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Army Colonel Challenges Pentagon’s Afghanistan Reports – NYTimes.com

6 Feb

If the official reaction to Colonel Davis’s campaign has been subdued, it may be partly because he has recruited a few supporters among the war skeptics on Capitol Hill.

“For Colonel Davis to go out on a limb and help us to understand what’s happening on the ground, I have the greatest admiration for him,” said Representative Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina, who has met with Colonel Davis twice and read his reports.

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, one of four senators who met with Colonel Davis despite what he called “a lot of resistance from the Pentagon,” said the colonel was a valuable witness because his extensive travels and midlevel rank gave him access to a wide range of soldiers.

Moreover, Colonel Davis’s doubts about reports of progress in the war are widely shared, if not usually voiced in public by officers on duty.

via Army Colonel Challenges Pentagon’s Afghanistan Reports – NYTimes.com.

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Rocky Anderson: Questions Asked and Answered | We The People Reform Coalition

6 Feb

01 Is the Justice Party going to be conservative enough to take more votes away from Republicans than from Democrats?

Yes and no. In its present configuration the Justice Party is a centrist spoiler rather than a unifying hub for a Third Wave victory over the two-party tyranny. It will take votes, not many, from both parties. He’s a former Democrat, he may hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans.

Hop on over to We The People Reform Coalition for answers to these questions:

02  Are Ron Paul youth going to get involved once Ron not a winner on GOP side?           

03  Balanced budget amendment?           

04  Why do you endorse Rocky Anderson?           

05  Is JP more likely to succeed than the Reform Party?

via Rocky Anderson: Questions Asked and Answered | We The People Reform Coalition.

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United States third party and independent presidential candidates, 2012 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

5 Feb

The Wikipedia is keeping track of 3rd party candidates. Check out the candidates and let us know what you think. There’s a dozen or so so far.

This article contains lists of official and prospective third party and independent candidates associated with the 2012 United States presidential election.

“Third party” is a term that is commonly used in the United States to refer to political parties other than the two major parties, which are the Democratic Party and Republican Party. The term is used as innumerate shorthand for all such parties, or sometimes only the largest of them.

An independent candidate is one who runs for office with no formal party affiliation.

via United States third party and independent presidential candidates, 2012 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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African American pastors express support for Occupy movement – The Washington Post

3 Feb

But Bryant, who observed the movement from a distance before deciding he wanted to be part of it, was adamant that Occupy the Dream has a defined agenda.

“Number one, we are asking for more Pell grants so that our young people might be able to compete and go to colleges and universities,” he said. “Number two, we are asking for an immediate freezing on foreclosures.” The group is also seeking billions of dollars “from Wall Street for economic development and for job training.”

Beginning in February, Bryant plans to launch a campaign to urge people to bank only at minority-owned financial institutions.

via African American pastors express support for Occupy movement – The Washington Post.

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From Ron Paul, to the Reform Party, to Occupy, to a New America

2 Feb

With your support, I secured a strong top-tier finish in Iowa and an historic 2nd place in New Hampshire. In Iowa, we more than doubled our vote total from 2008. We more than tripled our 2008 total in New Hampshire, and we quadrupled it in South Carolina.

—Ron Paul

People are catching on to Ron Paul’s honest, consistent, principled. and carefully planned program for combating fascism, racism, militarism and imperialism by returning to Constitutionally required and economically necessary LIMITED GOVERNMENT.

But Republicans are not catching on fast enough.

I registered as a Republican just recently, to be able to say I voted for Ron Paul in the Connecticut primary in April, but I can’t find, so far, any House or Senate candidates in this state who want to rein in the Fed and bring all the troops home, support the key Ron Paul fiscal & foreign policy proposals. Too many “military industrial complex” submarines and helicopters made in this state, I guess.

To mobilize that huge majority of Americans, mostly Independents and the 100 million alienated on the sidelines, who want honest politicians and real solutions, we’ll need to revive the Reform Party, test the Americans Elect processes, bring the genuine tax refusers from the ‘tea party’ over to the Occupy Mainstreet movement, and green the grass of the grassroots relentlessly before November 2012.

Let’s get it done this American spring, so we can hear the volume of the loud majority in the streets this summer.

Charlie Keil

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Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

1 Feb

Meanwhile, though Haidt still supports President Obama, he chides Democrats for a moral vision that alienates many working-class, rural, and religious voters. Though he’s an atheist, he lambasts the liberal scientists of New Atheism for focusing on what religious people believe rather than how religion binds them into communities. And he rakes his own social-psychology colleagues over the coals for being “a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering” and for making the field’s nonliberal members feel like closeted homosexuals. (See related article, Page B8.)

“Liberals need to be shaken,” Haidt tells me. They “simply misunderstand conservatives far more than the other way around.”

via Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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The Politics of Dignity – NYTimes.com

1 Feb

This message, of course, plays well in the USofA too:

Dear Sirs: You may think that the situations in Egypt and Russia have nothing in common. Think again. Yes, these two countries have starkly different histories. But having visited both in recent weeks, I can tell you that they have one very big thing in common: the political eruptions in both countries were not initially driven by any particular ideology but rather by the most human of emotions — the quest for dignity and justice. Humiliation is the single most underestimated force in politics. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you force people to live indefinitely inside a rigged game that is flaunted in their face or make them feel like cattle that can be passed by one leader to his son or one politician to another, eventually they’ll explode. These are the emotions that sparked the uprisings in Cairo and Moscow. They don’t go away easily, which is why you’re in more trouble than you think.

via The Politics of Dignity – NYTimes.com.

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Newt vs. Mitt | The Nation

1 Feb

It’s astonishing that a party with nearly limitless financial resources has such paltry human resources. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote a column titled, “A Good Candidate is Hard to Find,” in which he did his best to come up with excuses for this sorry state of affairs: “The problem, perhaps, is that a successful presidential campaign calls on a trio of talents that only rarely overlap. Being a master politician in a mass democracy, in this sense, is a bit like being a brilliant filmmaker who’s somehow also a great economist, or a Nobel-winning scientist who writes best-selling novels on the side.” Which is, at best, a generous metaphor to use in reference to the two candidates leading the Republican pack today. It also evades the key issue, which is that the party has lurched so far to the right that a candidate like Romney, with some moderate positions on his record, must become a shape-shifter to survive the primary, leaving him badly compromised for the general election.

via Newt vs. Mitt | The Nation.

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Turning the ‘Buffett Rule’ Into Law – NYTimes.com

1 Feb

The Congressional Research Service estimates that the Buffett Rule, requiring millionaires to pay at least the same rate as most middle-income taxpayers, would affect about a quarter of all millionaires, or 94,500 taxpayers. Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal policy group, says the bill’s 30 percent rate would bring in about $50 billion a year.

via Turning the ‘Buffett Rule’ Into Law – NYTimes.com.

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The GOP hate-off continues – Mitt Romney – Salon.com

1 Feb

The Republican Party is split between its two personalities: Predatory finance capital and angry white male faux-populism. That’s trouble enough. Add to that Gingrich’s fury at Romney’s bottomless pockets full of nasty ads, and this is a party headed for a crack-up.

November’s still a long way away, but it’s hard to imagine President Obama losing Florida after the slime-fest we’ve just witnessed. Both Gingrich and Romney are seeing their negatives go up as the campaign goes on, while Obama’s approval rating continues to climb. I think the president is largely responsible for his ratings rise, because he’s brought the fight to the GOP since the debt-ceiling debacle.

via The GOP hate-off continues – Mitt Romney – Salon.com.

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