Truth hurts.

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"'Bending the truth or being unhampered by accuracy is a strategy that he has followed for years.'" The worst of it is that he isn't ashamed in the least!

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COMMENTS: 
*  When are you Trump people going to start thinking with your brain instead of your heart? Trump is over his head in this race and if by some miracle he became President he would have a House and Senate that would be totally hostile to him. The fact is he would be under house arrest in the White House. He has slandered just about everybody in the race and many in the House and Senate and they are not going to forget his insults. The House and Senate would take over the every day functions of the government pass whatever laws they want and have the two thirds majority they need to override a Trump Veto.
*  More free media attention for Trump. The Grubertards are helping him even when they try to hurt him.
*  Trump’s minions are like many dumb women in bad marriages -- "stuck like chuck" with a charming-- lying/cheating spouse who swept them off their feet.  The more lies/cheating – the deeper they go into denial -- get defensive -- more determined to hang  in there -- convince themselves/others -- he is really a good guy -- the lying/cheating will stop! "Once Trump becomes Prez -- you'll see!" lol
*  I want to write and say I am sorry (for poking fun at Trump & his followers).  But I just can't !!!!! what a nut-job LMFAO.  He's # 1 He's #1 ---------- Biggest Liar of 2015 ---------- He's #1 He's #1
*  I'm glad the fact checkers are finally confirming what I've been saying since August. Trump lies every time he opens his mouth.
*  This man is dangerous. He is taking our 2015 America and turning it into 1933 Germany. He's not funny; he's not a joke; he's not amusing or cute. He's a ego-maniacal, psychopathic, misogynistic bully and bigot.
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Donald Trump Is the Biggest Liar of 2015
By Emily Stewart, December 27, 2015

When it comes to that whole truthiness thing, Pinocchio's got nothing on Donald Trump.

Political fact-checking project PolitiFact, which rates the accuracy of claims made by politicians and elected officials, dubbed the campaign misstatements of the current GOP presidential frontrunner its 2015 "lie of the year."

"Donald Trump doesn't let facts slow him down," editor Angie Drobnic Holan and staff writer Linda Qiu wrote in the announcement of the decision. "Bending the truth or being unhampered by accuracy is a strategy that he has followed for years."

Of the 77 Trump statements checked by PolitiFact, more than three-quarters are rated as "mostly false," "false" or "pants on fire." In fact, just one of the billionaire businessman's fact-checked contentions -- that Vladimir Putin has an 80% approval rating in Russia -- falls into the Pulitzer Prize winning project's "true" category.

Previous biggest lies of the year include exaggerations about Ebola in 2014, President Barack Obama and other Democrats' claim that Americans would be able to keep their health plans post-Obamacare in 2013, and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and other Republicans' contention that proposed health care reform included "death panels" in 2009. Another GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, earned the crown of lies in 2012 over an ad suggesting Jeep was pulling out of Ohio and headed to China.

So what have Trump's biggest 2015 lies been?

His contention at a campaign rally in Birmingham, Ala. in November that he saw "thousands and thousands of people" cheering as the World Trade Center fell in 2001. The claims have been widely discredited, and Trump has been able to produce no video proof that such a thing actually happened (besides his "world's best memory"). Still, he has continued to insist on the veracity of his account, mocking the disability of a reporter who challenged it.

Another of Trump's major fibs: his claim the Mexican government sends "the bad ones" over the border to the United States at the first Republican debate in August.

Another: his retweet of an image laying out false crime statistics. "Whites killed by whites -- 16%. Whites killed by blacks -- 81%. Blacks killed by blacks -- 97%," the image read.

The former reality television star acknowledged the racially charged tweet may have been factually challenged, but he was quick to distance himself from any culpability in an interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. "Bill I didn't tweet -- I retweeted somebody else that was supposedly an expert," he said.

The expert in question: @SeanSean252, whose Twitter profile reads "NEVER EVER VOTE RINO AGAIN!" and asks non-Conservatives not to follow him.

More Trump lies:

• President Obama wants to take in 250,000 people from Syria.
• The Obama administration is pushing refugees to states with Republican governors.
• The Trans-Pacific Partnership is designed to let China come in "through the back door."
• Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders is "gonna tax you people at 90%."

And he started off on the right foot: All of the five fact-checked statements from Trump's June 16 campaign announcement were deemed inaccurate by PolitiFact.

Pre-presidential candidacy, Trump has had issues with telling the truth as well. Remember his whole crusade to prove President Obama was not born in the United States? Trump went as far as to offer to donate $5 million to charity if the president released his college records and passport applications -- because his birth certificate wasn't enough.

Trump's lies haven't done him a ton of damage in his business career and so far they haven't hurt him much in politics, either. The former real estate magnate continues to lead the GOP pack, and it appears that nothing that he says or does can deter his supporters (see The Daily Show segment where two Trump fans say they would back him even if he proposed creating a national registry of Jews).

A RealClearPolitics national average of polls has him leading with 34.4% support, with second-place Ted Cruz far behind at 17.1%. Even scarier news for the GOP establishment: because some of his supporters may be ashamed to admit that they're on the Trump bandwagon in real life, his support could be even greater. 
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"Politics is much less workable than it was. There is much greater pressure not to give on anything, to make absolute decisions, not to be working across party lines."

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ANOTHER LONG ONE.... about an old-school politician who believed in compromise, cooperation, and reconciliation-- all long gone, unfortunately.
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COMMENTS: 
*  Politics will always mean compromise, no matter what the puritans wish. The trouble is that the GOP has been bullied into jumping over the edge by the evangelics/tea party types , leaving no room for any sensible compromises. What is needed is for the tea partiers to get a drubbing in the congressional election for the GOP to get back to reality.
   *  The problem with the Teavangelicals is that they have found a Presidential candidate they love -- Tailgunner Ted Cruz (R. Canada/Cuba). If they manage to nominate him, he needs to take a historic beating in the general election. His toxicity will poison the well, and hopefully, eliminate these nitwit Teabaggers once and for all.
*  Blah, blah, blah, vomit.  Sorry, ex-Sen. Danforth.  You and your generation of pols was responsible for this with its deification of a president who declared that government was the problem, not the solution.  You created this monster.  You allowed - hell, encouraged, the fringe to become the mainstream, and we, and my kids and grandkids, have to live with the results.
*  Danforth is still in denial. As a "retired" Republican he can admit that his party has been taken over by kooks, but still blames Obama for being unable to work with them.
*  GOP economic policies that take from the poor to give to the rich are immoral. Danforth stood with Clarence Thomas. Today we see that Thomas sucks totally as a judge. Uncle Thomas holding the position he does is immoral. If the good former senator is serious, he has to stand against GOP economic policy. Thomas was the low point of his career. Politics almost always involve morals. We try to do the right policy. When religion is overtly injected into policy is when we usually get it wrong. In America, for the last 100 years, our extreme religion that is causing suffering by injecting itself into politics has been the religious right and it is telling that Episcopalians are with the Democrats but Mr. Senator Preacher refuses to acknowledge the command for compassion coming out of his own faith. I think some of us would say that is textbook immoral. 
*  Well they need to take their 6 figure Senate salaries and have dinners with one another and stop the constant campaigning to spend time in DC solving problems. Oh wait almost ALL elected reps are LAWYERS whose minimal academic training teaches them to battle and that there are only winners and losers. If we want change stop electing lawyers.
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Longtime GOP senator lets Donald Trump have it: “There’s an audience for this self-proclaimed great man, and for the anger and hatefulness that he expresses”

Salon exclusive: The five-term GOP senator takes honest look at his party, conservatives, and religion in politics

By Michael Schulson, December 28, 2015

John Danforth represented Missouri in the U.S. Senate from 1976 to 1995. An ordained Episcopal priest, he officiated Ronald Reagan’s funeral. In 2000, Dick Cheney narrowly edged him out for the vice presidential spot on the Republican presidential ticket. Instead, Danforth went on to serve, briefly, as President Bush’s ambassador to the U.N.

Now 79 years old, Danforth isn’t happy. And, for all his Republican chops, much of that animus is directed at the political right. In his new book, “The Relevance of Religion,” Danforth criticizes a political climate that he sees as overly attached to grand social visions, and deaf to the basic demands of democracy. “The fundamental allegiance of Americans is to our structure of government, not to any particular ideology or policy,” he writes.

Instead, Danforth calls for a kind of ideological disarmament, driven by religious moderates. The basic suggestion here—that religious people can help to make politics more mellow—may sound strange in the era of Hobby Lobby showdowns and Rick Santorum.

But Danforth’s goal is not to amplify the place of religious rhetoric in politics. Instead, it’s to use religious language to insist that politics matters less than the ideologues insist—and that to make a policy position non-negotiable is to turn it into an idol. “Politics,” he writes, “is not the battleground for universal truth.” It’s a process for negotiating compromises.

Over the phone, Danforth spoke with Salon about Ferguson, Donald Trump and whether America still has a conservative political party.

Most Americans would say that they want a friendlier, more positive political dialogue. But things just seem to be getting crazier. What’s the disconnect between our desires here, and what we keep getting?

Well, I think the big question is, “Who is speaking to the politicians?” The most outspoken voices are the so-called bases of the political parties, particularly of the Republican Party. And the message [politicians] are receiving from the base is: “Take an absolute position. Don’t compromise. Be absolutely pure in your position, and if you’re not pure, we’re going to run a primary opponent against you.”

Where have the moderate voices gone?

I think that the great work of America has always been to try to have a process, to try to have a way to hold together all those competing ideas and competing interests. Somehow that process isn’t working now, because people on the edge of politics really don’t want it to work. They want to stay in their absolute positions.

Do you think religious arguments are feeding this divisiveness?

Religion certainly has been divisive. Religion should be a binding, reconciling force in politics. It should make it possible for diverse people to live together in a respectful way.

Some religious communities promote a universalistic vision. But others are pretty tribal.

Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell, in “American Grace,” say that belonging to a religious congregation, regardless of theology and denomination, creates social capital on a broader basis, and connects people to the community around themselves. So, I don’t think that being connected to a congregation necessarily creates an adversarial relationship with the broader community.

You’re an ordained Episcopal priest. The denomination has recently put its weight behind some Democratic policies. Do you ever feel separated from your own movement? What changes when a denomination aligns itself with a political party?

I do think that religion compels us to be concerned about disadvantaged people and poor people. There are a variety of ideas on how to best accomplish that, right across the political spectrum. I think it is a mistake for people to say that the religious position on such-and-such piece of legislation is this or that.

If you say, “I am speaking for my denomination, and my position is the moral position,” does that mean that the opposite position is immoral? How are we supposed to have a meaningful discussion if I am on God’s side and you are on the enemy of God’s side? This shuts it off completely. Politics is not religion. Politics is simply politics. It is a method for working our differences. It is not the realm of the absolute.

Aren’t there cases when legislation does do something immoral?

It is certainly possible. In the days of the Jim Crow, it was a reality.

We should be very wary about saying that somebody’s position on legislation is anti-God. Politics is not saying, “I believe,” as a matter of faith. The way that politics works, when it works, is to engage people with a variety of opinions and competing interests, and hold them together.

When you were in the Senate, how did your religious beliefs inform your politics?

There were a very few instances when I thought there was a close connection between my faith and my view of an issue. I was very interested in world hunger when I was in the Senate. I was opposed to the death penalty, and I thought that had religious implications. But it was not in my mind on a day-to-day basis: “Here is a piece of legislation. What is God’s will in relation to this piece of legislation?”

Religion affects politics in a different way than [offering] direction for positions on legislation. It creates a tone. Part of that tone is honoring the views of other people, even if we disagree with them, and not turning our own position into absolutes—in religious terms, not turning them into idols.

In the book, you emphasize basic, practical changes in the Senate’s culture—like whether or not senators eat dinner with colleagues from the other party.

I had one member of the Senate tell me [recently] that he or she couldn’t think of more than five or six members of the Senate to invite over for dinner. This is a very, very big change over [the] 21 years [since I left the Senate]. My family lived in Washington. We got to know other senators socially. We got to know their children. We were in their homes—Democrats and Republicans, equally.

Part of me hears this and thinks, “In a system with billions of dollars, media empires, and lobbyists, something as simple as dinner is inconsequential.”

I think it is important because it’s one thing that’s practical, that could be done. But the problem is much more extensive than that. Politics is much less workable than it was. There is much greater pressure not to give on anything, to make absolute decisions, not to be working across party lines.

So what would a religious protest against this status quo look like?

I don’t think it takes thousands and thousands of people to pull this off. It would be possible for a relatively small number of people to be much more forceful in presenting an alternative point of view. For example, let’s say that just a few people would make it their business in election terms to attend political meetings, go up to the candidates, and say, “I just saw this commercial. It was run on your behalf. It said you approve this message, and it was a total vilification of your opponent. Tell me how that squares with your values.”

I think pushing against the state of campaigns could definitely be done by people.

In the book, you write that “society is not hopelessly unjust.” There are plenty of critics right now who would disagree. When should people say that they want reconciliation, and when can they say, “The system is never going to serve me. I need to fight against that”?

Reconciliation has to do with mutual respect and humility, and recognizing that politics is always going to be imperfect.

That was the key question for the people who wrote the Constitution. It wasn’t how you were going to come out on a particular issue; in fact, they compromised on the most awful of issues, namely slavery. Their concern was what sort of system will hold us together. That is the thrust of the ministry of reconciliation. It should be the mission of both politics and religion, to try to hold together a diverse nation. But how we do we hold all that together? That is the ministry of the reconciliation. That is the purpose of our Constitution.

Now, when you get to the specifics—what do you think is just or unjust? How does that relate to specific legislation? How do you define justice? What is it? How does it work itself out on, let’s say, healthcare or government spending or whatever else you want to address as a matter of public policy? You can have strong positions on those subjects, and you can advance them as powerfully as you can, but you can also do it within the structure of a system that allows us to state our positions and to be advocates and to press our points, but at the same time do it in a way where the system works.

You’re from St. Louis. One of the messages of the Ferguson protests seemed to be that a lot of Americans don’t feel like the system is working for them, or will ever work for them. What do you say to them?

Well, I say, first of all, let’s listen to you, let’s find out—there is a Ferguson Commission that was appointed by the governor to address just this. What is the path forward? How do we deal with this? They held multiple hearings. They came out with a report. Hopefully, some of that report—some has already been put in place. So let’s address this issue.

Will a committee feel like enough response to people who are protesting?

Well, I certainly would not advocate somehow destroying the system. I would not advocate a situation where all we do is shout down other people.

I would say, okay, what’s the problem? Well, one of the problems here is the situation in North St. Louis County. African-Americans believed that they were being used as ways of financing these tiny little communities. There were traffic fines, and there were just an awful lot of stops of [African-American drivers].

What can we do about that? Well, there was legislation that was passed to try to address that problem. So, okay, let’s figure out where we can effect change, but not undermine the whole system, thinking that will make things better, because it will not.

I’m sympathetic to this idea of a “ministry of reconciliation.” But I’m white and coming from a fairly comfortable background, and that shapes my perspective. How does reconciliation look different, coming from different social vantage points? Is that something you reckon with?

Part of advocacy is to be as effective as you can be, and to be as strong as you can in advocating your position. But at the same time, it’s within a political process. And the political process has a design to create the possibility of change, but to do so within a structure.

This is very much Edmund Burke, who’s one of my heroes. Burke was no conservative with regard to specifics; he was quite a reformer in his day—prison reform and the like. But he also was totally put off and shocked by the French Revolution, and the total collapse of any kind of system in the name of change. He believed in the structure for the management of the country.

That’s the wisdom of conservatism. It’s not the position on this or that—on immigration or something. It’s respect for a traditional system. And I give it that respect, and I don’t think it’s antithetical, in any way, to change.

Over the past couple years, there’s a kind of hopelessness that has become more publicly pronounced on the left, especially in conversations about race. The most prominent writer here is probably Ta-Nehisi Coates, at The Atlantic, who has been asking, What if this never really changes?

Let’s say you take that position. I don’t, but let’s say you do. Then what’s the next sentence? Is the next sentence the French Revolution? I don’t think so. I don’t see the two as connected or disconnected.

Okay, let’s say that you think this is not going to turn out just the way you want it to. So, is that an argument against doing anything? Or do you just go ahead, with the best of your ability?

My view of politics is very realistic, and that is that it’s never going to achieve perfection. That’s not the way it is. Politics is not perfect. It’s just politics.

Is there a place for imagining perfection—for that kind of dream—within American political rhetoric? Or do we need to back off from that?

Perfection is not politics. Politics is legislating. This is a cliché, but legislating is sausage making. That’s the nature of politics. The alternative view of politics is: I know where we should be, and we’re not there, therefore I’m going to shut things down.

I really think that’s the position that is articulated by, let’s say, Ted Cruz, who says, “Look, as recently as last year we won an election. And we have very clear ideas of what must be done. We want to stop illegal immigration, we want to repeal Obamacare, we wanted to defund Planned Parenthood, and now 10 months have passed, and none of that has happened. Therefore, we’re just mad as can be.”

You can hear that on the left, but you can certainly hear it in the Republican Party, also.

Do you think there’s a home for your brand of conservatism within the Republican Party right now?

I think so. I think if it were articulated by a presidential candidate, that candidate would pick up an instant following.

About this business of making America great again, that really is the longing for the man on the white horse. It’s a longing for the powerful individual who will recreate or make the country great. It’s really—it’s dangerous. It’s a dangerous way to look at the country. We’re just going to hope for the superheroes, the Dear Leader who is going to do all this for us, and we recognize from the get-go that that’s not America.

So, are we going to chip away at problems? Yeah. Let’s reach in and move the ball forward best we can, and maybe not move it very much, but at least try. And we are a good country. We’re just a terrific country. And our Constitution is just a brilliant document. Some people who claim they’re constitutional conservatives I think don’t understand the Constitution, because the body of the Constitution is a structure for allowing us to stick together even though we disagree with each other.

Are you surprised to see a figure like Donald Trump do so well right now?

 Yeah, I’m absolutely bowled over.

What about his candidacy surprises you?

That there’s an audience for this self-proclaimed great man, and for the anger and hatefulness that he expresses.

Speaking in the sense of Edmund Burke, do you think of politicians like him as conservatives?

No.

So is there a conservative party in this election?

Well, I don’t know yet. I think it’s up for grabs, but I’m concerned about that. We’ll know more in about four months. It could be that there is a right-wing party, but conservative? I don’t see it in the Dems either. I sure don’t see it in Obama.

You know, after the midterm elections, I thought, “Okay, what would I do if I were Obama?” Well, I would never have a meal in the White House without having members of Congress there. I’d invite them up: I’d invite the Dems and the Republicans and the leadership and the members of the Finance and Ways and Means Committees, in selected groups and small groups, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And the cocktail hour. And I would say, okay, what should we do? What should happen?

But Obama didn’t do that. Talk about my way or the highway. This is not just the problem of Republicans. I don’t see it anywhere.

Critics on the left often accuse Obama of being too compromise-oriented.

Again, the method of going about it is as though there is no Congress. All I’m saying is, this is not just one-sided; I think that there’s a lot of blame to go around. I do think, in my own party, am I troubled? Yes, I sure am. This is nothing to do with what I signed on for. When you think about just really terrific Republican senators, what they were like, like Howard Baker and Bob Dole, it was certainly not “let’s get my way or stop the system.”

You briefly served in the administration of George W. Bush, who has been described as the most openly religious president in the modern era. Do you think Bush used religion in a conciliatory way—in a way that was consistent with the principles that you lay out in this book?

I don’t see him as being an in-your-face, full-of-himself type. I did not see him as being “Here is my position that’s based on religious principles and therefore, I am entirely right and you’re entirely wrong.

A reporter for the Dallas Morning News, who had covered Bush’s career, said that Bush “believes that he is God’s candidate—that God has chosen him.” Is it healthy for politicians to feel like they have some divine calling behind them?

If you think that “my program is God’s program,” then you’re creating a big problem. Then again, if you think that God empowers you and leads you, to me that’s very meaningful—but that’s a long way from saying that I am the carrier of God’s attempt at this.

Your book focuses on domestic issues, but you’ve been very active in foreign policy, and you served as an ambassador to the U.N. Do you think America sometimes brings a religious vision to foreign policy objectives?

I hope not. Let’s take Sudan, where I was fully involved with George W. Bush. We didn’t have any national interests in that, really. So the pure pragmatists may say what weren’t we doing that way, and did we think we should have been involved? Yeah.

If there was a case like—let’s say starvation in Africa, or something like that, purely humanitarian—should the U.S. be involved? If you see it as a question of values, of course. Religiously motivated values? Yes. It’s a little bit of a departure from the exclusively realist view of foreign policy.

But does the U.S. have a mandate to push itself around the world, and to try to reform the rest of the world into our image? That would be pretentious on our part. It would be lacking in the kind of humility that religion leads us to.

This was certainly a big issue with the war in Iraq, right? The conflict seemed to be framed in terms of good and evil, which quickly gravitated toward accusations that there was a religious element to America’s interventions abroad.

When it comes to Iraq, there surely is [a religious element], yeah. If you’re talking about Sunnis and Shi’ites.

Sure, there was that failure to recognize the textures and complexities of the religious landscape in Iraq. But I mean this in terms of labeling an Axis of Evil, or talking about global conflict in the language of good and evil, which seems to have shaped global perceptions of the war for years afterward.

I think using chemical weapons is pretty darn evil.

OK, so how—

There are all kinds of considerations, you know. We get rid of Saddam Hussein. Then what? That’s a practical consideration. I’m not sure where to draw the line in all this. I don’t think the U.S. is the values arbiter of the rest of the world, and I think there can be things worse than some strongman. It’s just what’s the situation you’re dealing with.

Your book focuses on domestic politics, but this seems to be the other half of the equation: how religion becomes entangled with the image we project abroad.

One of the messages of religion is humility, rather than certainty that you’re God’s agent. That is a message we should carry into foreign policy, as well as domestic.

Looking forward, is there any part of the political landscape where you feel hopeful—where you’re seeing this humility, seeing this search for common ground, seeing this desire to find compromise?

The hope is the American people. I think the American people are different from the way they are represented by politics, and maybe by some activists. I don’t think the American people are hateful. I don’t think the American people are angry. They don’t expect government to be a miracle cure. They simply expect it to function.

Where’s the voice for that? Is the voice all Donald Trump? Or some radio personality?

What they see now is a system where the most demanding people have succeeded in rendering this system into something that doesn’t work. It’s dysfunctional. They would like that changed. And I think that they would be receptive to that kind of voice, if they only were to hear it.

That’s the point of the book. It’s not saying to religious people, shut up. It’s saying, be outspoken—not as advocates necessarily, not that there is God’s position on a particular issue, but rather be outspoken on behalf of this absolutely marvelous system, that was created for us 220 years ago. It’s just marvelous. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t advance it and uphold it.
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"... the Christmas season in particular is a time for family and community." It doesn't have to be religiously-based, however.

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COMMENTS:
*  I`m sorry you relapsed in rejoining a church. As a humanist I know that serving humanity is its own reward without the need for a god belief to be part of it. Perhaps what you were feeling was a need for community which attending church does provide. But community can also exist in any number of the service clubs doing good work for people, the environment, and all living creatures we share our DNA with. Anyway, quitting church is like quitting cigarettes, sometimes it takes a few attempts.
*  So, you are only moral out of fear of punishment. Very noble. And atheists manage to be moral WITHOUT that fear. Hmmmmm....
*  ...  I have to wonder about Christians if they really believe that they would all become axe-murders or Republican presidential candidates if it wasn`t for fear of eternal punishment or is it just another mindless ritual to say they`re sinners?
   *  When people are brainwashed into thinking there is only ONE way to be, all other ways seem unthinkable.
*  Christmas is largely a winter holiday celebration. Why should atheists, agnostics, and free thinkers not enjoy it? It has almost nothing to do with the historical Jesus or with the absurd theological claims that have grown up around him.
*  That's not all that different from the Unitarian Universalist church. It, too, has welcomed people of all beliefs, including atheists, and has been around from the time of our founding fathers (Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin actually attended the first Unitarian service in the world, and John Adams was a Unitarian).
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Why This Group Of Atheists, Agnostics And Seekers Loves Christmas

"For me, Christmas is about family and loved ones."

By Carol Kuruvilla, December 23, 2015

About 900 revelers crowded into London's Union Chapel last Thursday, ready to sing their hearts out. They were atheists, humanists, agnostics, spiritual seekers and many things in between. And they were there for the Yule Rock concert, a joyous celebration of Christmas. 

Many members of this merry crowd were fans of Sunday Assembly, the secular congregation that organized the event. Although Sunday Assembly is often called the "atheist church," nearly three years after it was formed the community has become a space for both secular and spiritual people of all stripes. There are now locations in the U.K., North America, Australia and Africa. In line with SA's motto to "live better, help often, and wonder more," London's assembly has formed smaller community groups around nearly every hobby and interest -- knitting, yoga, social enterprise, for example.

The choir is one of those interest groups, and Yule Rock is one of their biggest yearly events. Sunday Assembly's Head of Music Emma Broomfield said that singing is a great way to build community because it often brings strangers together to work toward a common goal.

"Singing is vital to people's well-being," the 34-year-old told The Huffington Post. "And if you're not part of a religion, and not part of a choir, there are not many opportunities to sing communally." 

*Sarah Carpo @sarah_em
Loved @SundayA_London's #YuleRock last night! What could be better than 900 people singing Wham! ??      
5:21 AM - 18 Dec 2015

For many secular residents of London, Sunday Assembly has become a way to address the needs of those who want to feel like part of a community, but don't necessarily identify with a specific religious tradition. There's been a steady increase in the number of residents in the U.K. who don't claim a religious affiliation (49 percent in 2014). This group, known as the "religious nones," is also a growing minority in America (23 percent in 2014).

Broomfield wasn't raised in a religious household. She said she felt the lack of community deeply after moving to London from the countryside a few years ago. She joined Sunday Assembly about two and a half years ago.

"When things get tough, I wanted somewhere to go where I could feel a human connection," she said.

Shelley Styles, one of the organizers behind this year's Yule Rock, said that the Christmas season in particular is a time for family and community. For her, the holidays bring her strong memories of her childhood and of classic U.K. Christmas pop songs, like "Stay Another Day" and "Fairytale of New York."

"For me, Christmas is about family and loved ones, taking care of people who are worse off than you. It's about getting together," Styles told The Huffington Post. "Obviously Christmas comes from the Christian religion, but it can also be adapted for people who have no faith or lost faith."
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I'm surprised we didn't actually see this.

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"McConnell has not exactly been shy about his desire to keep new judges from being confirmed." The Turtle likes to create a bottleneck.

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Everything You Need To Know About How Republicans Are Running The Senate, In One Number
By Ian Millhiser, December 27, 2015

Eleven.

If you want to understand how the Senate has functioned since Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) took over as Senate Majority Leader last January, the number 11 offers a clear window into McConnell’s entire philosophy of governance — or perhaps, non-governance. According to the Federal Judicial Center, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed just 11 judges this year. That compares to 40 during President George W. Bush’s seventh year in office, 34 during President Bill Clinton’s seventh year, and 44 at this point in Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Notably, all three of these presidents also spent their seventh year during a period of divided government when the opposite party controlled the Senate, and yet judicial confirmations only slowed to their current crawl under Majority Leader McConnell.

One of the judges confirmed in 2015, moreover, Judge Kara Farnandez Stoll, was elevated to a federal appeals court — the remaining ten were confirmed as district judges, the lowest ranking judges with lifetime appointment. And Judge Stoll joined the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, a highly specialized court that primarily deals with patents. Historically, confirmations to this specialized court have been far less political than confirmations to the 12 circuit courts of general jurisdiction.

By contrast, the Senate confirmed 6 appellate judges during Bush’s seventh year in office, 7 during Clinton’s seventh year and 10 under Reagan.

McConnell has not exactly been shy about his desire to keep new judges from being confirmed. Last June, he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that it was “highly likely” that no appeals court judges will be confirmed this year. McConnell even managed to create significant roadblocks to judicial confirmations when he was Minority Leader, largely due to the historic spike in filibusters that his caucus engaged in under his leadership.

This spike in filibusters eventually led the Senate to change its rules to eliminate the minority’s ability to block most confirmations in 2013.
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"... there’s a long and hallowed tradition of sheer barking panic in American politics."

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THIS IS A LONG ARTICLE BUT IT SEEMS BEST TO INCLUDE THE WHOLE THING.
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COMMENTS:
*  Richard Hofstadter, quoted in the article, also wrote a book in 1964 called "The Paranoid Style in American politics." He said there's about 20% of any population that gravitates to the far right of the political spectrum. They insist that our government and all laws align completely with their beliefs, and any departure from that alignment is viewed as the result of a conspiracy against them, or by their leaders "selling out" to nefarious forces. Thus they constantly feel under attack and endangered. It's easy to get those people to believe all manner of conspiracy theories, so candidates fanning the flames of fear find a receptive audience among that group.
*  "If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies." ~ From the GOP "brain trust's" post-willard, postemortem analysis of why he gained just 27% of the Latino vote. Dick Armey folksied it up thusly: "You can't call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you....”  But alas, the GOP has slid WAY too far down the slippery, slimy slope into sociocultral extremism to turn back now. Their only hope to regain the oval office is to keep on beating the bigoted bushes and get as many pissed off Caucasians to the polls next year as they can to make up for their ever widening gap with minorities, women and young voters. It won't work. They'll lose again.
*  The fear mongering of the Republican Party is all they have to run on. Their trickle down economics has been proven to be nothing but a failure. Their so called leaders are nothing but spineless inept marshmallows. Conspiracy after conspiracy that prove to be nothing more than dreams and fantasies. 8 years of saying NO isn't leadership it's nothing but school yard antics at its best. Now go have another vote on Health-Care it's been almost 3 weeks since you wasted money and time on the issue.
*  Right wingers are like the orcs in the Lord of the Rings films. A mental state of calmness is completely foreign to them. Their non-stop invention of crises, with complimentary knee-jerk reactions, is an inborn natural state; a life-long series of mental hiccups.
*  WHAT WE HAVE TO FEAR IS TRUMP. Talking down Donald Trump requires team work. We all have to call 702-982-0000 at the same time. We have to occupy his phones in Solidarity and cripple his communications. We have to social network, we have to go viral. We have to active thousands of protesters to join in calling and protesting by phone #DumpTrump
*  Hate and fear, the only play card the GOP have. Amazing how conservatives continue to eat it up. America is great and moving in the right direction. That is the truth but hardly the argument to return to the failed policies of the Bush Administration
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Why Politicians Want You to Panic
Crime is down, jobs are growing, America is pre-eminent. And yet Republican candidates are still fanning the flames of fear.
By Joe Keohane, December 27, 2015

At the beginning of this year, after a Republican sweep in the midterms, new Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell had a message for the incoming class as the party geared up for the 2016 presidential contest: Don’t be “scary.”

“I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome,” he said. “I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority.”

Around the same time, we began hearing more talk of the rise of the “reformocon,” a calmer, more practical, policy-minded and less viscerally anti-government stripe of Republican. One who maybe even might be able to resist the temptation to actively antagonize Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing electoral bloc. For a moment, it looked like the fever that had burned since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 had broken.

But then came the Mexican rapists, and Benghazi, and the plot to “Islamize” America, and Planned Parenthood acting as an agent of holocaust. We heard endless dark warnings about Obama the Nazi, Obama the ISIS apologist. We learned that the Affordable Care Act is tantamount to slavery and the Holocaust could have been averted if the Jews had just had guns, and that the Iran deal will trigger the second Holocaust (so many holocausts!).

Once the Paris attacks happened, the panic tightened its grip, with two leading Republican presidential candidates suddenly possessed by dueling hallucinations of celebratory Muslims in Jersey on 9/11. Then came San Bernardino. Donald Trump, who had previously contented himself with talk of an authoritarian state in which Muslims were made to register and neighbor spied upon neighbor, doubled down, calling for a ban of all Muslims trying to come to the United States. The rest of the field, while not quite scaling such rhetorical heights, hardly distinguished itself with steely Churchillian reserve, opting instead for a flurry of Muppet arms. When Obama gave a speech emphasizing calm and fortitude, Marco Rubio responded by saying that, on the contrary, Americans are “really scared,” John Kasich said “our way of life is at stake,” Chris Christie proclaimed that World War III had begun, and Jeb Bush said ISIS is “organizing to destroy Western Civilization.”

McConnell may have tried—however lamely—to get the scary horse back into the barn, but time passes and news breaks and the beast does not abide. What is driving all this panic? It’s easy to blame it on individual demagogues and pin it all on the symptoms of Obama Derangement Syndrome. This was the view on display in a November column by the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who attributed the abundance of panic in the GOP to the fact that “many bullies are also cowards” and “the apocalyptic mind-set that has developed among Republicans during the Obama years.” There is something to that, but it’s hardly the whole story.

The fact is, the variety of political panic we are presently enjoying is woven into the fabric of our society, an unfortunate side effect of living in a continually morphing nation of immigrants. This panic has historically afflicted the right more than the left (though the left is not immune to panics of its own), and though it usually simmers just beneath the surface of our politics, it has, at this particular moment in time, not just reemerged but, seemingly, gone mainstream.

For the most part, the current field of Republicans is riding the wave, ginning up panic whenever possible, in a campaign season that often seems less like an application to the White House and more like one for the ding farm. But will it work? Can this trembling, red-eyed, dark-minded impulse at the core of our national experience be marshaled to win a national election? And, perhaps more importantly, can it be stopped?

***

For all our talk of steady hands and rugged individualism, there’s a long and hallowed tradition of sheer barking panic in American politics. “There’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical!” Sinclair Lewis wrote in It Can’t Happen Here, his 1935 novel about a folksy American politician who leads a panicky nation into fascism. And indeed, we’ve done our part to prove him right. Over the decades, Americans, minds afire with doomsday visions of wild plots and schemes, have lost it over the illuminati, the Masons, the pope of Rome and his marauding Jesuits, the League of Nations, the U.N., communist infiltrators, welfare queens, Willie Horton, Jeremiah Wright, birtherism, gay plots, “death panels,” Jade Helm, no-go zones, the aforementioned Mexican rapists/ethnic cleansers/Ebola-infected ISIS supporters, and so on.

And throughout, most of those eruptions have come from a certain spot on the American political spectrum. Writing in 1954, historian Richard Hofstadter, borrowing a term from the social theorist Theodore Adorno, dubbed these people “pseudo-conservatives.” In his essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” which Hofstadter wrote in response to the rise of far-right demagogues like Joe McCarthy and groups like the John Birch Society, he defined the type:

“Although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatives, [pseudo-conservatives] show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, its institutions and traditions.” They may call themselves conservatives, Hofstadter noted, but they do so mainly for the veneer of political legitimacy the term confers. In reality, they are more a mix of ultraconservative, isolationist and, occasionally, radical. “They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word.”

The pseudo-conservative, Hofstadter continued, “is likely to be antagonistic to most of the operations of our federal government except congressional investigations.” He is preoccupied with his loyalty and the perceived disloyalty of others and prone to constant patriotic “self-advertisement.” He “sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world ... cannot possibly be due to its own limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.” He believes that “those who place greater stress on negotiation and accommodation are engaged in treasonable conspiracy or are guilty of well-nigh criminal failings in moral and intellectual fiber.”

All these years later, Hofstadter’s essay reads like the whiteboard from a breakout session at CPAC. While the author blamed the confluence of uncertain times and the advent of mass media—which keeps people “in an almost constant state of political mobilization”—he also argued that the animating spirit of pseudo-conservatism was tied to the “rootlessness and heterogeneity” at the center of the American experiment:

“Because we no longer have the relative ethnic homogeneity we had up to about eighty years ago,” he wrote, “our sense of belonging has long had about it a high degree of uncertainty. We boast of ‘the melting pot,’ but we are not quite sure what it is that will remain when we are melted down.”

Some recent research helps explain why the contemporary right may be more susceptible to this gnawing status anxiety than the left. In a paper published in December of last year, a team of researchers led by New York University’s Jonathan Haidt and the University of Virginia’s Thomas Talhelm (now at the University of Chicago), found that liberals tend to prize individuality, while conservatives prize belonging—not in a gossamer, self-regarding NPR “citizen of the world” sort of way, but a solid, intimate church group handshake-basis sort of way. If that’s true, then the more conservative-minded want to belong to their country like they belong to their towns, and it’s not hard to see how Hofstadter’s hypothesis would play out in a country where there’s no coherent whole to belong to. Belonging to America is like belonging to the universe. It’s not for the faint of heart.

This is not to say that all, or even most, conservatives are susceptible to the panic currently on display by pseudo-conservatives vying for the Republican banner, but it does suggest that within conservative America there is a strong and vocal constituency that has a pressing need to belong in a manner to which they’re predisposed, but can’t attain. And for them it’s hard to concede that the reason might be that the country was never wholly theirs in the first place, that it’s a mongrel all the way down to its bones. So the inability to belong begins to feel like dispossession, like an expulsion in progress. But by whom? Foreign agents? Domestic subversives? The mind begins to reel.

If that anxiety is the spark of pseudo-conservative panic, fear is the accelerant. This is another reason we keep seeing panic bloom on the right. In 2013, Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott published a study that attempted to link people’s predispositions to fearfulness with their political affiliations. She found that people who were more prone to fear tended to skew right. “It’s not that conservative people are more fearful,” she said, “it’s that fearful people are more conservative.” This, of course, has a potential upside: the caution and vigilance at the heart of classical conservatism. But the downside is that that fear can be easily inflamed, resulting in people, McDermott wrote, who are “scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand.”

In its preoccupation with people you don’t know taking things away from you—including, in the very real and serious case of ISIS, your life—the pseudo-conservative impulse has proved irresistible for conservative politicians looking to draw support among a shrinking but ever more agitated base. It is now common to propose eliminating whole departments of the federal government, to urge supporters to ignore any federal law they find contrary to their religion (unless they’re Muslims), to preach the virtues of authoritarianism to cheering crowds of self-identifying small-government types, to demonize the very idea of moderation. By the looks of it, most of the current GOP candidates are banking that the pseudo-conservative line is their ticket to the White House. And maybe it is.

***

But that leads to an obvious question: If panic is such a powerful tool, why don’t Democrats try to whip some up themselves? After all, there are elements on the left that are prone to a kind of panic. The resurgence of political correctness on campus is a good example. Like the pseudo-conservative right, adherents to the PC left are obsessed with fragility—only in their case it’s the fragility of the persecuted people they claim to speak for. Their motivations may be rooted in sincere grievances and legitimate fears, as are the right’s, but the way they’ve chosen to address them—by imposing purity tests, catastrophizing every perceived slight and setback, and demonizing and purging dissenting voices—has become hopelessly overwrought, rendering the PC left about as liberal as the pseudo-conservative right is conservative. But the actual politics are beside the point. The emotional animus has taken over. (In fact, the justifiably mocked “I don't want to debate. I want to talk about my pain!” could serve as the motto of both sides at the moment.)

But the fact is, panic just doesn’t play that well with Democrats. For one thing, Democrats tend to be less liberal than the Republicans are conservative, and thus higher-level Democratic politicians tend to keep the more radical elements of the base at arm’s length. For another, the more radical elements of the left—Truthers, Occupiers and puppet-wielding Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers of yore—rarely run for office. The pattern is well established: The far left tweets; the far right runs.

One would hope that after a while the reflexive Chicken-Littling of everything would become a bit ... unflattering. Even to the feverish. And certainly, recent history suggests that while willingly surrendering one’s rational faculties in the service of liberty may be catnip for the GOP base, and may work well from the local up to the congressional level, it may be a dog whistle when it comes to winning a national contest. Richard Hofstadter followed the 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater closely, seeing him as the embodiment of the pseudo-conservative fervor of the time. Goldwater’s belief that “economic individualism can still be ruthlessly applied to American life” (Hofstadter’s words), his declaration that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” and his vow “not to pass laws but to repeal them” would play perfectly to today’s right wing.

But Goldwater also got his clock cleaned by Lyndon Johnson—partly because his rhetoric was so extreme in the runup to the nomination that he wasn’t able to moderate it convincingly to bring in more even-tempered voters. His defeat stood as a reminder to subsequent generations of presidential candidates, who, like Richard Nixon, recognized both the importance of pseudo-conservatives as a constituency but also that you can’t say a lot of this stuff out loud. Hence, the dog whistle. That lesson held until Trump happened.

There is a chance that whoever emerges from this primary season will soften his or her rhetoric and pull back on the overt expressions of panic to appeal to more moderate voters. Paul Ryan has said that “If we try to … fuel ourselves based on darker emotions, that’s not productive,” and he claimed to “believe in an agenda that’s inspirational, that’s inclusive, that’s optimistic.” That smells more like the establishment trying to corner Donald Trump than a collective epiphany about the virtues of not going henshit, constantly, and over virtually everything.

Plus, any hope of moderation hangs on the existence of moderate voters. A recent poll found that 43 percent of Americans believe that whites are now as discriminated against as blacks and other minorities. And 53 percent told researchers that the American “way of life” has changed for the worse since 1950. That suggests a rich pseudo-conservative vein that candidates can continue to mine.

But while they do, both they and the voters they court would be wise, between their howls and hyperventilation, their visions of dark forces bringing America to its knees, to heed the counsel of Cicero: “Fear is a bad guardian,” he wrote, “for a thing that ought to last.”
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"Colbert also pointed out that Trump doesn’t let facts get in the way of his message."

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Stephen Colbert Compares Donald Trump’s Presidential Bid to a Comedy Skit
By Anita Bennett, December 27, 2015

Stephen Colbert thinks there’s something familiar about Donald Trump — the GOP presidential frontrunner is a lot like the conservative character Colbert made popular on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.”

“He’s my old character with ten billion dollars,” Colbert said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation. “He’s completely playing on an emotional level, and so beautifully. I mean, that’s one of the reasons why I just can’t do that old character anymore, because he’s doing it better than I ever could because he’s willing to drink his own Kool-Aid. And manufacture and distribute it because he’s got all the cash.”

The “Late Show” host made his comments during a sit-down with fellow CBS host John Dickerson. Colbert also pointed out that Trump doesn’t let facts get in the way of his message.

“He’s this very interesting like Frankenstein of the idea that um, facts don’t matter and only money does.”

Despite the criticism, Colbert went on to say he does respect Trump’s ability to connect with his audience.

“I have a respect for Trump for knowing who the real audience is. That if you really wanna win you gotta get the people,” he said. “The people get to make the call. Especially now because the parties are so beholden to big money. That the party apparatus itself has been dismantled in favor of just cash. And so there aren’t, you know, wise old people who get to make the call because that’s been farmed out to Super PACS who don’t seem to be that powerful themselves really, but in giving the power over to the Super PACS they’ve actually completely defanged the party themselves.”

Watch the “Face the Nation” interview below.


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Have a "Merry Christmas", Mr. Magoo.... er, Mr Trump.

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COMMENTS: 
*  Furor Trump or... - I'd rather have the lump of coal, which is far smarter, far more clever, far less ridiculous, and far, far more attractive (see, it's not really pudgy or orange). Only down side, if I took my lump of coal to a Trump rally, his Trumpanzies would no doubt try to beat it up and spit on it, so there's that... So here it comes... I just love it when they come out hitting thumbs down as fast as they're furry little fingers can press the mouse button... it gives them something to do to help vent the hate they all keep bottled up.
*  I'm getting a laugh out of people ragging on a columnist who has a great sense of the absurdities of modern politics, and who writes a good column - while ignoring the childish behavior of their hero, Trump, who apparently has nothing better to do on Christmas Eve and Christmas day than compose silly tweets about political opponents.
*  Trump's fans are those folks who love reality tv like the Kardashions and Honey Boo Boo because they really Are entertaining. The Donald is entertaining but most of us who read about him won't vote for him because we don't need to splash 'Trump' on our White House because he is nothing but a carny showman.
*  The way that man contorts his face I'm sure he's trying to emulate Mr. Magoo.
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New York Times Columnist Creates Catchy Donald Trump Christmas Carol
By Jordan Charlton, December 26, 2015

Donald Trump stood as an early Christmas present for The New York Times’ columnists when he launched his rollercoaster ride of a presidential campaign.

So columnist Gail Collins decided to give back to the Donald in the form of a new Christmas carol. Naturally, it oozed with sarcasm and criticism for the polarizing real-estate-mogul-turned-presidential-candidate.

Headlined, “The Donald Trump Days of Christmas,” Collins explained that this is a campaign “where the insults are meeting a new norm. Thanks almost entirely to the front-runner.”

She then wrote a new Christmas carol, courtesy of the Donald’s most outlandish comments.

On the seventh day of Christmas, he gave to you and me …
Seven Mexican rapists
Six terrorist refugees
Thousands of Muslims partying on 9/11!
Four “loser” opponents
Hillary-bathroom sniping
Two birther rants
And a bromance with Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s taken no time to relax and sip some eggnog. On Christmas Eve and Christmas, the GOP frontrunner was at his Twitter best, railing against President Obama, Hillary Clinton and “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd.

As TheWrap reported, love him or hate him, Trump was certainly one of the biggest media winners of 2015. The real estate mogul has created an immovable position in the news cycle for himself, with television news networks and digital sites tossing him all the free publicity he can hope for.
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"... the GOP debates have felt like madcap purity contests ..."

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COMMENTS: 
*  They believe number 6 because they all read things on sites like WND and believe every single word as the gospel truth. They absolutely believe that Obama is a gay, Kenyan born Muslim and are blown away that the LAMEstream media isn't reporting on this! They believe every far-out freakish thing ever published on the net and can't believe the press is ignoring these things - they honestly have no idea they're living in an alternate reality. It's really trippy to watch. Too bad it's doing such tremendous damage to the country. It does bewilder me though that we are living in the information age and there are still so many, many ignorant people.
*  The Republicans find themselves in the same situation as in 2012, ever farther to the right and desperate for attention. The eventual nominee will attempt to go back to the center, expect the Republican base to demand more radical rhetoric tinged with insanity. There's a real potential for a 10 to 20 point lose here for the Republicans and collateral damage in the house and senate. Good, they deserve it.
*  A party that creates its own alternate reality and then tribalizes around it is unfit for governing. How can it? You don't simply decide that science is a hoax, or that the president of the US is a the real enemy of the nation, or that economics is a feel-good exercise to make the rich even richer. There's something called the real world you have to respect. 20 years of Fox News, talk radio, and an air-tight echo chamber have reduced the GOP to a party of self-radicalizing fruitcakes who think of themselves as the "real victims". This insane cult is so far gone that I would be surprised if the frothing racists and xenophobes who constitute it can ever find their way back to sanity.
*  ... too much time spent in front of Fox Ooze, Rush Limbaugh, Jim O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, and the biggest spew thrower, Donald Trump....we have a Constitution, moron...your hero Trump will be unable to do most of the things he brags he'll do. And he won't get the chance because he'll never be elected president. There aren't enough morons like you in the country to get him to that position....
*  Yeah, I find the detachment from reality in the GOP debates quite disconcerting. They seem to be pushing for a number of bombastic policies for problems that don't exist. We are going to kill family members of ISIL despite the fact you are more likely to be struck by lightning than be killed by ISIL in the USA? Going to the gold standard that is hated by almost every economist despite 5% unemployment and good job growth? It's loopy.
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The Wild Ideas You Missed While Donald Trump Was Talking
Trump’s not the only Republican making dubious claims. He’s just the only one we’ve paid attention to.
By Michael Grunwald, December 26, 2015

After five Republican debates, most Americans know about Donald Trump’s provocative beliefs, like his desires to end birthright citizenship, stop Muslim immigration and kill families of suspected terrorists. Much less attention has been paid to Carly Fiorina’s conclusion that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, Mike Huckabee’s pledge to defy Supreme Court rulings he deems incompatible with God’s law, Rick Santorum’s claim that Islam is not protected by the First Amendment or Chris Christie’s threat to shoot down Russian planes and launch cyberattacks on Chinese leaders.

Those provocative beliefs, believe it or not, were also expressed during the five Republican debates. They were just overshadowed by the furor over Trump. It might be natural for an opposition party to sound bombastic during primary season, especially when its front-runner is blessed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bombast, but the debate transcripts read like a Democratic opposition researcher’s dream.

The good news for Republicans, arguably, is that their rhetoric has been so consistently over-the-top that it has started to sound routine; academics call this “shifting the Overton window,” the range of what’s considered politically acceptable. I’ve watched all the debates as well as the undercards live, but when I reviewed the transcripts, I was amazed how many radical statements had slipped under my radar. Ted Cruz called for putting the United States back on the gold standard. Marco Rubio accused President Barack Obama of destroying the U.S. military. Huckabee said Bernie Madoff’s rip-offs weren’t as bad as what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare. Lindsey Graham said his administration would monitor all “Islamic websites,” not just jihadist ones. I had even forgotten Trump’s claim that vaccines caused autism in a 2-year-old girl he knew.

Vaccines do not cause autism. Goldbuggery is crackpot economics. The U.S. military is still by far the strongest in the world. And what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare is give them pensions and health care. But none of those statements drew any pushback from the other Republican candidates, or, for that matter, the media moderators. Neither did Ben Carson’s assertion that if the United States had set a goal of oil independence within a decade, moderate Arab states would have “turned over Osama bin Laden and anybody else you wanted on a silver platter within two weeks,” which is wackadoodle on multiple levels.

After the first Trump-obsessed debate in August, I wrote about how the Republicans were racing to the right to try to attract the scraps of attention that weren’t going to Trump. My favorite example that night was Bobby Jindal’s promise to sic the IRS and the Justice Department on Planned Parenthood on his first day as president—basically, an impeachable crime. But that didn’t turn out to be an isolated incident. In fact, Cruz made the same promise in a later debate, except for the IRS part, presumably because he also vowed to abolish the IRS.

The Democratic candidates have also appealed to their party’s ideologically committed base during their primary debates, which, perhaps for that reason, have been scheduled at odd times when few Americans have been watching. But with occasional exceptions from socialist Bernie Sanders, who suggested that he wouldn’t mind 90 percent tax rates on the rich, they haven’t said much that felt particularly surprising or politically damaging. Debt-free college may or may not be a good idea, but it’s hard to imagine Republicans turning it into an attack line.

By contrast, the GOP debates have felt like madcap purity contests, with the candidates competing to demonstrate their commitment to supply-side tax cuts and foreign-policy belligerence, as well as their fierce opposition to illegal immigration and every imaginable government regulation. Rubio, supposedly the establishment alternative to Trump, vowed to repeal Wall Street reform in its entirety and oppose abortion without any exceptions. John Kasich, supposedly the moderate in the GOP race, vowed to “punch Russia in the nose.” Wild accusations by non-Trump candidates—that the independent Federal Reserve has kept interest rates low to prop up Obama, that Obama shows more respect to Iran’s ayatollah than Israel’s prime minister, that 300,000 veterans died last year while waiting for health care, that Obama is trying to strip away the sovereignty of the United States, that David Petraeus was prosecuted for sharing classified information with his girlfriend because Obama didn’t like him—have provoked no reaction whatsoever during the debates.

Democratic leaders have expressed glee about these nationally televised festivals of right-wing me-too-ism, but another way of thinking about them is as highly rated, mostly unrebutted advertisements for the notion that Obama is a disaster and America is in peril. So far, the Republicans have had more than 20 hours to tell the public that “the idea of America is slipping away,” that “we’re on a path to socialism,” that “America has been betrayed.” Nobody on the debate stage disagreed when, for example, Christie declared that Obama doesn’t respect the military or the police, or that Americans believed in a more prosperous future in January 2009 (when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month) until Obama “stole” that belief. You might not take Christie at his word that Obama is a “feckless weakling,” but when you hear it over and over, you might assume he must be missing at least some feck.

At times, a few of the Republican contenders have dared to challenge the magical thinking that has dominated the debates. Rand Paul has been a consistent voice against regime change as a cure for what ails the Middle East. Kasich has mocked the “fantasy” that massive high-end tax cuts would create balanced budgets. And Trump has bucked GOP conventional wisdom on foreign and domestic issues, denouncing the Iraq War as a waste of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars that could have shored up American infrastructure instead, while defending progressive taxation as a logical approach to raising revenue from those who can afford it.

When I slogged through the transcripts, I also noticed a few interesting ideas buried amid the can-you-top-this rhetoric. When he wasn’t accusing Obama of criminalizing Christianity while exalting the faith of Guantánamo detainees, Huckabee was often calling for more focus on chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer that cause so much pain and cost so much money. When she wasn’t telling whoppers about Planned Parenthood videos and Obama firing a general who never served in his administration, Fiorina kept pushing for “zero-based budgeting,” the idea that every program and agency should have to justify every dollar every year. When he wasn’t complaining that Obama cares more about anti-Muslim sentiment than anti-Semitism, Santorum suggested that veterans should get most of their care from private hospitals, and that the Veterans Administration should become a specialized center of excellence for military-focused health issues like prosthetics and PTSD.

But policy entrepreneurialism was not the gist of the Republican debates. The gist was that the survival of the United States is at risk; that Obama has been weak on ISIL and Assad and Russia and China and Iran and Hezbollah and every other distasteful figure on the world stage; that calling radical Islam by its name and “targeting the bad guys” and “taking the fight to the enemy” will solve all the problems in the Middle East. On domestic issues, the gist was that the United States in the Obama era has become a dystopia of rampant unemployment, high taxes, runaway deficits, porous borders and job-killing regulation—and that undoing what Obama did would make America great again.

These are presumably winning messages in a Republican primary. It’s not clear whether they would be in a general election. The reality of the Obama era, for all its warts, is that unemployment has dropped to 5 percent, the deficit has shrunk by two thirds, illegal immigration has plateaued, far fewer U.S. soldiers are dying abroad and Americans are more likely to be killed by lightning than by terrorists at home. The question is whether the run-for-your-lives talking points will crash into statistical reality, or whether they will gradually help create a new political reality.

The Democrats would say the GOP is simply defying reality—on climate, on economics, on the ease with which muscular foreign policies can fix the world, on just about everything. Then again, the GOP isn’t the party that’s hiding its debates on weekend nights. Its views may be extreme, but it’s airing its views for all to see. It’s acting like a confident party—perhaps an overconfident party—while the Democrats are acting like they’ve lost their feck.
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"The male-centeredness of our opinion making and public space continues to reflect the male-centeredness of our understanding of the world."

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COMMENTS: 
*  Most politicians are so full of it, it's amazing that they're able to function at all.
*  This should be a non issue and if people don't know by now that women have a longer wait because they can't just whip it out and pee in a urinal on a wall needs to get up to speed and get their heads out of their rear end.
*  We also always wash our hands after we pee.
*  This debate occurred at St. Anselm College's Carr Center in Goffstown, New Hampshire on December 19, 2015,  The only restrooms in that particular building are public access, there are no private restrooms in that or adjacent buildings.  The number of male restroom facilities also out number the female facilities by a ratio of about 4 to 1.
*  A 5-minute break is, actually, ridiculous; 15 minutes, at least, should have been allotted. it's not that any such debate is so pressed for time!
*  I'm sure the author will get a lot of comments about women wanting "special privileges", when we only want to be treated like human beings.
*  My personal opinion - am I allowed to have one as a male? I couldn't care less! It happened - let's move on! The bigger problem is with our choices on either side! You can't tell me we don't have better options in this country!
   *  Of course you couldn't care less. Why should you care anything about something that doesn't affect you? I'm not voting for Clinton, but it's indicative of a huge problem I and every other woman face daily. And that's why we care. And we're more than aware of the number of men who do not care about the issues that affect us.
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Biology Doesn't Write Laws: Hillary Clinton's Bathroom Break Wasn't As Trivial As Some Might Like to Think
By Soraya Chemaly, December 25, 2015

As a lot of the world now knows, last Saturday night, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was late returning to the stage at the Democratic Debate after a five-minute break. Almost immediately media reported that she was delayed because of a line at the women's bathroom. As the break came to a close, with Clinton nowhere in sight, the moderators of the debate started without her.  Within minutes, Clinton walked back onto the stage, smiling, and said, "Sorry," to knowing laughter.  Women, the laughter acknowledged, live in the interstitial spaces of a world shaped by and for men.

Clinton's wry smile and later explanation, "You know, it does take me a little longer. That's all I can say," sent tetchy sexist commentators, and more egalitarian commentators, aflutter.

Rand Paul's wrote a popular tweet, going straight for the tried and true conservative "women cat fighting" narrative, that read, ".@CarlyFiorina has ZERO trouble making it back from commercial breaks @HillaryClinton." Because everyone knows women pee competitively.

Mike Huckabee opined that Clinton's "best moment in the entire night was when she was in the restroom."

Donald Trump, it goes without saying, made the biggest splash. He took the opportunity, once again, to put his bottomless reservoir of shame and misogyny on public display. "I know where she went, it's disgusting, I don't want to talk about it," Trump said, talking about it. "No, it's too disgusting. Don't say it, it's disgusting, let's not talk." Bodily fluids freak Trump out, but women's in particular. This summer, Trump told a lawyer who needed a breast pump that she was disgusting and after Megyn Kelly's challenged him on his sexist record during the first GOP presidential debate he jumped to, "you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."

Bernie Sanders joined the fray, saying that Trump "must have a very unusual relationship with women," if he doesn't realize they pee. "I guess I'm a man, men are allowed to go to the bathroom."  Bless him for pointing out the double standard.

Today, writing in the New York Times, Frank Bruni began his column simply, "Everybody pees."

One of the only women commenting on the debate situation was Jennifer Weiner who included the episode in a recap simply titled, "The Year of the Toilet," following up on a November piece by Emily Bazelon on the broader need to make public spaces more welcoming and egalitarian to diverse populations. Weiner was in a small minority however.

When Clinton said, "That's all I can say," she knows what she's talking about. Pointing out subtle, implicit and structural sexism doesn't make you any friends.  After Megyn Kelly asked Trump about his history of derogatory and demeaning comments towards women, references to her as a "cunt," "whore," "bitch," and "slut," skyrocketed in social media.

I write and talk about controversial subjects all the time - violence, rape, race - but I have never received as vitriolic a response as last summer, when I wrote about the disparity in public facilities for men and women, The Everyday Sexism of Women Waiting in Bathroom Lines; it was a piece about norms and knowledge.  Angry people mostly men, by the hundreds, wrote to tell me I was vulgar, stupid, ignorant and should learn to stand in order to pee, because it's superior. It continued for weeks, until I wrote a follow-up piece on the ten most sexist responses.

People may think that women no longer face sexism in media or politics when they speak, but that ignores the very obvious fact that even before women say anything they have already, in split seconds, jumped through hundreds of "what if I said something about sexism" hoops. Can you imagine the backlash and media frenzy if Clinton had actually, in some detail, pointed out that the women's room was farther away or that there is often, especially at large public events like this debate, a line that women patiently wait in while men flit in and out and makes jokes about women's vanity? That the microaggressive hostility evident, structurally, in so many of our legacy public spaces is relevant to women every day. "Bathroom codes enforce archaic and institutionalized gender norms," wrote Princeton students Monica Shi & Amanda Shi about their school's systemic sexism this year.

Fiorina, the only other woman candidate hasn't uttered a word about the subject of Clinton's delay.  She's fighting her own battle against people in her own camp.  Steve Deace, a radio host and Ted Cruz supporter tweeted during the GOP debate that Fiorina had gone "full vagina" when she made an allusion to sexism, saying she'd been "called every b-word in the book." Fiorina, apparently failing to understand that her own choice of expression buttresses the very problem she faces, shot back with, "I've now been called the V-word as well by the Cruz campaign, yes V, and I won't say that word either." It's too bad, really, we could have had a more meaningful #Vaginagate redux.

Many people, like Trump, believe it would be so much better if we just kept pretending women were simply messier version of men who should continue to deal, in quiet, small and private spaces, with their needs, discomfort and difference. That they should speak when spoken to, look pretty. Always.  And not curse.  Many men can go through their entire lives having no idea what women's needs are.  No one, particularly, it routinely seems, conservative men, really wants to know about what makes women women or human. Women, too, as subject to the culture's misogyny often likewise cringe when faced with words like "vagina," "rape," "menstruation."

But, it goes further than just not knowing or wanting to know.

Trump specifically used the word "disgust," which, politically expedient, has a particular resonance in conservative circles. Disgust is having a moment.  Studies show that the word is particularly powerful one for conservatives who tend, far more than liberals, to respond viscerally to descriptions that illicit shame, fear and horror. Second, Trump was talking not just to Clinton, but about women. Disgust, and the stereotypes it both relies on and perpetuates, distances women from men, the dominant societal and political group that he is so proudly part of. Disgust is step one of othering people, step one of justifying injustice. While it can be applied to distance oneself from virtually any other group, "the locus classicus of group-directed projective," wrote Philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her book, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, "is misogynistic disgust."

A profoundly conservative disgust and ignorance about women is why women like Purvi Patel are jailed for decades. It's why a woman in Tennessee just used a coat hanger for an abortion and is being charged with murder.  It's why thousands of women in Texas have had to figure out give themselves abortions.  It's why millions of already impoverished women face even more dire economic circumstances if their access to safe and affordable medical care specific to women's complicated, repugnant and disgusting bodies.  It's why maternal mortality in the country has risen by 136% in the past 25 years, while the rest of the world's had declined, with black women experiencing four times the risk.  It's why three UN investigators recently reported that they found the degraded status of women's rights in the United States "shocking" and "myth-shattering."

Disgust about women's bodies, hardly limited to Trump, is inseparable from a cultivated and politically useful ignorance.  The GOP's party platform is shaped around the idea that women are not competent adults, capable of moral reasoning and autonomous decision making, but, rather, are stuck somewhere between children and men, in need of eternal male intervention. It is filled with men passing oppressive anti-women laws who admit to never having thought about women's lives or bodies. The party's paternalism, its fundamental reliance on notions of complementary and binary gender roles, relies on maintaining ignorance, sometimes referred to as "mystery," about the "opposite sex."

Keeping people ignorant of women's bodies and bodily habits is the polite thing to do.  But, we aren't talking about people. Women already know. We're talking about keeping men ignorant.  Men run the world, and, for women, it's an unsafe and uncomfortable one. But, insisting that the way men do things is inadequate for meeting our human needs is so whiny, a word mainly associated with the high-pitched plaintiff keening of dogs.

In some countries a lack of facilities for girls and women means girls can't go to school, women can't move freely and safety in their own neighborhoods, their ability to get food, water and work all compromised by the dangers of seeking out safe sanitation. In militarized zones and refugee camps, a trip to the bathroom for a child or woman carries with it the almost certain risk of sexual assault and possibly death. Girls and women, in an effort to stop having to use toilets, stop drinking, making themselves sick with dehydration and other ailments.  In wealthy nations, the effects on women aren't nearly so blunt or harsh, but they are meaningful none-the-less.

The argument, "it's biology, get over it" is a silly one. Biology, as one reader put it, "doesn't design restrooms." Biology also doesn't write laws. That, too, is relevant.

As scholar Judith Plaskow wrote in a paper on sanitation, toilets and social justice, "Not only does the absence of women's bathrooms signify the exclusion of women from certain professions and halls of power, but it also has functioned as an explicit argument against hiring women or admitting them into previously all-male organizations."

On Saturday, Clinton and other women also had to travel farther than their male peers, whose restroom was conveniently located much closer to the stage. Her career as a senator came to an end in 2009, two years before the 76 women who were then serving in the House finally got a bathroom even remotely close to the Speaker's Lobby.  As Representative Donna M. Christensen, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands, tweeted two days after, "The first woman came to Congress in 1917. We are finally getting a ladies rest room near the floor of the House."

Male members, if you'll forgive the expression, could take for granted the fact that if and when they needed a bathroom it was close and would not impede their ability to listen to or participate in debates or vote on legislation. The men's room was not only near but, had a fireplace, a shoeshine stand, and televised floor proceedings. There was also an attendant who warned men if session breaks were coming to an end.

The male-centeredness of our opinion making and public space continues to reflect the male-centeredness of our understanding of the world.
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