Suggested Reading for Week Ending 7/27
Top 10 DEMs get ratings between 20% and 39%, like Jim Matheson (D) of UT at 35%, or Mike McIntyre of NC with the hightest lifetime ranking at 38%. The lowest REP ranking is 42% and there are 60 REPs with a ratings higher than 89% – leaders on the “Conservative Road to Destruction.”
We have come to the point of time in our history where facts no longer have merit, where laws are selectively broken if they in some way show support for our president or the government he represents … and those tentacles run deep INTO our federal government – both bodies of Congress and the Supreme Court. And ALEC helped get us to this point.
But ALEC membership does provide other rewards for legislators. It allows them to rub elbows with rich, out-of-state potential donors to their election campaigns and also to build similar relationships with ALEC’s state corporate members.
We could also repeal the ban on immigrants collecting SNAP and Medicaid benefits during their first five years in the United States. Passed as part of the 1996 welfare reform, the ban reduces immigrants’ economic options, and thus their ability to refuse the worst jobs.
Virtually all of the far right’s conspiracist beliefs are equally transparent lies, if you can trace them back far enough. But that assumes a truth-seeking function on somebody’s part—an assumption that’s clearly unwarranted. In our age of savagely decimated newsrooms, fact-free “he said/she said†journalism appears to be the only kind that most organizations can manage—a style that naturally gives the advantage to those like Bundy who just make things up, carefully tailored to bolster their arguments.
… the US, by far, is seen by the people of the world as “the greatest threat to peace in the world today†with 24% taking that view. Only 2% see Russia as such a threat, and 6% see China.
Thirty-five years from now, America’s official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run, as we come face-to-face with, if not necessarily to terms with, our aging infrastructure, declining international clout, and sagging economy.
We are the cavalry for which we are waiting.
Andy Hailey