Progressive Eruptions Will Be Away For A While

My older sister passed away early this morning.

GOP's continuing outreach to Hispanics: FAIL

Busy week ahead.  Light posting.  But here's one we're not surprised to read:



GOP Director of Hispanic Outreach Quits and Becomes Democrat 


When Republicans appointed Pablo Pantoja to State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, they hoped he would be able to bridge the sizable gap that only expanded during the 2012 elections, when the state’s 4.7 million Hispanic voters supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a 20 percent margin. 

But after months of inaction by Congressional Republicans on comprehensive immigration reform and stiff resistance by Republican-leaning groups like the Heritage Foundation, Pantoja has had enough; on Monday, he announced via email that he was leaving the party and registering as a Democrat: 

Friend,

Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party. It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others. Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them. 

Pantoja goes on to specifically cite last week’s revelation — that an author of Heritage’s false report on the cost of the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill wrote a dissertation in which he suggested that Hispanics are at a permanent disadvantage because they have lower IQs — as the final straw in his political evolution.

Sunday Night Poetry

The Peace of Wild Things

BY WENDELL BERRY

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Hold Your Horses!

Video of the week. 

(How many works of art/artists can you identify?)

Enjoy!

They don’t pay taxes. They circumvent our laws. They get free stuff from the government.

From The New Yorker:


THE HAMPTONS (The Borowitz Report)—They don’t pay taxes. They circumvent our laws. They get free stuff from the government. They are America’s billionaires, and many would like to see them gone. 

According to a new survey by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, the American people hold the nation’s billionaires in lower esteem than ever before, and a majority would like to see new laws enacted to deport them. 

 “They come here, take thousands of our jobs, and export them overseas,” one respondent said, in an opinion echoed by many others in the survey. “They are part of a shadow economy that sucks billions of dollars out of the United States every year and puts it in Switzerland and the Caymans,” another said. 

Images of hedge-fund managers arriving via helicopter in the Hamptons this summer have only reinforced the impression that authorities have turned a blind eye to their movements. “Many of these people should be in prison, and the government is looking the other way,” one respondent said. 

Stirring even more controversy is the billionaires’ practice of having babies in the United States and using the nation’s porous estate-tax laws to pass down untold wealth to the next generation. “They should leave and take their children with them,” one respondent said. 

Even after it is pointed out to respondents that some billionaires, such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, have made significant philanthropic contributions to the world, a majority of those polled stubbornly maintained their negative views of billionaires. 

 “Look, in every group you’re going to have some good ones,” one of the respondents said. “But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the vast majority of these people are destroying this country.”

Wall Street Journal Warns Republicans Are Greatest Threat To America’s Economy

According to the WSJ Survey: Economists Cite Budget Battle as Top Threat,



According to a recent survey of 62 real economists by the Wall Street Journal, it is not the instability of China’s stock market, or its move to devalue its currency, or the Greek Eurozone crisis, or the possibility of the Federal Reserve finally raising interest rates. What frightens a great majority of the nation’s leading economic experts most of all is that the Republican-controlled Congress will “precipitate another fiscal crisis this fall” when Republicans plan to either shut down the government unless Planned Parenthood is destroyed, or hold the debt ceiling hostage until Planned Parenthood is destroyed. It is important to note that the push to put an end to Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with the economy, debt and deficit, national security, jobs, or economic growth; it is about legislating and enforcing an extremist religious policy.

[skip]

“After watching Congress repeatedly crash into fiscal deadlines in recent years, a majority of economists are expecting a repeat performance, with 55% of respondents to the latest Wall Street Journal survey of 62 economists predicting that there will be some disruption to the economy and financial markets in the months ahead.”

[skip]

The WSJ economists are fearful that yet another evangelical Republican economic disruption will have a really serious impact on their forecast for 2.2 percent GDP growth and a 5.1 percent unemployment rate by the end of 2015.

The economists, who have witnessed Republicans “produce significant damage to the American economy” three times over the past six years said they are convinced Republicans will do a repeat performance such as the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, the fiscal cliff showdown in 2012, and the 2013 government shutdown that adversely affected the American economy and won Republicans control of the entire Congress.

The economists, particularly the chief U.S. economist of High Frequency Economics forecasting firm, Jim O’Sullivan, said if Republicans as varied in extremism as Ted Cruz and John McCain follow through on their threat to shut down the government if Planned Parenthood is not destroyed, especially with a new budget and borrowing authority due by October 1st, they will repeat their past “serious damage to the economy by harming consumer confidence.”


MORE HERE.


Will the GOP controlled Congress threaten to drive the country over the financial cliff again if they don't get their way? We can only wait and see how reckless the GOP will be.

HINT:  If we look at who the base is supporting for president, I think we know the answer.

Wednesday is Trump Hump Day!

I'm going to try to stick to posting about "Il Donald" on Wednesdays, otherwise known as "hump day."

Here are some of the Trumpet's latest endorsements on his candidacy for the presidency:




Ex-KKK leader David Duke backs Donald Trump: ‘He understands the real sentiment of America’


Trump's got the former leader of the American terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan, endorsing him! And who's surprised? The same people who support Trump are the same people who insist that President Obama is a secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood. So now their guy gets the full support and admiration from our very own U.S. terrorist organization.  Will we hear the TGOPers' disgust and outrage?

I'm going to guess that the hypocrites who falsely accused President Obama of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood will say nothing. Ammirite?


Il Donald is on a roll!


Popular Neo-Nazi White Supremacy Group Endorses Trump for President


To no one’s surprise, America’s most popular neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer, has officially announced its support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Predictably, the endorsement praised the numerous racist statements in Trump’s announcement video, especially his “willingness to call [Mexicans] out as criminal rapists, murderers, and drug dealers.”




So there it is. The darling of the TeaPublican Party has attracted the support and admiration of a former leader of America's very own terrorist organization, the KKK, and also of a white supremacist group. 

What do you suppose it is about Il Donald  that has attracted these organizations to him?  




The Trumpet continued with his misogynistic attacks on FAUX NOOZ pundit, Megan Kelly:


Donald Trump's new Twitter tirade against Megyn Kelly





The Trumpet continued in his quest to alienate the Hispanic vote, and he's doing a GREAT job:

Donald Trump Kicks Jorge Ramos Out Of Press Conference"Go back to Univision."





This is just the sort of temperament the TeaPublicans admire in a presidential candidate -- a loutish, insulting bully who'll promise them everything and deliver nothing, except "I'm gonna be great!"


And to round Trump Hump Day off, we present Il Donald's "classy" 3rd wife who, if Trump gets the TeaPublican nomination and wins the presidency, would be America's first T&A FLOTUS, showing off to America and the world her considerable assets!

The TeaGOP's ideal for a FLOTUS!  How tres, tres French!

But...but...Michelle Obama bared her arms in an official photo!!!!11!

Continuing with coverage of Trump on Trump Hump Day:


NEW YORK (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump repeated his claim Tuesday evening that he would stop eating Oreos, citing the cookie maker's decision to close a plant in Chicago and move it to Mexico. "I'm never eating Oreos again," Trump said, before adding that he would consider it if he could find some that were made in the U.S.

 



Il Donald, speaking like a a junior high school mean girl:



Trump attacks Megyn Kelly again: ‘When people treat me unfairly, I don’t let them forget’

Ben Carson: Separation Of Church And State Is ‘Schizophrenia, A Form Of Craziness’

Ben Carson: Separation Of Church And State Is ‘Schizophrenia, A Form Of Craziness’ 


Poor Dr. Ben. Every time he opens his mouth to enlighten his followers with a gram of wisdom, he throws in a pound of ignorance:


“We have to stop listening to these people who tell us that we cannot talk about God, we cannot talk about our faith, I wonder, do they realize that our founding document, our Declaration of Independence, talks about certain inalienable rights given to us by our Creator – aka God?”



First off, no one has told anyone to stop talking about God. No churches, temples or mosques have been shut down by the government; no televangelist mega-churches have been put out of business (or taxed) by the government; no Christian radio stations or teevee cable stations have been pulled off the air by the government; no government thugs have broken into American homes where religious people are praying and hauled them off to jail; and no American who wishes to be a street preacher has had his or her soapbox confiscated by the government. 

Cable, local teevee and radio stations are rife with programs about religion, and Christianity leads the number of cable and teevee stations promoting its dogma and doctrine. As for talking about "our faith," the GOP candidates for the presidency have been abundantly clear about their devotion to their faith, and not one of them has been arrested for doing so. 

The Declaration of Independence set out the reasons for our separation from the British government, and it enumerated the wrongs committed by the monarchy against the colonists. But the DoI is not the basis for our laws, the document that is the basis for our secular laws is the United States Constitution, and that document says nothing about God establishing government and its laws; it does not claim anywhere that our laws are based on the Bible or any religion. Dr. Ben may have missed school on the day these two founding documents were studied and explained. The Declaration of Independence is not the law of the land.




Dr. Ben: “So, if it’s in our founding documents,
  
Not DOCUMENTS, but the Declaration of Independence. There is no reference to God as the giver of our laws in the U.S. Constitution, rather the Preamble to the Constitution states "We the people..." as the creators of this secular nation and its laws.



 Dr. Ben:  "...it’s in our pledge,"


The words "one nation under God" were inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s during the time of the Red Scare.  It was not in the original Pledge of Allegiance, which was conceived and written by a Socialist,  Francis Bellamy.



Dr. Ben:  "...it’s in our courts and it’s on our money, but we’re not supposed to talk about it..."

[The word "God"] it's in our courts] -- In a court of law, one does NOT have to swear to tell the truth on a Bible, one has the option of swearing on the US Constitution. This is also true for when a president is given the oath of office. But woe be to any politician who uses his/her freedom, guaranteed by the US Constitution, to NOT be a religious politician!  Our founding document, the US Constitution, specifically, states that no religious test is to be applied to anyone seeking the presidency or any other constitutional office. But some religious people have no problem with ignoring that part of our laws, and those same religious people would condemn any man or women who exercised his/her freedom and swore the presidential oath of office on the Constitution. ("So Help Me God," is NOT in the original presidential oath of office as set out in the Constitution.)


Dr. Ben:  "...and it's on our money..."

The insertion of "In God We Trust" on our currency happened during the Civil War, not during the founding of this nation. and it was initiated during one of the darkest times in this country's history.  "In God We Trust" was also adopted as our national motto, replacing "E Pluribus Unum," a more proper motto for a secular country.  But the majority of religious adherents were successful in overturning what our Founding Fathers established as this country's motto:  "E Pluribus Unum," and turned the motto into a religious one -- one that honors only the Abrahamic religions, so it favors one group of religions over all others in this country.  Clearly a violation of the US Constitution.



Dr. Ben:   "...what in the world is that? In medicine we call it schizophrenia, a form of craziness.”


Dr. Ben, unfamiliar with our founding documents, mottoes, pledge, and constitutional guarantees, calls separation of church and state "schizophrenia, a form of craziness."

Cleary, Dr. Ben doesn't understand the many meanings of "a form of craziness" either, otherwise, he'd keep his mouth shut about things of which he apparently knows very little.

The No Religious Test Clause of the United States Constitution is found in Article VI, paragraph 3, and states that:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.^[a]

The Civil War was about slavery, slavery, slavery.

Historian Ken Burns reminded supporters of the Confederacy on Sunday that the Civil War had been primarily about slavery, and not states' rights as many conservatives have claimed. "You know, when the Constitutional Convention happened, there was a man named John J. Chapman, who said slavery was like a sleeping serpent," 

Burns told CBS host John Dickerson. "It lay coiled under the table during the deliberations; thereafter, slavery was on everyone's mind, if not always on his tongue." "You know, we've grown up as country with a lot of powerful symbols of the Civil War in popular culture that would be 'Birth of a Nation,' D.W. Griffiths' classic, and 'Gone with the Wind,' of course," he explained. "And in that, it postulates, among other things, both films, that the Ku Klux Klan, which is a homegrown terrorist organization, was actually a heroic force in the story of the Civil War. So it's no wonder that Americans have permitted themselves to be sold a bill of goods about what happened, oh, it's about states' rights, it's about nullification, it's about differences between cultural and political and economic forces that shaped the North and the South." 

 But Burns recommended that Americans read South Carolina's Articles of Secession to get the real story on why the states went to war against each other. 

 "[T]hey do not mention states' rights. They mention slavery, slavery, slavery," he pointed out. "And that we have to remember. It is much more complicated than that, but essentially the reason why we murdered each other -- more than 2 percent of our population, 750,000 Americans died; that's more than all the wars from the Revolution through Afghanistan combined -- was over essentially the issue of slavery." According to Burns, the racism running through the DNA of America was still present in modern day politics.


READ MORE HERE.

Sunday Night Poetry

Grief

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the check-out line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? She says,
reading the name out loud, slowly
so I am aware of each syllable
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.
.
.
by Matthew Dickman
from American Poetry Review, 2008 - See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/#sthash.zpKh1kNK.dpuf

Exactly What The TGOP Wants To Hear: B.S.

TeaPublicans don't believe anything that is fact-checked on PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, or Snopes, or any other sources that contradict what has been spoon-fed to them by their great intellectual leaders:

Donald Trump
Glenn Beck
Michael Savage
Sarah Palin
Todd Aiken
Jim Hoft
Steven King
Mike Huckabee
Michele Bachmann
(and the "intellectualest" of them all:  Louis Gohmert.

Donald Trump's vice presidential choice.

A Break From Politics For Some Beautiful Music

My nephew, Kevin Callahan, is a classical guitar composer, teacher, and performer. Here is the middle movement, "The Riverbed," from his "Three Rivers Moments:"













 And here is Alki Guitar Trio performing Kevin's "Seattle Suite:"

 

Donald Trump: "A most genuine jerk."

UPDATE:

Putting Trumpism Into Practice by Infidel753

Pro-life Doctor Ben Carson's suggestion for our immigration problems?

KILL THEM!


"You look at some of these caves and things out there one drone strike, boom, and they’re gone!"  He continued by stating: "I’m suggesting we do what we need to do to secure the border, whatever that is."






August 20, 2015



Trump's Immigration Policy, or: A Farce in Six Pages



Here are the various TGOP presidential candidates on the Trumpster's plan to fundamentally transform America by changing the Constitution:


Dr. Ben Carson:

"...said that he supports ending birthright citizenship, which he called “stupid.”

 "For a woman to be pregnant and say, 'I'm going to go to the United States and have my baby there so that I can have an anchor' is stupid," Carson said, according to a local TV station in Phoenix. "We can keep families together. If they came here and did that, we can still keep them together by packaging them up and sending them back."


"...packaging them up..."  Does he mean like putting them in cardboard cartons and taking them to the local UPS store?  Is this a nice way to talk about human beings?





Carly Fiorina:

“...we should put all of our energies, all of our political will into finally getting the border secured and fixing the legal immigration.”


John Ellis Bush:

"The ex-Florida governor quickly dismissed Trump’s plan suggesting that it wasn’t 'grounded in reality.' "


Senator Lindsey Graham:

"The senator from South Carolina escalated his ongoing rhetorical battle with Trump, calling the businessman’s plan 'absolute gibberish.'

'It is unworkable. Mitt Romney said his biggest mistake as a candidate for president was embracing self-deportation,' Graham told CNN’s “The Situation Room.” 'That hurt our party. Donald Trump's plan is forced deportation. It's not going to work; it is unworkable.' ”


Rand Paul:

" 'His [Trump's] immigration policy, that seems to have won him a lot of attention, is to send 11 million people to Mexico?,' " Paul told the Independent Journal Review. 

" 'How is he going to practically do that? If he is going to take the time to do that then why is he all of the sudden going to re-admit them all?' " He added 'someone should ask him some practical questions about… why his policies are the opposite of what they were just a few years ago.' ”


More HERE.




 5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.


 Fewer immigrants are entering the U.S. illegally, and that’s changed the border security debate



 A TGOP Trump supporter tells us why the billionaire would make a great president: 

 "Being a businessman, he knows the ways around. I don't think he'd go to Congress and ask. I think he'd just do it."

That person is probably the same type of Tea Party malcontent who's accused President Obama of being a dictator/tyrant shredder of the Constitution. Or maybe he or she is just plain stupid?


Megan McArdle:


"Politically, Trump is, of course, at least as inauthentic and dissembling as the rest of them, from his opinions, which drift upon the prevailing populist winds, to his wild lies about what he will be able to do if people actually elect him. But he appears to be a most genuine jerk, which is one more symptom of sincerity than most candidates are able to muster."

GOP Presidential Candidates Want to Fundamentally Transform America

Remember when the TGOP lost its mind over these words spoken by then candidate Barack Obama just days before the 2008 election?: Here’s Obama’s original statement, in an October 2008 campaign visit to Columbia, Mo: 

 "Now, Mizzou, I just have two words for you tonight: five days. Five days. After decades of broken politics in Washington, and eight years of failed policies from George W. Bush, and 21 months of a campaign that's taken us from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunshine of California, we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

The Goopers took those words (which were clearly referring to changing the leadership of America) out of context and ran with them as "proof" that President Obama would fundamentally transform America. Nothing in the above statement refers to changing the U.S. Constitution.  The Goopers went wild and assigned nefarious motives to that statement because they didn't bother to actually read the whole sentence, a habit that makes them hopelessly confused and easily duped in these sort of matters.

We're in another presidential election cycle and here come several T-Gooper candidates for the presidency who actually state their position to fundamentally transform America by repealing the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the U.S. to conform to their fears about brown people and citizenship:


A Good Chunk Of GOP Field Wants To Repeal The 14th Amendment 



"...for a political party desperately trying to improve its standing with Hispanic and other minority voters, it could portend a damaging bend toward nativism. That's because denying certain groups of people birthright citizenship rights is something the country hasn't done since the days of slavery. As former U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger explained, birthright citizenship was common law in America from the founding of the country. But in 1857, the Supreme Court suspended that privilege in its infamous Dred Scott ruling, deciding that no person of African ancestry -- whether slave or free -- could ever become a citizen of the United States. 

The country eventually ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868. Paul in 2010 argued that the right of citizenship upon birth was not intended to be extended beyond children of slaves. But that has never been the widespread constitutional interpretation. Indeed, several other Republican candidates for president this year have continued to support maintaining the status quo, including former Hewlett Packard president Carly Fiorina and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Former Arkansas Gov Mike Huckabee said in the past that he opposes changing the law. An aide to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio pointed the Huffington Post to a 2010 article in which he too opposed changing the law. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, meanwhile, has largely avoided taking a position on the issue."





And here are some competing arguments about how this could be accomplished.


On another important policy issue, here's the Trumpster talking about what he'd do to get rid of undocumented  people. Hint:  It's as rash and irresponsible as most of the blather that emanates from his always jabbering mouth:


"Despite his nativist rhetoric, Mr. Trump may grasp the staggering economic and social havoc that mass deportation would wreak. Hence his offhand comment, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that he’d “bring them back rapidly, the good ones.” According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 87 percent of the United States’ undocumented immigrants — some 10 million people — have no serious criminal record. 

If those turn out to qualify as Mr. Trump’s “good ones,” what purpose would be served by deporting them only to “bring them back rapidly”? What Mr. Trump proposes is nothing less than manufacturing a humanitarian upheaval on a scale rivaling the refugee crisis in Syria. Notwithstanding his cavalier rhetoric, there’s no evidence Americans would tolerate such a mass uprooting of people who have planted deep roots in this nation." --The WaPo

Our Lady of Perpetual Exemptions

John Oliver of "Last Week Tonight" exposes televangelists' scamming of Americans (and the IRS).  Remember:  What these charlatans get away with ends up costing you and me more taxes. They're making hundreds of millions of dollars off of believers, who can hardly afford these contributions, so that these swindlers can buy themselves million dollar private jets and mansions, and, sadly, too many Christian Americans allow themselves to be conned. There's a direct connection here between these fake churches and televangelists and who they con and Donald Trump's popularity with a certain segment of the American population.  Think about it.

If guys said what Donald Trump says.

These are actual Trump quotes. I didn't think it was possible that his bragging, his exaggerations, and his lies could sound more moronic than when they were leaking from his maw, but these guy do a great job of mocking the egotistical jerk:

The Mystery is Solved! Why Donald Trump is Popular With the TGOP.

Donald Trump talks like a 4th grader: linguistic analysis


"Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump talks like a 4th grader, according to a linguistic analysis performed by Politico's Jack Shafer. Shafer ran the text of Trumps' responses in the recent Republican debate through the Flesch-Kincaid test, designed to determine how difficult a given passage is to understand for English readers: 

 Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level. For Trump, that’s actually pretty advanced. All the other candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning 9th-grade status. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at the 8th-grade level. John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a 5th-grade score. 


 According to Shafer, Trump's remarks at an August 11 news conference in Birch Run, Michigan, put him at an even-lower 3rd grade level (in the United States, 3rd graders are typically eight or nine years old)."


Makes perfect sense. Trump appeals to people who have the comprehension skills and maturity of 3rd and 4th graders.

Congratulations to his fans.  They're not smarter than a 5th grader.

The TGOP Week in Review

We wonder if Dr. Carson...

has "evolved" from his recent position on using 17-week aborted fetal tissue for research?  But wait, Dr. Carson doesn't believe in Evolution, so maybe he can't evolve from his experimental work with fetal tissue

The Huffington Post reports:

WASHINGTON -- Famed neurosurgeon Ben Carson says that most medical research can be conducted without using fetal tissue, which has been in the news recently after a series of secretly taped but edited videos showed Planned Parenthood officials discussing how to legally provide aborted tissue to researchers. He has called the benefits of such research "over promised," and has said the videos have made him wonder "how far we have drifted in terms of our humanity."

But according to Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB-GYN and pain medicine physician, the Republican presidential candidate published a study with three other colleagues in 1992 that described using “human choroid plexus ependyma and nasal mucosa from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation.”

Fetal tissue has been used for a variety of purposes, including research on an Ebola vaccine, blindness and HIV.





 Ben Carson did research on 17 week fetal tissue
POSTED BY DR. JEN GUNTER ⋅
AUGUST 12, 2015 ⋅

Dr. Ben Carson, GOP nominee hopeful, told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that “There’s nothing that can’t be done without fetal tissue” and that the benefits of fetal tissue have been “over promised” and the results have “very much under-delivered.”

 Carson also said, “At 17 weeks, you’ve got a nice little nose and little fingers and hands and the heart’s beating. It can respond to environmental stimulus. How can you believe that that’s just a[n] irrelevant mass of cells? That’s what they want you to believe, when in fact it is a human being.”

 Dr. Carson, like everyone, is entitled to an opinion no matter how wrong, What he says doesn’t change the fact that fetal tissue plays a vital role in medical research. For example it is being used to develop a vaccine against Ebola. Many researchers depend on fetal tissue to understand and hopefully develop treatment for a myriad of conditions from blindness to HIV. Without fetal tissue neurosciences research, something essential for the development of neurosurgical techniques, would be far less developed.

Dr. Carson should be intimately aware of this fact. While opining on the uselessness of fetal tissue research to Megyn Kelly, Dr. Carson neglected to mention his own paper Colloid Cysts of the Third Ventricle: Immunohistochemical evidence for nonneuropithelial differentiation published in Hum Pathol 23:811-816 in 1992. The materials and methods describe using “human choroid plexus ependyma and nasal mucosa from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation.”


Yes, Dr. Ben Carson has done research on fetal tissue and published his findings. His name is on the paper so that means he had a substantive role in the research and supports the methods and findings. 

**********

Just recently, the Tea-Pee-ers went crazy over finding out that Hillary Rodham Clinton supported Margaret Sanger.

Now that we know Dr. Ben Carson supported, did research and published the findings on 17-week fetuses, will they clutch their pearls, and drop to their fainting couches or, more likely, give some other excuse for his two-faced hypocrisy?

I think we know the answer.

The Iran Deal: Listen to the Generals

Dozens of retired generals, admirals back Iran deal 
Source: Washington Post 
By Karen DeYoung 
August 11 at 3:09 PM 

 Three dozen retired generals and admirals Tuesday released an open letter supporting the Iran nuclear deal and urging Congress to do the same. 

 Calling the agreement “the most effective means currently available to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons,” the letter said that gaining international support for military action against Iran, should that ever become necessary, “would only be possible if we have first given the diplomatic path a chance.” 

 The release came as Secretary of State John F. Kerry said U.S. allies were “going to look at us and laugh” if the United States were to abandon the deal and then ask them to back a more aggressive posture against Iran. Not only would U.S. global credibility be undermined, Kerry said, the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency would be threatened.






Jonathan Alter
The Daily Beast
Ex-Intel Chief: Iran Deal Good for Israel 

Yes, it’s true: If Obama can toughen the penalties for cheating and pivot to confronting Iran’s support for terrorism, he will enhance Israel’s security. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes the Iran nuclear deal is a “stunning historical mistake.” Meanwhile, Israel’s opposition Labor Party, Republicans here at home, and much of the American Jewish community are joining him in denouncing the agreement signed last week. But many former senior intelligence and national security officials in Israel disagree. 

While they think the deal is flawed and that Netanyahu deserves credit for raising the alarm on Iran years ago, they also believe that the historic agreement is—on balance—in the national security interest of the State of Israel. 

 I spoke recently with Ami Ayalon, a former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, and a former chief of the Israeli Navy. Even as he explained that the issue “is not black and white,” he reeled off a list of former defense ministers and chiefs of Shin Bet and Mossad who agree with him that “when it comes to Iran's nuclear capability, this [deal] is the best option.”


From The Jerusalem Post:


Poll: US Jews more likely to back Iran deal than non-Jew

A poll showed American Jews are much likelier than non-Jews to back the Iran nuclear deal. The Los Angeles Jewish Journal poll published Thursday shows 49 percent of American Jews support the deal and 31 percent oppose it. 

Among all Americans, 28 percent support the deal and 24 percent oppose it. 

 Similarly, 53 percent of Jewish Americans polled want Congress to allow the deal to go ahead, while 35 percent want Congress to stop the deal. 

Among all Americans, the numbers are 41 percent wanting Congress to allow the deal and 38 percent supporting Congress should it kill the deal.


ISRAEL:


Israeli Validators for the Iran Agreement