Matt Dillahunty of Atheist Experience fame has more than once asked a caller, “How did you determine that God is the good one and Satan is the bad one?” That question was made particularly relevant after I was sent this picture (from, interestingly, Texas):
So a friend just verbally relayed a bit of wisdom she found on the internet yesterday. The core is, therefore, not mine, but she couldn’t remember the exact wording and thus the exact phrasing you find in this post can be blamed only on me.
RawStory’s Tom Boggioni reports on something I would never watch myself: Fox news talking to a “political insider” for the “inside thinking” on the politics of politics. Oy. Nonetheless, the insider raised a good question: Are house democrats a good witch or a bad witch?
“There is real danger for the president lurking out there,” Stirewalt cautioned the Fox News host. “Republicans — if they lose control of Congress — there is a very strong chance that Donald Trump will be impeached.”
In addition to being the subject of the most morally abominable statement I’ve ever heard made on television, Andrew Jackson was the 7th President of the United States and a staunch defender of slavery.
A populist, Jackson was nonetheless very much an advocate of the status quo: he opposed many SCOTUS decisions that had the potential to create change and consistently sided with those who wanted to keep social structures locked in the same forms they had taken in preceding decades. He did antagonize many with power, but from my rough reading of history that appears to be because of his autocratic tendencies: his policy outlines were similar to those of others of his party, but by acting unilaterally he was effectively reducing the opportunities for other office holders to exercise their powers in legislative and other governmental processes. Jackson favored a “strong presidency”, which just happened to benefit his autocratic hunger for power. Justifying this publicly, he insisted that Congress was corrupt and vesting king-like power in the executive was the only effective check on congressional corruption. While in office, Jackson preserved the status quo not least by rejecting new legislation: he exercised his veto more than all previous presidents combined. And yet, Newt Gingrich thinks that Jackson was a huge “change agent”. Listen to Gingrich speak of Trump (from CBS This Morning):
I think Trump is a remarkable figure. I think he’s a historic figure. He’s certainly probably the biggest change agent since Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and 1830s.