Day: September 27, 2017

Closing Thought–27Sep17

Get Your Priorities Straight, Dipstick!

IST Factoid:  Puerto Rico is a US territory….ergo its residents are US CITIZENS!

The factoid was inserted because there seem to be many that did not know….

Nearly half of all Americans aren’t aware that Puerto Ricans are citizens, according to a new Morning Consult poll.

While 54 percent of Americans know that Puerto Ricans are citizens, 47 percent do not know that, according to the poll, which was first reported by The New York Times. Among Americans with a bachelor’s degree, 72 percent are aware of citizenship for people on the island.

The poll found a connection between knowledge of Puerto Ricans’ citizenship and a willingness to send emergency aid.

According to the report, 8 in 10 Americans who know Puerto Ricans are citizens support sending aid, while among those who do not know, 4 in 10 support sending aid.

It has been a week since Hurricane Maria roared ashore in Puerto Rico and demolished the island in all ways….infrastructure too the biggest hit….60% of the island has NO potable water….there is only spotty electric power and food is running ever so short.

The Island is a wreck and instead to making sure that the country stays laser focused on Puerto Rico Trump spend his Twitter time trying to ramp up some new form of division among us Americans.

After starting the shit storm about the taking of a knee he did finally Tweet about Puerto Rico……

Here are the tweets, in case you missed them:

“Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble…It’s old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated. Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars…owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with. Food, water and medical are top priorities – and doing well. #FEMA”

Really?  All the compassion, empathy and concern for the people of Puerto Rico is just heart tugging….(complete sarcasm)……

I even saw a Tweet from a yahoo supporter of Trump addressed to some news anchor…..

“Trump is the president of the US….not Puerto Rico…..Move on”

The stupidity of these people is just amazing…..

Trump needs to MAN up and do more for Puerto Rico……why is the hospital ship. Comfort, NOT in Puerto Rico?  (word is leaking out the Comfort will be heading to Puerto Rice.  Why did it take so long?)

We have the perfect model for handling this disaster…..The 1948 Berlin Airlift….refresh your memory…..

Source: Berlin Airlift – Cold War – HISTORY.com

There should be planes landing at regular intervals and it should have begun mere days after Maria pushed through.

The president keeps Tweeting out that people think the US is doing a good job…..does not look like it….but please give me the names of those deluded individuals.

So far talk is cheap…..but talk does not feed, quench or shelter the Americans on the island of Puerto Rico.

Betraying The Veteran (Again)

For too long the American veteran has been a prop for the political parties….veterans are rolled out whenever they want to project this air of patriotism and then are quickly kicked to the curb and pushed aside.

And it has been that way for 50+ years and nothing ever changes….the vets are lied to, promised, used and discarded like broken tools….one of America’s biggest sources of propaganda.

This President and this Congress are NO different from the past…….

Despite vowing to support America’s veterans, President Donald Trump and congressional Republican leaders have put forth budget proposals that are poised to do great damage to the economic security of veterans and their families—all to pay for tax cuts for millionaires and corporations.1 In fact, new analysis by the Center for American Progress reveals that the tax cuts Trump wants to give corporations and businesses, which will cost $4.3 trillion over 10 years, amount to 28 times as much as the deep cuts he is proposing to services and benefits for veterans.2

And these cuts are just the tip of the iceberg.

Despite the common belief to the contrary, veteran-specific benefits and services fall short of meeting the needs of veterans and their families, many of whom struggle to meet basic needs even with Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) supports.3 More than 3.9 million veterans live paycheck to paycheck—meaning their family incomes are less than twice the federal poverty level, or less than $50,000 for a family of four.4 Yet new CAP analysis reveals that if Trump’s proposed cuts to key job training programs were applied directly to program participation, more than 340,000 veterans could lose access to critical employment services that help boost wages.

Source: 5 Ways President Trump and Congressional Republicans Are Betraying Veterans – Center for American Progress

Our veterans deserve so much more than this country is willing to give them….the country asked….they went…..now they are ignored.

Ignored that is until the powers need another prop to trot out to lather up the base.

Vietnam War: Who Was Right And Why It Matters

Ken Burns, a documentary film maker, is airing his 13 part series on the Vietnam War on PBS….so I thought that I would post a few articles about that war and how it pertains to today.

There are many these days that compare Afghanistan to Vietnam….that there are many similarities and lessons not learned……

The ghosts of the Vietnam War no doubt hovered over a recently assembled conclave of President Donald Trump’s advisers as they deliberated over the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

In the Vietnam era, as today, the United States found itself engulfed in a seemingly never-ending war with mounting costs, unclear goals and few signs of success, writes this Drake University professor.

Source: Vietnam War: Who was right about what went wrong – and why it matters in Afghanistan

Afghanistan has become a stalemate, a quagmire, just as Vietnam….and no one wants to admit it and they, the Pentagon, keeps throwing resources at a conflict that is going no where.

Some lessons are harder to learn than others…..I guess.

Forecast: The Syrian Theater

A normal person might think that our continuous war in the Middle East has hit upon a stalemate….the news about Russia, North Korea, health care, protests by athletes, etc…the Middle East is a place of quiet reflection right now.

Nothing could be further from the truth…..civilians are still dying, ISIS is still attacking in various ways, Kurds are demanding independence and so on…..and since this is the region that I focus most of my work on then I need to keep my readers up to date as much as possible…..

Unless you read blogs then you might think that all is well in the Middle East especially Syria…..

This is a report by the Institute for the Study of War……..

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The United States will continue to risk its vital strategic interests in the Middle East unless it changes its policies in Syria and Iraq. President Donald Trump and his administration inherited a weakened U.S. position, with Russia imposing constraints on American freedom of action and options. The Trump administration has taken initial steps to advance U.S. prestige in the region by reassuring America’s traditional allies and acting more firmly against its enemies and adversaries. The tactical tasks of recapturing Mosul and liberating Raqqa from the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) are complete and nearly complete, respectively. Nevertheless, its efforts to define and execute policies that secure America’s vital interests are moving more slowly than those of America’s enemies, adversaries, and spoilers who are more agile than the U.S. These actors include Russia, Iran and its proxies, Turkey, ISIS, al Qaeda, and some Kurdish elements, who are pursuing goals that threaten American objectives and are exploiting the current situation to make strategic gains as the U.S. champions short-term gains and tactical success.

The Trump administration has not yet broken with its predecessor’s approach to the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Iraq. It has prioritized conducting counterterrorism operations against ISIS to recapture ISIS’s territory. American military forces have accelerated this campaign by relying on the most readily available local forces, including Kurdish forces in northern Syria that are aligned with terrorists targeting Turkey. The administration has eschewed a U.S. role in addressing the regional war’s underlying drivers, including the role of the Bashar al Assad regime in Syria and sectarianism in Iraq stoked by Iran. The main effort of the counter-ISIS fight must become preventing the organization from reconstituting and its rivals from inheriting its leadership of the Iraqi and global jihad. ISIS re-emerged from a defeated al Qaeda in Iraq and controlled Iraqi cities only three years after American troops departed in 2011.

Read the full report (PDF).

AS the reader can see….there is more going on than the news media lets us mere mortals onto…..but thanx to my dogged desire to see that the situation in the Middle East remains in the forefront….and that my readers keep abreast of the situations that they will be paying for in the future with cash and blood.

Why Do They Hate So?

For decades now the Right has had a hard on for higher education.  They take every opportunity to degrade anyone with an advanced degree as some sort of elitist.

The burning question is why do conservatives hate higher education?  I have my thoughts but I am usual a bit harsh…..but someone has to have a good idea where higher education became such a negative force in our society.

Conservatives don’t like professors. When conservative Republicans were asked to gauge their feelings about college professors, over half gave a “cold” response, while only 24% were “warm”. I experience that disdain in the comments that conservatives make to my columns, where the word “professor” itself is a taunt, a curse.

Conservatives don’t like the institutions where professors work. A recent Pew poll found that only 29% of conservative Republicans thought that colleges and universities have a positive impact on our country.

Republican politicians encourage these views. Betsy DeVos, the new Secretary of Education, was explicit in her condemnation of professors as she was being confirmed: “The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think. They say that if you voted for Donald Trump, you’re a threat to the university community.”

Source: Why Conservatives Don’t Like Higher Ed – LA Progressive

At what point will this continue?  There are many incidents in history where the first people to be deposed by an authoritarian regime are the educated and community leaders.

Hope do these people hope to gain by demonizing the educated?