The Many Faces of US Politics...

[Gmac]

The pope should stick to religion he's doing way too much talking about politics .

[Hardy]

The pope should stick to religion he's doing way too much talking about politics .

It's a matter of balance. He's talking about American politicians - who do way too much talking about religion.

[gallsman]

Trump has responded to the Pope...

​DONALD J. TRUMP RESPONSE TO THE POPE

If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS's ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.

The Mexican government and its leadership has made many disparaging remarks about me to the Pope, because they want to continue to rip off the United States, both on trade and at the border, and they understand I am totally wise to them. The Pope only heard one side of the story - he didn't see the crime, the drug trafficking and the negative economic impact the current policies have on the United States. He doesn't see how Mexican leadership is outsmarting President Obama and our leadership in every aspect of negotiation.

For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President. No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man's religion or faith. They are using the Pope as a pawn and they should be ashamed of themselves for doing so, especially when so many lives are involved and when illegal immigration is so rampant.

[Gmac]

The Donald is spot on there

[J70]

The Donald is spot on there

What part?

He makes numerous, unsupported claims, as usual.

[J70]

The pope should stick to religion he's doing way too much talking about politics .

Yes, advocating for the poor and downtrodden and the effect of proposed mass deportations on families is very much disconnected from the pope's mission.

[heganboy]

Classic... the Top Christian in the world says the majority of American Christians are not Christian!!

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-pope-idUSKCN0VR277

Is that the right link?
The article on Reuters you link to doesnt say anything of the sort

[Gmac]

The pope will move on to the next country and tell the poor there what they want to hear also.
Bottom line the pope has no business talking about a politicians  religious beliefs.

[seafoid]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/03/10/koch-brothers-new-brand/


In any event, the lasting contribution of the Kochs to our history will almost certainly be the introduction of truly huge money into the political process, vast funds coming from the tiniest sliver of the population. With each election cycle the resources they've assembled have grown, and this year, as I've said, they've announced plans to spend $889 million. About $300 million of that is slated to go directly into campaigns; the rest will pay for get-out-the-vote operations, their voter data project, and the like. "We've had money in the past, but this is so far beyond what anyone has thought of it's mind-boggling," Fred Wertheimer, the longtime head of Common Cause, told Mayer. "This is unheard of in the history of the country. There has never been anything that approaches this."

The really sad story is about Republican Congressman Fred Upton, a moderate who took global warming seriously until, in 2010, he wanted to be chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Then, to appease the Kochs—who had donated to the campaigns of twenty-two of the panel's thirty-one GOP members—he undertook what one political reporter called a "naked belly crawl" into the cave of climate denial, coauthoring an Op-Ed with the head of the Koch's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and promising to subpoena EPA head Lisa Jackson so frequently that, in Mayer's paraphrase, "she would need her own congressional parking space."


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/01/09/can-he-save-gop-itself/

One of the original selling points for the Tea Party was that it had moved on from the obsessions of the religious right. It was about deficits, jobs, and small government, not about abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools, and creationism. But as soon as Republicans gained a majority in state legislatures, there was a flood of anti-abortion laws proposed or passed, with religious rationales or backing.
But the Tea Party's eruption in the town hall meetings of 2009 was funded by the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity. The right-wing laws passed by Republican state legislatures follow a plan drawn up by the millionaires-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Corporate money, spouting from the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court, has flowed into elections for local judges, state legislatures, and "citizens'" opposition to government. There is every reason for the rich to promote measures that limit the vote, promote a defiance of science, or stigmatize "aliens."
This is not cynical opportunism on their part. They believe what Romney told them in their plush hideaway—that 47 percent of Americans are moochers who earn nothing, pay nothing, and deserve nothing. By that logic, the moochers should be kept from voting, or from getting anything the earners have acquired. Their attitude is perfectly summed up by Republican Bruce Rauner, a multimillionaire now running for Illinois governor, who issued this statement:
I've worked extremely hard and feel incredibly blessed to have earned financial success.... Capitalism is the greatest poverty-fighting machine in the history of mankind.... I can't be bought or intimidated by the special interests.
The astonishing thing is that much of the public agrees with that "too rich to be bribed" creed. The proof that we live in a plutocracy is not that the wealthy get most of the prizes in our society, but that majorities think that is how it should be. Even to criticize what the super-wealthy get is to wage "class war." That is why Democrats must shy from words as toxic as "redistribution." Rebecca Blank, a former acting secretary of commerce, could not be nominated to the Council of Economic Advisers because she voiced the truism that "a commitment to economic justice necessarily implies a commitment to the redistribution of economic resources." A new foundation set up to study unequal income found that the gap between the super-rich and everyone else has grown, but that support for the belief that "government should reduce income differences between the rich and poor" has gone down even as the gap widened. So the supposedly "Third Way" think tank warns Democrats that any populist talk of raising taxes on the rich will doom them. Wealth is untouchable, is sacred, for reasons the pope just diagnosed:

[J70]

The pope will move on to the next country and tell the poor there what they want to hear also.
Bottom line the pope has no business talking about a politicians  religious beliefs.

So staying silent, like Pius XII, is the way to go when it comes to politicians and their policies?

What would you prefer the pope talk to the poor about?

How their suffering and misery in this life will pave the way for eternal happiness?

[J70]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/03/10/koch-brothers-new-brand/


In any event, the lasting contribution of the Kochs to our history will almost certainly be the introduction of truly huge money into the political process, vast funds coming from the tiniest sliver of the population. With each election cycle the resources they've assembled have grown, and this year, as I've said, they've announced plans to spend $889 million. About $300 million of that is slated to go directly into campaigns; the rest will pay for get-out-the-vote operations, their voter data project, and the like. "We've had money in the past, but this is so far beyond what anyone has thought of it's mind-boggling," Fred Wertheimer, the longtime head of Common Cause, told Mayer. "This is unheard of in the history of the country. There has never been anything that approaches this."

The really sad story is about Republican Congressman Fred Upton, a moderate who took global warming seriously until, in 2010, he wanted to be chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Then, to appease the Kochs—who had donated to the campaigns of twenty-two of the panel's thirty-one GOP members—he undertook what one political reporter called a "naked belly crawl" into the cave of climate denial, coauthoring an Op-Ed with the head of the Koch's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and promising to subpoena EPA head Lisa Jackson so frequently that, in Mayer's paraphrase, "she would need her own congressional parking space."


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/01/09/can-he-save-gop-itself/

One of the original selling points for the Tea Party was that it had moved on from the obsessions of the religious right. It was about deficits, jobs, and small government, not about abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools, and creationism. But as soon as Republicans gained a majority in state legislatures, there was a flood of anti-abortion laws proposed or passed, with religious rationales or backing.
But the Tea Party's eruption in the town hall meetings of 2009 was funded by the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity. The right-wing laws passed by Republican state legislatures follow a plan drawn up by the millionaires-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Corporate money, spouting from the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court, has flowed into elections for local judges, state legislatures, and "citizens'" opposition to government. There is every reason for the rich to promote measures that limit the vote, promote a defiance of science, or stigmatize "aliens."
This is not cynical opportunism on their part. They believe what Romney told them in their plush hideaway—that 47 percent of Americans are moochers who earn nothing, pay nothing, and deserve nothing. By that logic, the moochers should be kept from voting, or from getting anything the earners have acquired. Their attitude is perfectly summed up by Republican Bruce Rauner, a multimillionaire now running for Illinois governor, who issued this statement:
I've worked extremely hard and feel incredibly blessed to have earned financial success.... Capitalism is the greatest poverty-fighting machine in the history of mankind.... I can't be bought or intimidated by the special interests.
The astonishing thing is that much of the public agrees with that "too rich to be bribed" creed. The proof that we live in a plutocracy is not that the wealthy get most of the prizes in our society, but that majorities think that is how it should be. Even to criticize what the super-wealthy get is to wage "class war." That is why Democrats must shy from words as toxic as "redistribution." Rebecca Blank, a former acting secretary of commerce, could not be nominated to the Council of Economic Advisers because she voiced the truism that "a commitment to economic justice necessarily implies a commitment to the redistribution of economic resources." A new foundation set up to study unequal income found that the gap between the super-rich and everyone else has grown, but that support for the belief that "government should reduce income differences between the rich and poor" has gone down even as the gap widened. So the supposedly "Third Way" think tank warns Democrats that any populist talk of raising taxes on the rich will doom them. Wealth is untouchable, is sacred, for reasons the pope just diagnosed:

Its bizarre when you walk through the dinosaur halls of the American Museum of Natural History and see David Koch's name plastered on the wall.

Or when you turn on Nova (US equivalent of BBC's Horizon) and see Koch as one of the funders for a programme on global warming and its effects on the planet and life.

Thankfully AMNH has ended its association with him. Hopefully PBS will soon too. He throws a few million at those issues for cheap publicity, while spending millions upon millions undermining the science and scientists they rely on.

[seafoid]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/03/19/2016-republicans-write/
The Republicans write
About GOP ideology
•   After decades of growing incomes for the middle class, the years between 2000 and 2011 were what the Pew Research Center calls a "lost decade." In those years, middle-class Americans made less money, had more debt and had less wealth—in fact, for the first time since World War II, the middle class actually shrank in size.
Even when Republicans acknowledge the wage problem, they don't see it as resulting from chiefly economic factors. To them, the main culprits are moral decay and culture, notably the decline of the two-parent family—a father and a mother, it nearly goes without saying.
•   When people don't see structural economic factors as the problem, they're hardly likely to hit upon plausible economic solutions.
•   But Santorum puts forth no policy solutions of real interest. His chapter called "Giving the American Worker a Fighting Chance" ends with really just two policy recommendations, and they're the same old ones: cut the corporate tax rate and reduce regulations.
•    One might have thought, then, that he was equipped to present a serviceably respectable conservative response to the problems of stagnant wages and increasing inequality.
But then one day in 2012, a man challenged him: Who are these takers you speak of? "Is it the person who lost their job and is on unemployment benefits? Is it the veteran who served in Iraq and gets their medical care through the VA?" Apparently, none of this had ever occurred to Ryan
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/05/24/how-republicans-got-way/

How the Republicans got that way
GOP fundamentalism
Strategists at the top of the party's pyramid may prefer a candidate they think will be palatable to independent voters in November. But true believers at the party's base think differently. They don't see a competition between two parties, with the prize to be won in the handful of battleground and swing states. They see instead an eschatological crisis, and the forces of darkness include not only Obama and the Democrats, but also "Republicans in Name Only," ideologically suspect enemies within the gate. The GOP's previous nominee, John McCain, another suspected moderate, compensated by running even harder to the right after he got the nomination, defying conventional campaign wisdom and alienating independents. If Romney fails to rouse the GOP base, he may be forced to do the same.
There is nothing new in this. Since the inception of "movement conservatism" in the 1950s, Geoffrey Kabaservice writes in Rule and Ruin, his comprehensive account of internecine Republican warfare, the long-range objective for such conservatives has been
to transform the Republican Party into an organ of conservative ideology and purge it of all who resisted the true faith. Moderate Republicans were the primary enemies and targets of movement conservatism. The need to do battle with Democratic liberals often was only a secondary consideration.... [Barry] Goldwater's warning to moderates at the '64 GOP national convention that they had to support "extremism in the defense of liberty" or leave the party was a classic expression of rule-or-ruin politics. So too were the conservative efforts to purge moderate Republican officeholders, even at the cost of replacing them with liberal Democrats.

The Collapsing Center
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/02/10/after-new-hampshire-collapsing-center/
Put bluntly, Hillary Clinton may be miscast as a candidate. She keeps trying on a role that doesn't quite fit. Her many talents—her formidable brainpower, her seriousness about and knowledge of complex public policy—aren't necessarily tailored for a presidential campaign, where expressing what one's about in a clear and easily comprehended way is so highly prized. Her message—to the extent she's had one—that she's "a progressive who can get things done" was hardly soaring, especially as compared to Sanders's sweeping vision: replacing Obamacare with a single-payer system, providing free college tuition for everyone, and cutting back the role of billionaires and big corporations in our elections. (The idea of expanding Medicare into a single-payer system isn't completely daft. It was backed by the late Edward M. Kennedy and widely supported by the Democratic base. Clinton's argument is that it simply isn't feasible to junk the hard-won Obamacare in favor of something Congress is most unlikely to pass. Technically, she's correct, but the issue has her arguing a negative proposition.)

In addition, by pointing out repeatedly that Clinton had received $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs alone, Sanders, who had brilliantly encapsulated his message that the economic system is rigged against you and is held in place by the campaign finance system, has had Clinton back on her heels about her close connections with Wall Street. The Clintons' galloping greed had made them very wealthy—together they earned $153 million for speeches from 2001 until she launched her presidential campaign—and rendered her vulnerable

[easytiger95]

The pope should stick to religion he's doing way too much talking about politics .

Completely agree Gmac, there should be absolute separation between church and state...which is why Trump shouldn't be doing events at Liberty U, courting Jerry Falwell and talking about "two Corinthians"...which, ironically enough, sounds like the start of a bad joke.

Perhaps if he and his ilk (Cruz is even worse) stayed out of the Pope's patch he'd stay out of theirs. But if you're going to frame a political campaign as a moral crusade, then surely the moral arbiter of over a billion catholics worldwide can express an opinion about it?

[Gmac]

Obama attacked trump yesterday very rare to hear current president commenting on future presidential candidates , pope joins in today coincidense I think not.

[Oraisteach]

Conspiracy theories? Very Trumplike.