Monday, December 24th, 2018
Julian Borger, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: As the year ends, this is what the world thinks about Trump, the Republicans, and the U.S. It is a far far distance from the America of the Marshall Plan, the technological leadership that took humans to the moon, and the political leadership that created stability and peace for decades. Now it is craziness, economic chaos, and the U.S. seems to the world to have become a reality TV show.
Donald Trump waves as he arrives to speak in Tupelo, Mississippi, in November.
Credit: Alex Brandon/AP
The US stumbled into the holiday season with a sense of unravelling, as a large chunk of the federal government ground to a halt, the stock market crashed and the last independently minded, globally respected, major figure left in the administration announced he could no longer work with the president.
The defense secretary, James Mattis, handed in his resignation on Thursday, over Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to pull US troops out of Syria. On Saturday another senior official joined the White House exodus. Brett McGurk, the special envoy for the global coalition to defeat Isis and the US official closest to America’s Kurdish allies in the region, was reported to have handed in his resignation on Friday.
That night, senators flew back to Washington from as far away as Hawaii for emergency talks aimed at finding a compromise on Trump’s […]
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Monday, December 24th, 2018
JEFFREY M. JONES, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: A very important political reality in this country is that although a majority of Americans are beside themselves with the state of the nation, for about 39% of us Donald Trump and the Republicans are the bee's knees, and all is going according to plan. I don't see how this continues, and it isn't clear to me how we stay one country or how whether we do or not, the United States we have known all our lives survives. Here are some facts.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ approval of the job Donald Trump is doing as president has been highly stable, showing less movement than all previous presidents’ ratings during their first two years in office. His presidency also has been notable for the absence of two historically reliable patterns in presidential job approval — honeymoon periods and rally events. It is possible that Trump — and to a lesser extent his predecessor Barack Obama — have ushered in a new era of marked stability in job approval ratings resulting from extreme party polarization.
1. Trump’s Stable Job Approval Ratings
To date, Trump has averaged 39% job approval as president, with his survey ratings ranging from a low of 35% to a high of 45%. The 10-percentage point range in Trump’s approval is the smallest for any president during his first two years in the Oval Office by a significant margin. Richard Nixon had the second smallest range of job approval at 16 points, while the average for presidents prior to Trump during their first two years is 28 points.
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Monday, December 24th, 2018
, - The Nws-Gazette/The Associated Press
Stephan: The priestly pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church just goes on an on, its scope still uuknown and not fully appreciated. Given the molestation of children, the anti-woman stance, and the corruption, I don't understand how it is possible to remain a communicant; I guess it is probably the sense of community that keeps people going, but it must be tough.
Credit: KPFA
CHICAGO (AP) — Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan on Wednesday issued a blistering report about clergy sexual abuse, saying that Catholic dioceses in Illinois has not released the names of at least 500 clergy accused of sexually abusing children.
The preliminary report found that the church’s six archdioceses have done a woefully inadequate job of investigating allegations and in some cases did not investigate them at all or notify the state’s child welfare agency. Madigan’s office said that while the dioceses have disclosed 45 more names of those credibly accused, the total number of names disclosed is only 185 and raises questions about the church’s response to the crisis.
“By choosing not to thoroughly investigate allegations, the Catholic Church has failed in its moral obligation to provide survivors, parishioners and the public a complete and accurate accounting of all sexually inappropriate behavior involving priests in Illinois,” Madigan said in a statement. “The failure to investigate also means that the Catholic Church has never made an effort to determine whether the conduct of the accused […]
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Monday, December 24th, 2018
Stephan: The Roman Catholic Church is not the only denomination that is profoundly sexually dysfunctional. The truth is that all fundamentalist religions, particularly those derived from the Abrahamic tree, with its Middle Eastern iron age thinking about sex and gender, share the same four issues: 1) A sense of superiority and entitlement as the followers of the one true faith. 2) A sense of persecution for their faith. 3) the belief as a matter of faith in male dominance. 4) the obsessive need for men through the institution and with the justification of the faith to control the half of the human race with vaginas.
In my view, it is time for humanity to move out of the iron age thinking of two and a half millennia ago, and get on with gender equality.
From “Protect LDS Children” to “Sam Young – Protect LDS Children – And Children of All Religions”
What would you, as a parent, think if your 12-year-old son came to you and asked “What does chastity mean? What is masturbation?”
Being a good parent, you manage not to show surprise at his questions, but you calmly ask him, “Where did those questions come from?”
His reply set off alarms in your head and heart. “It was Bishop _____. He asked me to come into his office at church and he shut the door. It was just him and me, no one else was there.”
A single male adult alone in a closed room with a minor male child? Asking your son sexually explicit questions? Your heart beats faster and your hands tremble as you ask yourself, “What’s going on here?”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, has for many years conducted “Worthiness Interviews” with both boys and girls, starting when the child reaches 12 years of age. These interviews […]
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Sunday, December 23rd, 2018
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA, Politics Staff Writer - Salon
Stephan: Although I might vary with Kathleen Hall Jamieson on some nuances I believe, as she does, and have believed since Trump became a candidate, that the Russians were pulling off one of the history's great intelligence coups, truly historic. They were determining from a position of vast economic and military inferiority the outcome of the presidential election of the most powerful nation on earth also, as it happens, their decades-long enemy. The 2016 election and the Russian influence in its outcome will be in the history books. Here is an excellent data-based presentation of what has happened, and equally important, why. They played the flaws in American culture like an instrument. Think about that.
Trump and Putin
Credit: CNN
The Russian government’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 American presidential election in order to install Donald Trump in the White House may be one of the greatest intelligence operations in modern history.
What is publicly known is damning. Russia intelligence operatives and other foreign parties working in conjunction with them were able to influence (if not infiltrate) the highest levels of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign staff and other parts of his inner circle. Many of those relationships may have continued well past his election as president. The apparent goal was to manipulate Trump and by extension America’s foreign policy in order to advance Russia’s and Vladimir Putin’s interests to the disadvantage of the United States and the West.
The Russian government also wanted to undermine faith in Western democracy by creating domestic chaos, uncertainty and a crisis of faith in liberal democratic social and political institutions. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal continues, public evidence suggests that the worst case scenario seems much more likely than not to […]
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