Random Politics & Religion #00

In the end it's pretty much picking the lesser of 2 evils. Which is a shame because democracy was not meant to be this way.

If that's the metric we're going with, Chris Christie 2016!

Here comes a new challenger!

Btw, so far Trump's What is love video beats Sanders bongos imo. Liberals need to step up their game if they wanna win the race.

My assessment is the opinion of political analysts. What do you consider the ground between outlawing guns and making them mandatory tableware? In our current vernacular, anti-gun would be limiting people's right to bear arms in any situation or place, pro-gun would be?

Honestly, I don't really care. Clinton is moderate across the board with very few exceptions and basically all of those popped up in the last 3 months.

Picking the lesser of two evils means picking someone whose broken the law and is a proven liar?

Which is a shame because democracy was not meant to be this way.

A House committee has begun its long-anticipated hearing in which the former secretary of state testifies about the attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.
By Dan Balz Chief correspondent October 23 at 1:17 PM

Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearance before the House Benghazi committee provided one more example of the breakdown of a Republican Party torn by factionalism and heavily influenced by a cadre of supporters who are far less interested in governing than in expressing its anger.

By the time the committee ended 11 hours of questioning of the Democratic presidential front-runner, the long day of testimony had come to symbolize seven years of Republican frustration with the administration of President Obama — and the fears within the party that it could face another four or eight years of Democratic occupation of the White House.

This combustible mix already had brought disorder to the search for a successor to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and has turned the Republican race for the White House on its head. The Republicans are now at a moment where events are forcing them to rethink and regroup, but to what end?

What happens in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination is the most important test of where the party may be heading. Currently, the GOP primary electorate appears enamored with two candidates — Donald Trump and Ben Carson — with no experience in elective office and no clear principles or guidelines for how they would govern.

Behind them are politicians with current or past elective experience, some of whom have governed as chief executives in their states. But given the current mood of the Republican primary electorate, many of them are playing to the angry crowds in the GOP bleachers, feeding rather than modulating the anger that is out there.

The presidential contest now mirrors the unrest that long has left the House Republicans a largely dysfunctional family. The fact that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) appears likely to become the next House speaker is one potentially positive sign of a restoration. But whether he can tame the rebellious conservatives in his conference is far from clear.

The party’s ills seemed to crystallize in the hearing room on Thursday in ways that likely worry many Republicans. All the denials in advance that damaging Clinton was not the main goal of the committee were overwhelmed by the tone, tenor and subject matter of much of the questioning by the Republican majority.

In the short run at least, the committee likely did more to help, rather than hinder, Clinton in her bid to win the White House a year from now. In reality, the day’s events did more to shine a spotlight on a damaged congressional oversight process, a committee without a clear objective and a party determined to strike back at the policies and priorities of the Obama administration.

Clinton’s record as Obama’s secretary of state is certainly fair game in the general election, and she will have to defend it. She was a principal advocate of a Libya policy that has left that country in chaos. As secretary of state at the time of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, she bears some responsibility for what happened there.

On the matter of why the Benghazi diplomatic outpost was so poorly defended, despite requests for additional security, she said Thursday what she has said all along — that those requests never reached her desk. Still, the security breakdown, well documented long before Thursday, came during her tenure.

The unmistakable smell of hypocrisy permeating the latest congressional hearings on Benghazi is so pungent that few people believe the claims from the panel's leaders that they are only searching for the truth. Almost three-quarters of Americans now believe the investigation is motivated by a quest for political gain rather than by a genuine wish to get at the facts.

It's no wonder. Other national tragedies, other terrorist attacks, other major failings of U.S. operations overseas have received limited attention -- sometimes none at all -- from congressional investigators. A comparison of the way Congress responded to other U.S. security disasters that deserved close scrutiny strongly suggests all you need to know about the partisan, electoral politics at play in Washington today.

To be sure, the events of Sept. 11, 2012, in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi constituted a calamitous failure and most certainly warranted a congressional investigation.

But that investigation already happened, over and over and over. What we see now is clearly political theater, a maneuver by the Republican majority aimed at eroding support for the likely Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Vast majorities of Democrats and independents see it that way, and almost half of all Republicans agree.

While Benghazi has been the subject of seven congressional investigations, in addition to one by an accountability review board, there are countless cases where Congress spent little time and money examining what went wrong.

For example, Congress does not appear particularly interested in looking at what caused the disaster a few weeks ago, when the U.S. bombed a hospital operated by the charity Doctors Without Borders, in Kunduz, Afghanistan, even though the mistake cost nearly two dozen lives and harmed America's efforts in the area.

If it is the security of Americans they worry about, congressional leaders have not spent much time investigating why some 30 Americans are being held hostage overseas today.

But that tempered interest is hardly a fluke. In fact, the enthusiasm with which Congress has jumped to investigate the Benghazi debacle is unprecedented.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a Joint Inquiry in Congress looked at five previous major terrorist attacks or attempted attacks against the U.S. to see where intelligence had failed. The incidents included the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 1999 "Millennium" plot, and the strike on the USS Cole in 2000.

These were not minor or inconsequential terrorist operations. They were deadly and they foreshadowed what came later. The embassy bombings, two simultaneous explosions in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, killed more than 200 people and left more than 4,000 injured.

Congress held a handful of hearings, but no formal investigation. The investigation was conducted by the FBI and ultimately resulted in the indictment of several men, including one Osama Bin Laden.

Not one of these five terrorist plots against the U.S. produced a level of congressional interest even remotely approaching what we see now on Benghazi and on Hillary Clinton. No investigation took as long. Even that joint congressional investigation was completed in 10 months.

If congressional leaders believe concern for the safety of diplomatic personnel warrants the magnitude and duration of their efforts, it's curious that Congress spent so little time reviewing the Africa embassy bombings, or any of the many other attacks on American diplomats who have died in the line of duty over the years; people like 33-year-old John Granville, a diplomat working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, shot to death in Khartoum, Sudan in 2008, or David Foy, 51, killed in a massive blast outside the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan in 2006.

If the issue is the failures of security, of intelligence, or of judgment that have cost the lives of U.S. citizens on dangerous assignments, it's curious that the events of an awful day in late 2009 at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan did not merit this kind of scrutiny. That was when seven Americans working for the CIA were killed when a man who was supposed to be an informant, invited by American agents to be the base, turned out to be a radical jihadi, a suicide bomber who blew himself up. The dead included Jennifer Matthews, 45, one of the CIA's top al Qaeda experts. That incident was investigated by the CIA, not Congress.

If it's terrorism that justifies the obsessive attention to Benghazi, it's interesting that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the worst terrorist attack before 9/11, was not the target of a slew of congressional panels the way Benghazi is. The only report from Congress on the Oklahoma bombing was privately released by Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who was searching for an elusive "foreign connection." The attack, which killed 168 people, was investigated by the FBI.

Yes, all of those happened years ago. But what about the Boston bombings of April 2013? They did warrant an investigation by the Homeland Security Committee, which produced a couple of reports. That's a minuscule investigation compared with the Benghazi work by congressional committees including, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Senate Committee On Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and others, each of which has already conducted its own investigation and issued its own report.

What happened in Benghazi back in 2012 was horrific and it is crucial that the U.S. learns from its mistakes. Investigating what exactly went wrong is an imperative. But what is unfolding in Washington is not about that. History proves it. That's the whiff so many people detect. We know what it is.

Whether our loyal Republican posters like it or not, the House Benghazi committee is NOT accomplishing either its stated nor real aims.

"They all lie, therefore when Hilary lies, I don't have to care."

Hilary 2016

This is the very definition of a "low information voter".

Meh....I feel indifferent.

It was a hail mary bomb from our own endzone from the jump.
because nobody that likes Hillary cares about the lives of soldiers or ambassadors to begin with.

I am still holding out hope the FBI digs up something embarrassing or criminal to poke her in the *** with until by some other miracle we find a candidate worth voting for. ...

Meh....I feel indifferent.

It was a hail mary bomb from our own endzone from the jump.
because nobody that likes Hillary cares about the lives of soldiers or ambassadors to begin with.

I am still holding out hope the FBI digs up something embarrassing or criminal to poke her in the *** with until by some other miracle we find a candidate worth voting for. ...

The Justice Department notified members of Congress on Friday that it is closing its two-year investigation into whether the IRS improperly targeted the tea party and other conservative groups.

There will be no charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner or anyone else at the agency, the Justice Department said in a letter.

The probe found "substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints. But poor management is not a crime," Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik said in the letter.

She foolishly answered questions from Gowdy on the record and under oath about emails yesterday that she probably should have taken the 5th on. I am pretty sure he got exactly what he wanted out of that hearing yesterday.

Ventura is too busy getting rich off of Chris Kyle's lies.

DOJ closes Lerner investigation


Another fake scandal comes to an end.

Ventura is too busy getting rich off of Chris Kyle's lies.

Meh....I feel indifferent.

It was a hail mary bomb from our own endzone from the jump.
because nobody that likes Hillary cares about the lives of soldiers or ambassadors to begin with.

I am still holding out hope the FBI digs up something embarrassing or criminal to poke her in the *** with until by some other miracle we find a candidate worth voting for. ...