- who to believe
According to this latest video, the Republicans have declared war…
and VJM Publishing looks at what warfare is
Added: Trump the Troll and Vladimir Putin tells it like he sees it
New: Trey Gowdy at Liberty University
Big Bad Don by user262008952 #np on #SoundCloud
click here to listen to the song (its brilliant! lol)
Speech 2016 (double click to view)
Trump the Troll (double click below to view)
Putin’s Opinion (double click below to view)
Trey Gowdy on Hope at Liberty University (double click below to view)
#releasethememo tweetstorm forces the release of an inflamatory document. is this a declaration of war? i guess time will tell…
The Four Types of Warfare as found in the latest compilation “The Best of VJM 2017”
When a person hears the word ‘warfare’, it usually conjures up images of fire and explosions, bombs, tanks, blood, death, bayonets and bullets.
If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).
USA and Israel. Is American policy fanning the hatred?
Act Four Opinion
Hillary Clinton and I are done
By Alyssa Rosenberg January 30 at 11:28 AM
It’s been the longest relationship of my life as a voter, and as a writer on culture and politics. But after last week, and the revelation that she failed to take her campaign manager’s advice and fire an aide accused of sexual harassment in 2008, Hillary Clinton and I are done. And to be honest, it’s probably overdue.
Rooting for Clinton has never been purely about her, of course. Breaking that “highest, hardest glass ceiling” would have been a rebuke to the idea that taking time to support her husband’s career is necessarily the end of a woman’s dreams and ambitions. Seeing Clinton, the leading hate figure of the past three decades of conservative politics, earn a respected role in public life often felt like evidence that women don’t need to let themselves be defined by their most venomous public detractors. And when I defended Clinton from the charges that she should have done something more to prevent her husband’s transgressions, I did so out of a belief that women have the right to complicated reactions in private as long as they behave with integrity in public.
I am absolutely convinced that wives shouldn’t be assigned to govern their husbands’ behavior. That’s a kind of buck-passing that excuses their spouses from having functional consciences and limited self-control. And marriage is a special kind of relationship, one where we make unusual commitments to love and support the other person that we might not extend to others. That devotion inevitably interferes with objectivity. If Hillary Clinton, or any other woman, is privately angry at or blinkered about another woman who comes forward to say that she had an affair with Bill Clinton, or that Bill Clinton sexually harassed her, I’m willing to allow Hillary Clinton that private fallibility and cruelty, that momentary lack of solidarity. We should all hope we find such forgiveness in moments when we’re faced with astonishing personal pain and respond in ways that demonstrate the limits of our strength.
But if I’m being honest with myself, I also trusted that Clinton’s marriage was a separate zone for her. I believed that when confronted with allegations of sexual misconduct in her capacity as a senator, secretary of state or candidate for president that she would handle those accusations decisively and in a way that made clear that she was on the side of other women. After all, she spoke eloquently about guaranteeing women equal access to the workplace and keeping us free from violence in her landmark speech in Beijing in 1995, and connected the subjugation of women and the instability of nations during her tenure as secretary of state. I’ve long followed the career of one sexual assault survivor who went to work on Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and I took her presence there as a vote of confidence that this was a workplace where she felt comfortable.
Maggie Haberman and Amy Chozick’s reporting for the New York Times about how Clinton handled sexual harassment allegations against Burns Strider, her faith adviser, during her 2008 presidential campaign makes it impossible for me to maintain that trust.
To be clear: Clinton is not responsible for Strider’s conduct. He alone is the person who is alleged to have rubbed his office-mate’s shoulders, kissed her forehead and “sent her a string of suggestive emails.” Clinton is also not responsible for the subsequent alleged sexual misconduct that got Strider fired from an outside group supporting Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
But Clinton is responsible for ignoring recommendations from Jess O’Connell, her campaign’s national director of operations and the person tapped to investigate the 2008 allegations against Strider, that Strider be fired from the campaign. She made the choice to ignore the advice of her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, who took that recommendation to Clinton. Clinton is the person who made the call to withhold some of Strider’s pay and to assign him to go to counseling sessions he never attended. And it’s entirely reasonable to ask whether, in taking these actions rather than terminating him from the campaign, Clinton made it easier for Strider to find another job where he was accused of sexually harassing another young woman.
I respect Clinton’s personal religious faith and the depth of her belief in forgiveness. What I can’t accept is the idea that forgiving Strider means minimizing the consequences he faced for his behavior, especially when doing so put him in a position to offend again. Other women bore the cost when Clinton tried to focus on redeeming a man who worked for her rather than protecting the woman who did.
It’s true that during her decades in public life, Clinton has been unfairly saddled with the weight of a lot of terrible decision-making by men. But it does not balance the scales to say that Clinton shouldn’t be held accountable for the choices she made and the advice she shrugged off as the chief executive of her own presidential campaign. Trying to protect her even from the consequences of her own actions is condescension, not fairness.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2018/01/30/breaking-up-with-hillary-clinton/?utm_term=.ca4dbca5caf1
Noam Chomsky on Trump: The worst is yet to come
This administration’s legislative agenda is uniquely cruel, even for the far right
Renowned linguist and author Noam Chomsky believes today’s Republican Party is “more dangerous than ISIS,” whether or not Trump voters will ever be willing to admit it. According to one May 31 poll, 68 percent think America is on the right track.
Chomsky, on the other hand, believes the country has been on the wrong track since it adopted a neoliberal economic model several decades ago — and things are about to get a whole lot worse.
During the opening of the first zero net energy building at UMass Amherst on April 13, Chomsky began his lecture by explaining why the despair that has ravaged Trump country is a phenomenon unique to America.
“[There’s been] a dramatic increase in mortality among middle-aged white Americans without college degrees, beginning in 1999, recently documented by [Princeton professors] Anne Case and Angus Deaton,” he said.
Case and Deaton found the pattern has spread nationwide in the past two decades, with no end in sight.
“It’s a phenomenon unknown apart from war and pestilence,” Chomsky said. “They have an updated current analysis where they attribute the increase in mortality to despair and loss of status of working people under the neoliberal miracle, which is concomitant [with] heightened worker insecurity.”
Thus, during the 2016 presidential election, “the same sectors of the population that are suffering increased mortality turned for rescue to their bitter class enemy, out of understandable, but self-destructive desperation.”
Trump’s 2018 budget, introduced in late May, would prove especially damaging to his working-class voters, due to its deep cuts to social programs. In its most recent analysis, the Congressional Budget Office found that the GOP’s American Health Care Act would strip 23 million Americans of their health insurance over the next decade.
“The consequences for working people are now being exhibited behind the facade of Trump/Bannon/Spicer bluster before the cameras,” said Chomsky. “This is the systematic enactment of the [Paul] Ryan legislative programs, which are unusually savage even for the ultra-right.”
On June 1, Neil Gorsuch joined his Supreme Court colleagues for their first group photo.
“There’s probably worse to come, as further blows to working people are authorized by the Trump/Roberts Court,” noted Chomsky. “Now with Gorsuch on board, who will probably decide to destroy public sector unions on fraudulent libertarian grounds.”
https://www.salon.com/2017/06/06/noam-chomsky-on-trump-the-worst-is-yet-to-come_partner/
https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-sessions-delivers-remarks-26th-annual-law-enforcement-legislative-day