Burr Reveals

the GOP nominee "aligns perfectly with where the Republican Party is" on the issues. 

James Carville Is An American Original

He gets it.

American democracy is safe as long as James Carville is around.

Comey's Trumpism

James Comey, the formerly respected FBI director whose maladroit handling of a fresh email “discovery” threatens to change American history. A few weeks ago, I wrote that the rise of Trump is a sign that the Constitution is “gravely, perhaps terminally, ill.” I underestimated how far the rot has spread and how hard it will be to cure.  A constitution is not simply a collection of words, or even a set of rules; it is a complex focus of text, history, values, and institutions. And as the nation forsakes the values and devalues the history, the institutions—for all their marble majesty—are hollowing out. The Comey episode is but the latest symptom of a seriously ailing civic culture.

He defied Department of Justice tradition and policy, and the advice of Department of Justice staff, to boldly tell the nation . . . essentially nothing except, “Everybody freak out!” In so doing, he has left not only his own reputation but the organization he heads sadly diminished for some time to come.

The email announcement—now denounced by, among others, Democratic and Republican attorneys general, the ethics counsel for the Bush White House, and Fox News’s Judge Jeanine—seems not to have been a partisan maneuver so much as an extraordinary lapse in judgment 

a chilling reminder of how many such pillars of the republic have been buckling lately.

Consider that Donald J. Trump, a man incapable of a coherent English sentence, now has a lease (with option to buy) on the Republican Party. The United States Congress—where the Northwest Ordinance, the Homestead Act, The Fourteenth Amendment, the Social Security Act of 1935, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were drafted—now spends its time happily threatening to default on the national debt and refusing to confirm judges.

The Supreme Court—once vaunted as the branch that worked, is now literally hollowed out, its one missing justice having robbed it of not only its ability to decide cases but its very confidence in itself. A new step downward is now being pledged, as Senators like John McCain and Ted Cruz begin to suggest that Court vacancies should never be filled. (“[L]et the Supreme Court die out,” one conservative commentator suggested last week.)

State governments—once the supposed “laboratories of democracy”—are hollowing out too, degenerating into semi-democratic one-party satrapies (look at Kansas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin).

even the elected state courts are increasingly under the sway of unregulated money.

The institutional media is now a shadow of itself. In the rise of Trump, cable news was an eager collaborator. 

The FBI’s Halloween trick was not intended light-heartedly, and it may be a harbinger of the same.

Trump’s Russian Connection

an alleged covert communication channel between the Trump Organization, Trump’s business fiefdom, and Alfa Bank, a Russian institution with ties to the Russian oligarchy and Putin. 

 a former senior spy for a Western country had uncovered evidence that the Kremlin had launched an operation—approved by Putin—to turn Trump into a Russian asset. 

 “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” It maintained that Trump "and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals." It claimed that Russian intelligence had "compromised" Trump during his visits to Moscow and could "blackmail him." 

Alt Right International

When the USSR represented an authoritarian version of the left, he was a leftist; when the party line of the successor Russian state changed to right-wing authoritarianism, he obediently tacked right—a circumstance which shows that “left” and “right” are often arbitrary categories, particularly when considering the fringes.

Marine Le Pen’s National Front requested a 27-million euro loan from Russia, according to the party’s own treasurer. Nigel Farage, the former UK Independence Party leader and Brexit engineer, has appeared on RT, the Russian government-subsidized media empire (it spends more on foreign broadcasting than any other entity except the BBC). 

Throughout the Cold War, Moscow subsidized the leftist fringe in Western Europe. Now it does the same with right-wing parties there—same tactics, different ideological players.

 a curious phenomenon: The resurgent far-right parties in numerous Western countries, which harp incessantly on the sovereignty, independence, and world-historical uniqueness of whichever country they happen to live in, have self-organized into a transnational alt-right “comintern” that appears to be more effective than the leftist comintern of the Soviet era.

Washington has made numerous preventable errors as the result of sacrificing a stable long-term relationship with Russia on the altar either of domestic electoral expedience or empire-building by the NATO bureaucracy. 

Putin may not fully realize just how much he has raised the geopolitical stakes in the growing Cold War 2.0 between the U.S. and Russia by taking sides in the most polarized domestic election since the Civil War. 

The Comey Sexism

Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere.

FBI Chief James Comey has shown himself to be another bully of the same kind. He has repeatedly talked down to Clinton, admonishing her as a bad parent would a 5-year-old. He has accused her of “poor judgment” and called her use of a private email server “extremely careless.” 

The US Military And Two And A Half

It gets said the US military can fight at most two and a half wars at any one time. What does that mean?

That is a statement of military capability. That is not a fiscal statement. Fighting two and a half wars non stop would be a surefire way for America to go bankrupt.

War is meant to be a weapon of last resort. It is not just because of democracy and diplomacy and peace and bloodshed and the ugliness and the unintended consequences. It is also dollars and cents. Wars are terribly expensive.

From the macro perspective, considering America was already fighting two wars in the Bush era, it was but inevitable that America would step back in the Obama era. The pendulum needed to swing.

America's costs in Iraq and Afghanistan ran into the trillions. That was one of the three or four reasons why the 2008 financial meltdown happened. Money is not free.

So how many wars can America fight at any one point in time? Two and a half.

But ideally America should fight zero wars. America should keep the powder dry, just in case. But, for the most part, America should work extra time to exhaust all other options first. Armies are almost like nuclear weapons, not meant to be used.

But when you do use them, you want to make sure all peaceful options were exhausted first, and they are in top shape, and the mission is well defined and achievable, and you are in and out. Open ended wars are not even wars.

America's founding mission is a total spread of democracy. Organizing immigrants and giving them voting rights in at least the big cities would go a long way. The "hombres" can be soldiers of democracy. The forces of democracy are proving less aggressive about using digital tools to spread democracy than those who would use the same to suppress peoples. Taking microfinance to two billion women would further the cause of democracy like few other things.  Grassroots political organizing is the best way to spread democracy. It is also much less expensive than wars. And if you handle immigration right it is all paid for. People do it themselves. Remittance has done way more for the Global South than foreign aid ever did. Stop demonizing people.

Russia And NATO

In the early 2000s Russia actually expressed interest in joining NATO. Russia apparently was rebuffed. That is mind boggling from the peace perspective.

It can be imagined the military industrial complex in America did not like the idea. When you don't have an enemy it is hard to justify a large defense budget.

On the other hand Russia has not exactly gone down the path of democracy. And it does not seem to have discovered some alternate path to putting its economy on a sound path to rapid progress.

Russia is Second World.

Be that as it may it is for Russia and America as the two leading nuclear powers on the planet to take the lead to creating a world free of nuclear weapons. Why keep weapons that everyone knows can never be used? Why leave the options open for false alarms that might end human civilization?

And while the two powers figure out their mutual dynamic, Syria suffers. The innocents in Syria suffer. It is a sad situation.

America could have done a much better job of winning the Cold War. It did not do enough to help Russia in the aftermath. It did not do a good enough job of face saving of a defeated rival.

And it is not too late for Russia to choose the path of democracy as the only available way to rapid economic progress and true greatness.

Letting go of Assad would be a good small step in that direction. Assad is irredeemable. Assad is deplorable. This guy has attacked his own people like Hitler attacked people in other countries.

The Comey Attack

What drives people? When your professional obligation is to uphold the laws and the constitution but you helplessly undermine your chain of command and your department guidelines and your heart says to not obey because your boss is a black woman (that don't look right) and you are moved by the ideologies of racism and sexism as certainly as the electrons are moved by electric forces and you are okay with Huma Abedin being a Hillary Clinton surrogate but a Pakistani Indian American is getting too close to the president for your comfort, what do you do? You make one last ditch effort. You would rather a madman near the nuclear code than a Pakistani Indian American near the President Of The United States.

The FBI did it to John Liu, who is born in New York City. He looked too Chinese to possibly occupy the second most powerful office in the country.

This is how you know racism in America's criminal justice system is a very real issue.

On Clinton Emails, Did the F.B.I. Director Abuse His Power?

Trump And The Bomb

his former GOP rival, Marco Rubio, repeated his earlier concerns about Trump only this week, saying America can't give "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual."

In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time. 

would be free to launch a civilization-ending nuclear war on his own any time he chose.

The only real protection against nuclear disaster is total elimination of nuclear weapons.

Ronald Reagan expressed incredulity that he would be allowed only six minutes to decide whether to trigger Armageddon based on blips on a radar screen. 

Although no president during the atomic age appears to have ever lost his grip on reality to such an extent that an insane nuclear act might have resulted, top advisers to President Richard Nixon tried to constrain his launch authority during the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced his resignation. His secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, quietly instructed the Pentagon war room to double check with him if Nixon contacted it to order up a nuclear strike. Nixon’s mental stability, and his heavy drinking, caused concern within his inner circle that he might behave erratically out of despair and depression. Alcoholism in a future nuclear monarch is of course quite beyond the pale.

about three serious false alarms in the United States and three in the Soviet Union/Russia that could have led to a very bad call by their leaders have occurred.

Both Putin and President Barack Obama are reminding each other, to a degree we haven’t seen since the Cold War, that they have nuclear buttons at hand.

As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire nations would be practically unbounded.

There are no restraints that can prevent a willful president from unleashing this hell.

a common expert view that the bomb is slowly but surely spreading around the world, and that proliferation may be unstoppable unless ALL nations including the nuclear-armed countries get serious about universal nuclear disarmament.

the double-standard of the nuclear “haves,” cigarettes dangling from their lips, lecturing the “have nots” to give up smoking is unsustainable over the long term.

Altogether only 15 minutes would elapse before 850 land- and sea-based missile warheads would take flight. There would be no stopping, no recall, no turning back the salvo. In all likelihood, a return volley of Russian missiles would be triggered. The scale of the ensuing disaster defies comprehension. In a large-scale nuclear exchange, hundreds of millions of lives would be extinguished in a few agonizing hours. A global humanitarian catastrophe would ensue to seal the fate of civilization itself.

So far, most respected Republican advisers have boycotted the Trump campaign.

Trump certainly has not yet made a convincing case that we could sleep soundly with him at the helm.

2016 Is Democracy Vs Fascism

we’re in genuinely uncharted territory with Trump: we’ve simply never seen a candidate with this much disregard for typical Constitutional values get this close to the White House. There’s no precedent for what might happen if he got there. For another, if you look at how our system of checks and balances is really built, it has relatively few resources to stop an authoritarian president from violating the Constitution and getting away with it. And the third reason may be the most unsettling of all: In a democracy, the final brake on the tyrannical exercise of power is public opinion. And polls suggest the American public has never been as skeptical of democracy or as open to authoritarian alternatives like military rule as it is right now. If a President Trump really blew down the walls of our system, a worryingly wide swath of the public would likely stand behind him.

Even Richard Nixon, as close to an out-and-out crook as the White House has known, finally resigned when Congress moved to impeach him. It’s simply not clear that Donald Trump would do the same.

If he wanted to close down mosques, or have his cronies prosecute political opponents, he probably could.

The Supreme Court's role as arbiter of what’s constitutional is ultimately just a matter of tradition, and Trump has already proved his willingness to flout tradition when it happens to suit his interests.

impeachment requires both a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Considering how scared most GOP officials have been of taking on a Presidential candidate with authoritarian tendencies, it is far from certain that many of them would prove more courageous in the face of an authoritarian President. And by the time the will to impeach him has built, and the highly complex proceedings completed, it would in any case be far from clear how much of the republic there would be left to save.

countries like Hungary, Russia or Iraq did have carefully designed institutions with intricate checks and balances; but because the politicians who inhabited these systems had little commitment to liberal-democratic norms, they failed to protect democracy.

it isn't primarily the legal genius of the Founding Fathers that has made American democracy uniquely stable, but, at least as importantly, the deep commitment of ordinary Americans to liberal norms like the separation of powers. It is the people's love for democracy, not the protections their democracy affords them on paper, that is the final check on the tyranny of the majority which the founders so feared.

the Constitution cannot save us from our politics

GOP Civil War Round The Corner?

Now the party of Ronald Reagan is being led by a man with no discernible ideological leanings, save for an affinity with some of history’s ugliest. 

“The likelihood of the Republican Party surviving this, of there being another Republican president in the future, is small,” said one movement conservative who served in the Bush White House. “I don’t think the party survives.”

Far from the halls of the Hoover Institution and big Washington policy shops is a force they cannot control: the Trump campaign, a small collection of social-media gurus, Breitbart alumni, and Trump family members who have managed to capture the majority of Republican voters in the U.S., and who may use their new power to launch a media network, or take over as the new axis of the GOP, or both. And as the old establishment looks on in horror, the civil war in its ranks has already begun.

“I’ve never seen so many really smart people at a loss for what to do,” says the head of one prominent conservative think tank. “They’re pulling their hair out, to the extent they have any hair left.” 

“We’ve known the cause of death while the patient was still alive on the table.”

There is pretty universal agreement in conservative circles that the immediate cause of death was blunt force trauma with a loud, orange object.

there is wide disagreement as to whether this was a sudden, unpredictable trauma—a piano falling on you as you walk down the street—or the result of deep-seated, sclerotic disease. 

“The ugliness of those forces is real. The number of people who supported Trump is alarming. 

Some among them just think it’s time to start over. “If you can’t resurrect the Republican brand with less than half a billion dollars and spending four to eight years to get it done,” Glover, who is on the board of Roy’s new think tank, said, it might be time to think about starting something new. 

The party she envisions is one with “a Jeb Bush platform but with a 21st-century bolt on acknowledging climate change, gay marriage and campaign finance reform that’s First Amendment-compliant.”

Trump could only have happened to a party that was already paralyzed by an identity crisis—one that still has to be dealt with in addition to the secondary identity crisis wrought by Trump.

three disparate factions that find themselves squabbling under the Republican tent—the Trump fans, the stand-pat establishment, and the conservative Jesuits—

What the orange dragon chooses to do after the drubbing Republicans are sure he’s going to get might be the difference between the final nail in the GOP coffin, and a revival. And again, few really believe in the latter, not even the stalwarts. “I have a feeling no one’s going to learn a lot from this campaign because of the unique nature of Trump,” says the think tank head. “I’m one of the people who is feeling a lot of angst.” If he starts a media company, says Ayres, “It will be far harder to heal the wounds that he opened up, and far harder to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

“It’s in Trump’s nature to continue to want to be relevant, to have people come to Trump Tower to lick his boots for years to come,”

As for the people who hope Trump will simply melt away on November 9 and remove the threat of collapse from the Republican Party? “I appreciate but do not share their optimism,” says Soltis Anderson. “I feel like we are in for a pretty long civil war.”

Talk Of Trump Victory?

This is confounding, to say the least.

Et Tu, Texas?

New Electoral College Ratings: Texas and North Carolina Shift in Clinton's Favor

Arkansas 1980

“I cannot tell you the number of times they would say to me, ‘If your husband wins, are you going to keep his last name?’ ” she told me. “I heard it over and over and over.”

Arkansas

The Road Trip That Changed Hillary Clinton's Life 

After they made their way deeper into Arkansas, bypassing Little Rock and curving through the Ozarks, the women stopped at a ramshackle restaurant for lunch. Mrs. Ehrman was growing more alarmed as she took in the surroundings.

“I said to her, ‘Hillary, you’re never going to get French bread here. You’re never going to get Brie,’ ” she recalled in a final plea, but by then Mrs. Clinton had made up her mind. “She wasn’t even listening to me at that point,” Mrs. Ehrman said.

They arrived in Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas, on one of the rowdiest weekends of the year. The hilltop town, with its canopy of oak trees, had become a swarm of drunken football fans, their faces painted red and their heads covered with hats shaped like the university’s hog mascot. The Razorbacks were playing a major rival at the time, the Longhorns of the University of Texas.

“It was then that I broke down and cried when I thought, ‘She’s going to live here?’ ” Mrs. Ehrman said. “I just cried. I just absolutely cried.”

Mrs. Ehrman took a plane back to Washington and paid someone to drive her Buick home. “I thought, ‘I’m getting out of here tomorrow morning. I don’t belong here,’ ” she said.

Texas Blues

Texas Republicans are slowly coming to grips with the unthinkable: Hillary Clinton has a shot at winning the nation’s most iconic red state.

Texas is the beating heart of the modern Republican Party, and the cornerstone of any GOP nominee’s electoral strategy. It’s also home to the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush, and to two serious recent GOP contenders for the White House, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry.

And Texas is where the party’s most prominent donor base is clustered.

GOP Is Going To Be Three Parties After November

Don't kid yourself. This guy Trump is not going anywhere. He is going to launch a TV network and milk 20 million people all he can. Call that one party. It is going to be like one of those right wing parties in Europe.

Then there is the Utah guy McMullin. He is very clear he is not running to win. He is running to launch a center right political party.

The Libertarian party is a Republican party. I think it also wants to abolish the Education Department.

The GOP civil war begins after November. They need to lose to Hillary first. Then they can get on with the real competition.

Republicans made a fateful choice back then to tie their prospects to a medium addicted to rage and the conspiracy theories that fuel it. That came back to haunt them with the candidacy of Donald Trump. Now they find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Either they continue on the current path of promoting the rage-making machine, or they take Rampell’s advice and decide to go to war with right-wing media – which might actually become their final Waterloo.

A New Political Party?

Bald, wiry, and barely 40, McMullin is not a bomb-thrower by nature. He is polite and mild-mannered, and speaks in the earnest cadence of a Mormon missionary asking for permission to come inside and share a brief message about Jesus. As a Capitol Hill policy wonk, McMullin was a loyal cog in the Grand Old Party until he quit his job in August to launch a presidential protest bid under the #NeverTrump banner. Initially, he said, his campaign was intended as a vehicle of reform, meant only to remind the GOP of its conservative principles. But now, in the final weeks of this havoc-wreaking election, McMullin is scanning the wreckage of the Republican Party, and wondering whether there’s anything left to salvage........ He has become increasingly convinced that the rise of Trump “is just a symptom of a greater disease in the party” — one that can’t be cured “within the existing infrastructure.” ....... McMullin and his campaign are attempting something much more audacious than a fluke victory in a single state. While no one was watching, they were building an entirely new political party in the desert — and they don’t plan to stop when Trump loses. ........ McMullin spent the next two and half months listening to frightened lawmakers and calculating donors apologetically explain why they couldn’t break with Trump — a party paralyzed by fear and careerism. ....... For him, these craven capitulations have highlighted the need for a new center-right party in American politics ..... if Trump continues to exert his toxic influence after Nov. 8, “we are going to see a new party emerge.” ...... they’ve assembled serious state organizations across the country on a shoestring budget, enabling them to hustle their way onto 11 state ballots in the space of just 10 weeks. As Trump’s candidacy has imploded, McMullin has sought to take advantage with campaign stops throughout the Mountain West, where he’s often been greeted with large crowds and armies of eager volunteers. ........ fewer than 50% of Latter-day Saints now identify as Republicans. ..... he ticked off his support for traditional Republican causes — pro-life, pro-trade, hawkish on foreign policy— and they cheered even louder when he took on the failures of the current Republican Party. He called for a “new conservative movement” that welcomed Muslims, immigrants, and “people who don’t look like me.”

Russia, Syria, Donald, And War, And Cyber Espionage

Exclusive: Trump says Clinton policy on Syria would lead to World War Three

Syria is the number one hot spot in the world right now. The complication is that Russia is all out in support of its top regional ally Assad.

How does this game end? It ends with Assad gone. Assad will eventually go, but will also have lasting damaging effects on Putin's regime internally. It is expensive to support Assad.

The sad part is all the damage that is being done while Assad lingers on.

The forces of democracy will ultimately win. Because it is first and foremost about the people in Syria.

Russia, Syria, Donald, And War, And Cyber Espionage

Exclusive: Trump says Clinton policy on Syria would lead to World War Three

Syria is the number one hot spot in the world right now. The complication is that Russia is all out in support of its top regional ally Assad.

How does this game end? It ends with Assad gone. Assad will eventually go, but will also have lasting damaging effects on Putin's regime internally. It is expensive to support Assad.

The sad part is all the damage that is being done while Assad lingers on.

The forces of democracy will ultimately win. Because it is first and foremost about the people in Syria.

Russia, Syria, Donald, And War, And Cyber Espionage

Exclusive: Trump says Clinton policy on Syria would lead to World War Three

Syria is the number one hot spot in the world right now. The complication is that Russia is all out in support of its top regional ally Assad.

How does this game end? It ends with Assad gone. Assad will eventually go, but will also have lasting damaging effects on Putin's regime internally. It is expensive to support Assad.

The sad part is all the damage that is being done while Assad lingers on.

The forces of democracy will ultimately win. Because it is first and foremost about the people in Syria.

Russia, Syria, Donald, And War, And Cyber Espionage

Exclusive: Trump says Clinton policy on Syria would lead to World War Three

Syria is the number one hot spot in the world right now. The complication is that Russia is all out in support of its top regional ally Assad.

How does this game end? It ends with Assad gone. Assad will eventually go, but will also have lasting damaging effects on Putin's regime internally. It is expensive to support Assad.

The sad part is all the damage that is being done while Assad lingers on.

The forces of democracy will ultimately win. Because it is first and foremost about the people in Syria.

Pigs Can't Fly

But they can run for President Of The United States, apparently! Oh, only in America! Here's looking at you Donald Trump.

Trump Monster

Bilal Elcharfa was pouring cereal for his children before school this month when his 7-year-old daughter, Maaria, walked into the kitchen, calling for him.

“Baba, I had a scary dream,” she said, hugging him tight. “About Donald Trump.”

Mr. Elcharfa, a taxi driver, had dealt with his own share of anti-Muslim sentiment, like the time a passenger refused to pay his fare because he said Muslims needed to pay for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Maaria said that if Mr. Trump became president, “I’m going to stay in my room forever.”

Trump Is Pus Coming Out

Mass injustice doesn't result from a "few bad apples," but from the mass of people willfully supporting injustice.

I remain desperate to protect you from a society that quietly but habitually tells you that as a girl, you're not equal to boys -- that you're more valued for your body than your brains, that you don't deserve the same opportunities let alone the same basic respect. And the truth is, black men and women are still treated vastly differently under our laws and in our communities. 

After all, you're only eight years old. But I know you understand the difference between right from wrong. And I know that you know the things Donald Trump has said about Mexicans and veterans and Muslims and women are wrong.

You've said that if Donald Trump wins, you want to move to India. 

Trumponomics Leads To India Before 1991

Trump's US will look like the India Narayana Murthy complained about

Rethinking Education, Health And Entrepreneurship

Hillary Clinton taking the White House, the Senate and the House and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren beating the drums in the US Senate creates a perfect environment for a progressive agenda like has not been possible since the time of FDR. This is not about making the right noise, this is not about reckless tax and spend your way to utter powerlessness, this is not about whiny liberalism when you would rather be in opposition so you can sneer at power and take delight and get nothing done. This is about creating a new American majority and being the natural party of power for a generation.

I am for tax increases and tax cuts and closing the loopholes of corporate welfare. The most immediate thing America could do for global warming is stop subsidizing dirty energy.

A 65% death tax is of utmost importance. Everyone with a net worth of $5 million and above should take one look at Donald Trump and conclude "I don't want my children to end up like that" and eagerly agree to a 65% death tax. Love one another was never meant to stop with your family.

Health has to start with wellness. Industrialization is not the only thing America has messed up and brought the planet to the brink. The American antibiotics industry and the industrial scale agriculture industry and the media have colluded to kill half the gut bacteria of Americans. That is the number one reason Americans are so fat. Eating right is half of wellness. More fruits and vegetables is so important somebody named Michelle Obama could become president just on that agenda.

America should import as many yoga gurus from India as it has imported software engineers.

If Americans simply learned to walk more and talk more, that would go a long way. When someone is lonely they are more likely to overeat. Gluttony is sin. Because you are abusing a body that God created in His own image.

Americans were fat enough in 1980 but if Americans were to slim down to the obesity levels of 1980, America saves over a trillion dollars in health care. That is how you save Social Security and Medicare, by everybody slimming down.

By the time you turn 35, you should eat half of what you were eating before. By 45, it should be 50%.

But once you fall sick, you fall sick. Adding the public option was liberal fantasy when Obamacare was enacted, now it has become a national emergency. And expand Medicaid and Medicare. Enlarge the network of free health clinics. Fund them better. You want to get the best of Canada and America. The blend is the best.

Mental health has to be elevated to the same status as physical health. That is the right way to fight the war on drugs. But America is such a fundamentally racist country the resultant stress among African Americans alone gives rise to mental health issues. America has to cure racism like it has to cure obesity. The cure now exists.

Every father and mother on earth is but a foster father and foster mother. It takes a planet to raise a child. All children were created by God. No child should have to go hungry. Pre-K education has to be universal. Only strong families and strong communities can sustain strong schools, but strong schools can help foster strong families and strong communities. Faith is the glue that brings it all together. African Americans should learn gratitude and forgiveness more than anyone else if they want to get ahead of everyone else. The best prayers are prayers of gratitude.

Digital technologies have not been used enough in education to bring the costs dramatically down. Every textbook at school and college should be available online for free in PDF format. There should be online communities of students. All lectures should also be available in video format online for free.

Prices on education should be falling like prices on computers have fallen over the decades.  

And America should legalize the 16 million who are already here. You save a trillion dollars immediately if you do not round them up and deport them. Also, the American economy would quite literally collapse if you do somehow manage to deport them. America wanting to deport the 16 million is like a semi truck moving at 70 miles per hour saying, I am flying now, get rid of some of those wheels.

And bring in one to two million  new people every year. You don't want to create all sorts of high paying jobs and have no one to take them. Immigration is the only reason America is the number one economy. Immigration is the only available way to shore up Social Security and Medicare. Besides all world will become one country long before 2050.

America has a mission. That is a total spread of democracy. Instead of invading countries it should give immigrants voting rights. Irish immigrants used to vote in Boston as green card holders. America is not a white country of white immigrants. America is a country of immigrants, period.

Sin is sin. If you are poor and sinful, you are sinful. If you are rich and sinful, you are sinful. Donald Trump is an unrepentant sinner, a messenger of hate, a Pied Piper to what he calls "the poorly educated." And he is in good mood because he is going to milk that crowd all he can after November. He is going to build a TV network. Trump University was a fiscal scam. Trump TV is going to be a moral scam. The dude envisions peddling hate all the way to making a billion dollars, or so he thinks.

The Democrats should not give up on that crowd. The message should be, repent, let go of the hate, come to love. Love all your fellow human beings. Racism is sin. Sexism is sin.

This crowd most stands to benefit when the Universal Basic Income is enacted.

Women and minority populations could gradually break the corporate glass ceilings, but the faster way is to simply blow it all up through entrepreneurship. It is for the progressives in power to fight monopoly situations, and to bring forth the education and health paradigms of a knowledge economy, and to expand access to credit so more people can go into entrepreneurship.

2017 should be a great start to a great progressive year.  

America should consider spending 10% of its defense budget to connect every human being to the Internet. You can not bring everyone to America but you can take America to everyone.

Getting global warming right is super important. Global warming is proof humanity has not handled industrialization well. Only a humanity that can do right by climate change could truly harvest the technologies of the future. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, biotechnology, all these are much deeper digs into nature than old industrialization. They could be much bigger disasters than global warming, but they don't have to be. They will not be if Universal Spiritual Centeredness is achieved. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, biotechnology are all limited to the first four dimensions. God is the Ultimate Intelligence, the 10th dimension, the final dimension.

Barack Obama experienced racism from racist Republican Senators. Hillary Clinton should be prepared for some sexism on the global stage, to be blunted with the might of the most powerful political office on the planet. You should hear some of the things Duerte and Zhirinovsky are saying. Ordinary women around the world are watching with much hope. It is about them. 160 million women in America should wake up on behalf of the three and a half billion women out there.

Pro life is caring about every child on the planet at concrete policy levels. Microfinance is the magic bullet with which to touch two billion women. Did I say entrepreneurship? Put 10% of America's defense budget into microfinance.

Trump Running To Launch Trump TV

Members of the media quickly seized on the event, calling it a test drive for Trump TV, the post-election television network that Trump is rumored to be considering in the event he loses in November. Despite reports that his son-in-law has been talking to media dealmakers about Trump TV, Trump himself has denied he has any interest in such a thing.

Warren: Champion Senator

Elizabeth Warren is the US president we need, but can't have – this time 

She’s a champion of workers’ rights, campaigning for those employed in the “gig” economy to get basic employment protections and social security. She has fought for a genuine living wage, arguing that the minimum wage would have risen to$22 an hour if it had increased at the same rate as productivity. She has demanded action to crack down on corporate tax avoidance, passionately making the case that “there is nobody in this country whogot rich on his own. Nobody.”

She has courageously embraced the Black Lives Matter movement, demanding reform of the police to stop the unjust killing of black Americans.