Majority Leader Eric Cantor Fails to Win Reelection

Eric Cantor, the resident Jewish tea party member, was voted out of office in last night's Virginia primary election, and Rep Cantor is so eager to help his Republican Party that he's resigning his status as House Majority leader to make way for someone with even more extreme views.  Last night was a victor for extremism.  Some have put forth the theory that in Virginia's open primary - - Democrats all voted for David Bratt just to embarrass the party.  Bot voter analysis shows that there was no influx of democratic voters.  It was said that immigration was the issue.  I reccomend that you watch Chuck Schumer's speech today on this subject of immigration reform.  In it he notes that Eric Cantor was part of the problem and not part of the solution, and that on top of the many, many excuses John Boehner have put forth for why immigration reform has not been passed, the latest excuse is that "We can't pass immigration now because Eric Cantor isn't with us".  Shawn Hannity puts forth his five point platform with broad political ideals.  But in reality you have no idea from casually listening to these five points the specifics of either what tea party members HAVE done, or are doing NOW or what they would LIKE to see America become in the future if they had their way.  To learn the true goals of the tea party you need to tune into a show such as Thom Hartman or Stephanie Miller.  Apparently there is a new news network called the TONN or tea party news network, no doubt trying to compete with CNN.  This David Pratt guy is a faithful desciple of Ayan Rand and was funded by 500,000 from the Kato Institute, an offshoot of the Koch Brothers, to teach courses based on his extreme beliefs.  Apparently this guy also is a graduate of Princeton theological seminary.  They must be teaching some strange theology nowadays.  But for Bratt's financing you have to go back to a guy named John Allicen, who got perhaps billions in TARP money from the Bush Administration for B T & T bank, and of that 22 million was used to fund Laura Ingrem and Mark LeVin, who saturated the air waves this past election advocating for David Pratt's election.   Of course many Republicans are not a bit happy that Eric Cantor lost his house seat- - after all he "sure brought home the Pork" to his district.

The tea party is on a roll because yesterday the Senate apparently failed by three votes or 57 out of sixty votes needed for voting the student loan bill out - -  and they make countless excuses for that, too.  For instance it is said that forty million students or whatever- will be denied student loan refinancing so that 22,000 multi millionaires can get a little extra cash.  Keep in mind with almost any other loan and certainly a home mortgage, it can be refinanced when interest rates drop.  But not student loans.  And they can't be forgiven even if you declare Chapter seven.  This burdensome debt on so many millions of students and ex students is a major drag on the overall economy, which is just   what the Republicans want.  In their minds anything which slows down the economy is a good thing if it makes the President look bad.   I see the figure 1.2 trillion dollars.  I hope that's not the student debt figure.  Al Franken, the guy from Minnisota you never hear from- - addressed this issue today.  But it's not as iff these students and ex students who owe this debt are asking for a "government handout' but merely want current interest rates they pay to be more in line with market rates now- - which would be something like 3.8% rather than over six percent.  But the tea party stands like a wall, and they will not close so much as a single tax loophole for the ultra rich, even though Mitt Romney said he was willing to do that even if HE became President in the 2012 campaign.  I can think of no bill off the top of my head the Republicans have EVER put forth that will help or stimulate this languishing economy.

We then have this dark sports utility vehicle full of comedians that was hit by a truck driver who had fallen asleep because he said he'd been up straight over 24 hours.  In his "defence of his action" he says that truck drivers routinely have to skip nights of sleep because the sooner they get the produce to market, the more money they make.  Yet many companies have policies concerning truck drivers and the ammount of sleep they are required to get to be alert and safe drivers.   That one Black comedian is in critical condition now and his personal writer was killed outright.  Meanwhile there are those on the Stephanie Miller show who think - - that using railroads to haul more produce and cattle and such would be a bad idea, even though rail cars can haul a lot more cargo more efficiently.  In August of 1965 I stayed overnight in a Fresno motel that was right next to the railroad track that runs right through the motel strip of that city.  So don't tell me they don't have railroad tracks.  But it's like these Resident doctors in hospitals who regard it as some kind of a macho or sporting thing to be able to stay awake for in excess of thirty hours and still perform surgery on patients.

With this paragraph let's take a break from Politics and do a religious sidebar.  I had a dream last night, involving two "characters" in particular (for lack of a better term) and these two characters are ones I'd had dreams about many times before usually with the same general plot line.  This time was different because I noted there was this one time a "fundamental alteration in the plot line" and I was puzzled why the change now?  I didn't know.  I thought "Was God trying to tell me something?"   But when you think of the things of God - - - you can be Safe - or Otherwise.  A Safe view of "God" or the "Things of God" would be either that God is this Rule Maker who lays it all out and spells his will for us out clearly and it's more than evident in the OT for one, when a person has Transgressed his Word.  The other view would be like my view of God that God is this 'A moral" being outside our Universe, and for whatever reason couldn't be less interested in Anything we say or do.  But you find people who are into the whole "Religious Scene" particularly in seminary - - take this other ground that God is "Mysterious" and "There are things we may never know" and paint a God who forever just keeps men guessing what he's all about.  In short you could say this is a god who plays games such as "Hide and Seek" and "Peek a Boo" and "Catch me if you Can".  You will note all these are children's games.  There is one Simpson's episode for instance where Homer is playing peek a boo with Maggie and an onlooker observes the play and says "That's the first time I've ever seen the Baby get bored with the game before the Daddy does".   But herein lies the problem.  We are told God is Very Intelligent and designed our DNA and all that and other parts of the cell that turns genes on and off at certain times and makes the thing seem so entirely complex, that an air traffic controller's job seems a snap by comparrison.   So I came up with the explanation or slogan if you will that "No fundamentalist Christian has any business talking to us about creationism" because they believe in a god and in an idiology that is utterly devoid of either Reason, or most importantly Intelligence.   His desciples are reduced to activities such as reading the tea leaves at the bottom of tea cups- or like that guy in 'Talking John Birth Society Blues" who sees phantoms in virtually everything.

I am going to be pasting in some external material on how screwed up the Obama foreign policy is right now.  But it seems that we "switched sides" and began supporting Al Qaeda in key areas in the Mideast and Africa, without informing anybody, such as congress, that we were making a major policy change, and due to this change, among other things - - Bengazi happened.  Now Al Qaeda is making new previously unseen inroads into Iraq.  They seemingly have a whole swath of land they control both in Iraq and in Syria and are linked up to the Al Qaeda troops fighting Assad in Syria.  We could have gotten the jump on that if we had intervened in Syria like the President promised we would- - such that the people would not become so completely desperate for any relief of the oppression that they would turn to anyone- - even the Devil, even Al Qaeda.  I think I have captured pretty much the meat of what George Washington's blog posting is about in this case, but you can always go back to the original.

The U.S. “Switched Sides” to Support Al Qaeda

Al Qaeda wasn’t even in Iraq until the U.S. invaded that country. And U.S. policy in Libya is partly responsible for sending an influx of Al Qaeda terrorists – and heavy weapons – into Iraq.  And now things are getting a whole lot worse …

You may not have heard, but Al Qaeda allies took over the Iraqi city of Fallujah 6 months ago.  And today, Al Qaeda-linked extremists in Iraq captured Iraq’s second-biggest city, the major oil centerof Mosul.  (The jihadis call themselves “The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”.   The fact that the U.S. is backing Al Qaeda in Syria is probably a continuing factor).   To make matters worse, the army fled, so the militants seized huge caches of U.S. supplied weapons, including humvees:

We reported in 2012 that the U.S. supported Al Qaeda in Libya in its effort to topple Gadaffi:  The U.S. supported opposition which overthrew Libya’s Gadaffi was largely comprised of Al Qaeda terrorists.  According to a 2007 report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center’s center, the Libyan city of Benghazi was one of Al Qaeda’s main headquarters – and bases for sending Al Qaeda fighters into Iraq – prior to the overthrow of Gaddafi:

The Hindustan Times reported last year:  “There is no question that al Qaeda’s Libyan franchise, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, is a part of the opposition,” Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer and a leading expert on terrorism, told Hindustan Times.

It has always been Qaddafi’s biggest enemy and its stronghold is Benghazi.

Al Qaeda is now largely in control of Libya.  Indeed, Al Qaeda flags were flown over the Benghazi courthouse once Gaddafi was toppled.  (Incidentally, Gaddafi was on the verge of invading Benghazi in 2011, 4 years after the West Point report cited Benghazi as a hotbed of Al Qaeda terrorists. Gaddafi claimed – rightly it turns out – that Benghazi was an Al Qaeda stronghold and a main source of the Libyan rebellion.  But NATO planes stopped him, and protected Benghazi.)  The Daily  Mail reported yesterday:  A self-selected group of former top military officers, CIA insiders and think-tankers, declared Tuesday in Washington that a seven-month review of the deadly 2012 terrorist attack has determined that it could have been prevented – if the U.S. hadn’t beenhelping to arm al-Qaeda militias throughout Libya a year earlier.  ‘The United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures,’ Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told MailOnline.  She blamed the Obama administration for failing to stop half of a $1 billion United Arab Emirates arms shipment from reaching al-Qaeda-linked militants.  ‘Remember, these weapons that came into Benghazi were permitted to enter by our armed forces who were blockading the approaches from air and sea,’ Lopez claimed. ‘They were permitted to come in. … [They] knew these weapons were coming in, and that was allowed..  ‘The intelligence community was part of that, the Department of State was part of that, and certainly that means that the top leadership of the United States, our national security leadership, and potentially Congress – if they were briefed on this – also knew about this.’

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‘The White House and senior Congressional members,’ the group wrote in an interim report released Tuesday, ‘deliberately and knowingly pursued a policy that provided material support to terrorist organizations in order to topple a ruler [Muammar Gaddafi] who had been working closely with the West actively to suppress al-Qaeda.’  ‘Some look at it as treason,’ said Wayne Simmons, a former CIA officer who participated in the commission’s research.  The same thing is happening in Syria. The U.S. “switched sides” and is supporting our arch enemy Al Qaeda.  Specifically, the Benghazi “embassy” became the CIA headquarters for transferring – after Gaddaffi fell – weapons in Libya to the Syrian Al Qaeda rebels, as confirmed by Pulitzer prize winning reporter Sy Hersh.