential nominee in 2016 will be Hillary Clinton, the perfect representative of the Clinton-Bush-Obama foreign policy consensus—of constant intervention and war. The American people are desperate for an alternative. The best way for Republicans to lose again would be to nominate someone who represents the same failed policy. If the GOP abandons the bipartisan War Party the political game will change radically. A reform movement has begun in the House—Walter Jones, Justin Amash, and John Duncan, for instance. But among potential presidential nominees only Rand Paul so far is charting a different course. Will others join him?