The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Listening to voters’ concerns

mtierney said:

I think rereading the post on this thread explaining Sharia Law would disabuse you of that notion, Lost.

There are a lot of "Christian Sharia" laws being proposed, and some passed, recently.  But I don't see you upset about that.

murdering your children who express other views isn't in the Christian religion. Review the 10 Commandments for confirmation -- I believe there is a copy on this thread from a week ago or so.

Perhaps there is some hope....

https://cruxnow.com/global-chu...

@sac:  please give us a list of the proposed "Christian Sharia" law to which you refer.  I am also opposed to government establishing a particular religion or sect. However, it appears that UK proponents of sharia initially desire  a parallel system of law for Muslims.  Many believe that as the sharia system matures you will eventually have demands for a theocracy based on sharia and the Islamic model of law/government (where there are no distinctions between religion and government).

In the UK, apparently thirty ("30") sharia councils have been set up.  See http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-365...  These councils attempt to resolve differences using sharia law including acceptance of polygamy.  Those who support sharia law in UK have high levels of conspiracy theories.  I fear that we will see such sharia councils here in the US eventually.  We can learn what the UK has done with regards to sharia law.

sac said:

mtierney said:

I think rereading the post on this thread explaining Sharia Law would disabuse you of that notion, Lost.

There are a lot of "Christian Sharia" laws being proposed, and some passed, recently.  But I don't see you upset about that.

RealityForAll said:

@sac:  please give us a list of the proposed "Christian Sharia" law to which you refer.  I am also opposed to government establishing a particular religion or sect. However, it appears that UK proponents of sharia initially desire  a parallel system of law for Muslims.  Many believe that as the sharia system matures you will eventually have demands for a theocracy based on sharia and the Islamic model of law/government (where there are no distinctions between religion and government).
 

There are Rabbinical Courts in the US. They handle disputes among Orthodox Jews, including divorces. I have heard of Catholic Canon Courts, but do not know anything about them.

If religious Muslims want to set up Courts or Councils to resolve disputes within their communities I would see no problem with that.

European countries seem to have a much more difficult problem with assimilation than do we, but in any event I do not see how religious Muslims could become  a large enough percentage of the population in this country to have much influence on our secular laws any tme in the near or not so near future.

And frankly, I see prejudice against and stereotyping of religious minorities to be a far more serious problem than the threat of imposition of minority religious views on the majority. Again, it was not too long ago that Protestants were afraid of the Vatican taking over America, and it was a little further back in our history when the government of the US actually went to war against the Mormons in Utah.

Big take-away from today's hearing for me was Comey saying he wrote a memo, gave it to a friend, and asked his friend to leak it to the NYT!!

Comey seemed to have little of the cockiness displayed at the earlier congressional hearing, he looked exhausted today.

If only Comey kept quiet and didn't mind being called a nutjob by the worst person on earth.

ETA: By the way, it's not called leaking if you're a private citizen.  It's called speaking your mind.

In this case, it's also evidence of a potential crime by the head of state. It's his duty to the Constitution to make sure it's known.

dave said:

If only Comey kept quiet and didn't mind being called a nutjob by the worst person on earth.

ETA: By the way, it's not called leaking if you're a private citizen.  It's called speaking your mind.

Dave, Comey used that word - leak - himself.

True. Here he used it.

MANCHIN: Did he inquire — did he — did he show any inquiry whatsoever what was that meeting about?

COMEY: No. You’re right, I did say to him — I’d forgotten this — when I talked to him and said, “You have to be between me and the president, and that’s incredibly important,” and I forget my exact words, I passed along the president’s message about the importance of aggressively pursuing leaks of classified information, which is a — a goal I share.

Here's an interesting article which popped up on my feed this morning. 

http://www.theamericanconserva...

In the realm of politics, the Religious Right was an abysmal failure. It was an effective fundraising tool for Republican politicians, but its lasting victories in terms of social policies are difficult to name. Stopping the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s was perhaps the movement’s sole permanent achievement. And that victory occurred before most of the major institutions of the Christian Right were even established. On abortion, gay marriage, prayer in school, and other social issues, conservative victories were typically fleeting.

Despite the hundreds of thousands of Americans that formally joined institutions associated with the Religious Right, and the untold millions spent on lobbying and activism, the movement’s long-term impact on public policy seems negligible. It is hardly surprising that the Religious Right is no longer even perceived as a relevant force in U.S. politics. Far from a kingmaker in the political arena, the Christian Right is now mostly ignored.

ridski said:

Here's an interesting article which popped up on my feed this morning. 

http://www.theamericanconserva...

In the realm of politics, the Religious Right was an abysmal failure. It was an effective fundraising tool for Republican politicians, but its lasting victories in terms of social policies are difficult to name. Stopping the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s was perhaps the movement’s sole permanent achievement. And that victory occurred before most of the major institutions of the Christian Right were even established. On abortion, gay marriage, prayer in school, and other social issues, conservative victories were typically fleeting.

Roe v. Wade still stands, but I think it's clear that abortion rights and access have been rolled back in the last three decades. 

I also wouldn't underestimate the policy effects of the Religious Right's opposition. It's not just about what it failed to accomplish, but about what it prevented others from accomplishing.

back to the topic of parsing the word leak! Also, Comey recounted the issue of the tarmac meeting between WJC and the AG Lynch before the election. She later asked Comey to change his words from investigation to looking into the "matter" in referencing HRC .

The Clintons just never change. 

Can we all parse matter going forward?

The former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under oath called the President of the United States a liar but you say:

mtierney said:

Big take-away from today's hearing for me was Comey saying he wrote a memo, gave it to a friend, and asked his friend to leak it to the NYT!!

But perhaps you are correct since calling Trump a liar is like calling the Sun hot

mtierney said:

back to the topic of parsing the word leak! Also, Comey recounted the issue of the tarmac meeting between WJC and the AG Lerner before the election. She later asked Comey to change his words from investigation to looking into the "matter" in referencing HRC .

The Clintons just never change. 

Can we all parse matter going forward?

Happy Friday!

may I cause a minor diversion in this thread to celebrate the momentous thrill of getting connection to the internet back in our new home??

      {I really want fireworks and Ferris wheels, but this'll do}

Thank you. Let's proceed with more serious political discussion...

you're in the wrong thread for that.

joanne said:

...
 Let's proceed with more serious political discussion...

Yay joanne, welcome back!  Congrats on one more step in your moving process!  Now, can we hear what you really think about DJT's physical condition, and why??

And oh, ridski,   so delightfully subversive.  This is why I will open pretty much any thread where I see your name, anticipating a smile if not actual lol.

I have a dozen large tablecloths today, and food shopping for work tomorrow; and a family house warming amid moving boxes. There'll be time enough for Trump analysis as he unravels before our eyes in the next few weeks  

Watch how how he walks (more a shuffle than a confident stride with head up and shoulders comfortably back), check the position of his chin (jutting? Tucked under? Lifted in interested enquiry?) and check his eyes (open and confident, or squinting in doubt and distrust?). His overall expression is usually bland sullen confusion. (Hah. Both bland and sullen! Funny!)

yup, and thanks. bland and sullen, true, not that hard a combination when you don't know what you're doing & above all don't want to let on.  enjoy your new place!

Joanne, but we will always have Paris...

.

Marksierra, can you send that to me at home? I want to send it my sister! (I'm on the wrong iPad; this ones not connected to email)

it's interesting that sections of the USA are taking comfort in the broken Paris agreement, while the major corporations will still work on smarter energy use and nations such China seize the opportunity to capture economic opportunities from an isolationalist America-first policy.  

I haven't paid a lot of attention to national and international events for over a week, and it's been quite momentous in many ways, so I don't want to jump to conclusions. We might see some surprises yet in very unexpected regions as some countries refuse to accept the labels always flung at them by conventional 'king maker' powers and as they peacefully and collaboratively help to resolve some of the political and economic tangles we're caught in. 

(If only soccer or cricket could resolve this mess, easily)

seems there will be more family surrounding Trump...a good thing

Melania Trump, son Barron move into the White House - Fox News
https://apple.news/A1dh9DDLHRo...

George Washington, Lincoln, Mussolini,Hitler, BHO and DJT and Julius Caesar -- linked in Times'  story....

Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” has always been about more than killing Julius Caesar.

On the eve of World War II, Orson Welles staged a landmark anti-Fascist production with a Mussolini-like Caesar. The Royal Shakespeare Company recently set the play in Africa, powerfully evoking the continent’s dictators and civil wars. Five years ago, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis staged a production featuring the assassination of an Obama-esque Caesar by a group of right-wing conspirators.

But it’s the Public Theater in New York that finds itself in the middle of a pitched controversy, for its new staging of the play at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Oskar Eustis, the director, chose to make his Caesar decidedly Trumpian, giving him a shock of hair, an overlong red tie and a wife with a recognizably Slovenian accent. As all Caesars are, he’s killed in the middle of the play — bloodily — by Brutus and his band of co-conspirators.

That killing has driven Delta Air Lines and Bank of America to pull all or part of their sponsorship of the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park program, and thrust the theater into a maelstrom of criticism from President Trump’s supporters.

“Julius Caesar,” with assassination at its core, is politically fraught, and subject to multiple interpretations. The play was written during a tense moment when Elizabethan England seethed with political plots. In Catherine the Great’s Russia, copies of the play were removed from bookstores. Over the years, totalitarian regimes have banned or bowdlerized it. And audiences and scholars have long debated the play’s meaning, and the extent to which Shakespeare was sympathizing with the conspirators or condemning them.

“One thing about Shakespeare’s plays that makes them so alive is that they are extremely labile,” said Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar. “They go in a lot of different directions, and ‘Julius Caesar’ is a strong, extreme case of this.”

Not that the play, in which the increasingly powerful Caesar is killed in the name of saving the republic, is pro-assassination. On this, most Shakespeare scholars agree.

“I think the general drift of it is: Be careful, you might get what you want,” Mr. Greenblatt said, noting the chaos and bloodshed the assassination unleashes. “The very thing that you think you’re doing to protect the republic can lead to the end of the republic.”

Leaders have been fascinated by the work. George Washington saw a production of the drama in 1790. Nelson Mandela annotated a copy when he was imprisoned on Robben Island for fighting apartheid in South Africa.

And the play became a staple of American public school reading lists, in part because it allowed teachers to discuss republicanism, said Brett Gamboa, an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth.

But like any work, the play, and the history it is based on, can be interpreted in different ways, and it has at times inspired violence. John Wilkes Booth acted in a production of “Julius Caesar” in New York City not long before he killed Lincoln, and complained after the assassination that he was being hunted “for doing what Brutus was honored for.” And Claus von Stauffenberg, a leader of a failed attempt on Hitler’s life, reportedly kept a marked-up copy of “Julius Caesar” on his desk.

Stanley Wells, a prominent British Shakespeare scholar, said that Shakespeare seemed to anticipate the play’s long afterlife when he has Cassius, one of the conspirators, exclaim to Brutus: “How many ages hence/Shall this our lofty scene be acted over/In states unborn and accents yet unknown!”

“Within the play itself,” Professor Wells said, “Shakespeare is looking forward to times when people will also see this historic event as relevant to their own times.”

Mr. Eustis, who is also the artistic director of the Public, includes the Cassius quote in his program note, in which he adds his own gloss: “Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means,” he writes. “To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him.”

The anti-fascist production that Orson Welles staged in 1937, with the Mercury Theater, was a revelation. The critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times that it was “the most exciting and terrifying drama of the season” and added that “the grim march of military feet through the ominous shadows of the stage is the doom song heard round the world today.”

“It was like nothing anybody had ever seen,” Professor Gamboa said, adding that the production went on to influence a host of other Caesars, portrayed as a recognizable political figure from more recent times.

“When everyone’s in white togas, there’s just not a lot of context there,” said Rob Melrose, who staged the 2012 Obama-inspired production at the Guthrie by the Acting Company — which was supported by a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. “Making those choices to have it in contemporary clothes, I think, illuminates Shakespeare’s play. What kind of person was Caesar? What kind of person was Brutus? But it also illuminates our time.”

Mr. Melrose said that the act of violence at the play’s center should always be appalling. “When Caesar is killed, it’s horrifying, it’s awful — whether it’s Obama or Trump,” he said. “Trump, Republicans and Democrats should all take heart that what this play says is that killing a political leader, no matter how righteous your views are, is a bad idea — a terrible idea

A link to the article:

Why 'Julius Caesar' Speaks to Politics Today. With or Without Trump.

In 2012, how come no one was outraged that a theater company staged "Julius Caesear" with a black actor in the lead role?  

http://www.startribune.com/cae...

oh that's, right, because liberals get that it's a play and a work of art.  And also because playing the victim and engaging in phony outrage is one of top rules in the conservative playbook.

Reporters now prevented from interviewing lawmakers outside of Budget Committee hearing room as the health care/tax cut bill gets written in secret.

This whole Republicans-running-everything just gets better and better.

I'm waiting with bated breath for mtierney's condemnation of the Republicans crafting this bill behind close doors, ramming it down our throats in secret, and denying the Dems any participation in it.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

no I'm not.

because she has no moral compass, whatsoever.