Here’s a tough question: Who is worse, Trump or Cruz?

We are at the stage where the two leading Republicans are Donald Trump and Ted Cruz who lead the polls but also have high negatives. If these two are the only ones left standing after the early primaries, then party members, especially those in the establishment, will be forced to choose between two candidates they detest. The New York Times, as befits a paper that serves as the mouthpiece for the establishment, has editorially slammed both of them and endorsed John Kasich (and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side), not that the Republican party base will care what the paper thinks and will actually see it as an endorsement of Trump and Cruz.
[Read more…]

How the views of Sanders and Trump have evolved over time

As we have seen, Donald Trump’s views on a whole host of issues have changed over time, shifting from more liberal to hardline conservative, especially since he entered the race. The efforts of his rivals to bring this up have been surprisingly lackluster with the ad below being the most pointed but it appeared a little late in the game and may be too late to derail Trump.
[Read more…]

A stinging indictment of Wall Street and the Justice Department

I have written repeatedly about how the Obama administration has treated with kid gloves the top executives of the big financial institutions even though they were responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 that ruined the lives of so many people. Now the office of US senator Elizabeth Warren has issued a short (8-pages plus three pages of endnotes) but biting report titled Rigged Justice: 2016 How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy that hits hard at the fact of wrongdoing by several major corporate entities, the major banks and investment houses among them, and that the Justice Department has not taken meaningful action against any of them.
[Read more…]

Lies, truth, what does it matter?

At the last Republican debate, both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were shown clips of their previous statements that directly contradicted their claims about their stances on immigration. Were they fazed by this? Not at all. Republicans have learned that these days, all that matters is the ability to look directly at the camera and say whatever the hell you want with a straight face. If you can do that, your fans will stay with you. ‘Never back down, never apologize’ has become their mantra.
[Read more…]

The establishment attack on Sanders intensifies

Just as the Republican party establishment tries to bring down both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz from their perches at the top of polls, so has Bernie Sanders’s rise led to similar attacks on the Democratic side, with the media leading the way. With the Iowa caucus imminent, the beltway insider mouthpiece that is the Washington Post editorial department launched an attack on him by accusing him of “peddling fiction” to the voters. Sanders responded by asking them to “check out where all the geniuses on the editorial page were with regard to the invasion of Iraq”, a deft counter-attack since that newspaper was one of the leaders in peddling all the fiction that was used to sell that illegal and immoral war to the American public. Lee Fang discusses how the New York Times misleads in its claims that Sanders is the main beneficiary of outside funds.
[Read more…]

How can people behave this way?

The brutal truth about foreign troops occupying a country is that they almost always result in horrific abuses of the local population, even if the troops are there not to invade but as peacekeepers. There seems to be something in the dynamic of a powerful occupying force facing a defenseless local population that brings out the worst in some members of the former.
[Read more…]

Republican debate review

I watched last night’s seventh debate and it did not contain anything new in terms of what each candidate said about their policies. It consisted of the usual bashing of president Obama and the claim that he has brought the nation to the edge of ruin and that a Hillary Clinton presidency will tip it into the abyss. Oh, and Bernie Sanders is a socialist, yuk, yuk. Each of them adopted the mantle of the One True Conservative who is strong enough to rescue the country and home and bring its enemies abroad to their knees thus ushering in a golden age of prosperity, while the others were merely poseurs.
[Read more…]