Hi everybody! I am back with more "stuff" that I hope will interest you. This coming week is a verry busy one for me between physio, teaching ESL, and taking my mother to appointments. As such, there may not be an Open Thread every day. I will tell you, I have a new appreciation for all the work Tom does to get the blog out, and he is a speed reader and extremely knowledgable on US politics.
Puzzle — Ship Building http://www.jigzone.com/puzzles/2015-09-13 my time 3:34 average time 4:30 How did you do?
Short Takes
Washington Post — H/T to JD — Corbyn’s rise echoes that of another senior-citizen socialist who has come out of nowhere this year to rattle his party's center-left establishment. Like Corbyn, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been waging a surprisingly effective insurgency in a campaign that was once thought to be unwinnable.
“If you’re Bernie Sanders, you’ll take some heart from this,” said Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. “If you’re Hillary Clinton, you’ll be nervous.”
While Sanders is still fighting uphill in his effort to outmaneuver Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Corbyn’s once-quixotic-seeming campaign ended Saturday with a landslide win. Nearly 60 percent of voters backed him over three more centrist rivals just four months after Labour suffered one of its worst-ever defeats in national elections.
There certainly are movements globally for more people centred governance as evidence by the excitement around Bernie Sanders, the dump Stephen Harper in Canada, the disappointment with Tony Abbott in Australia, and now the Labour Party in the UK. Now, if only Citizens United could be overturned in the US. A related story can also be seen at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanders-corbyn-and-the-coming-debate-inside-the-democratic-party/2015/09/12/a23673f4-597e-11e5-8bb1-b488d231bba2_story.html
The Nation — Appearing before the senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, George Kennan, the legendary Cold War diplomat often called “the father of containment,” criticized the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The United States, he said, should not “jump around like an elephant frightened by a mouse.”
Kennan’s metaphor of the frightened elephant is a strangely apt one for the situation in which we find ourselves nearly half a century later. In the GOP primary, the candidates are calling for a foreign policy defined by fearmongering and senseless aggression. Their agenda includes plans to reverse President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran; abandon renewed diplomatic ties with Cuba; escalate tensions with Russia; and deploy US troops to Syria. Much like Kennan’s agitated elephant, the Republican candidates see challenges posed by Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, the Islamic State and other extremist groups that are far out of proportion to any real harm they could ever inflict on US interests. They are so out of touch with reality that even admitting the folly of the Iraq War is seen by them as a sign of weakness. The far greater danger is the combination of paranoia and hubris that characterizes the foreign policies of the Republican candidates, who would lead us into still more self-inflicted disasters. They would have us rush to embrace unnecessarily militaristic responses to otherwise manageable challenges, bringing yet more chaos to the Middle East and Eastern Europe while costing the nation even more in lives and treasure.
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-danger-of-foreign-policy-by-bumper-sticker/
Although a long artical, it is certainly worth reading. Katrina vanden Heuve makes some great points. And who could resist looking at that picture of McTurtle with his back-up choir which includes Cornyn of Texas.
Daily Kos — Sarah Palin continues to entertain us with her superior intellect. Could it be that she formulates her words in a manner only some can understand? Well, Rachel Maddow has asked for our help in deciphering a strange and convoluted statement Palin made at the rally against the Iran Nuclear Agreement.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/10/1420001/-Sarah-Palin-confounds-Rachel-Maddow-Tell-me-what-this-means?detail=emailclassic
Do read the rest of this short piece, and if you can't understand Palin, you're in good company! I might even venture to say that if you do understand, you've been possessed by Teabuggery! Saints preserve us! You know it is bad when even Glenn Beck is wishing he didn't know Sister Sarah!
My Universe — Since I can't do cartoons like TC, JL suggested something like this, at least that's what I thought she meant. Being the ailurophile I am, I thought I would treat you to this new feline birthing method!
