To me, he is describing John Kerry and other Statesmen that came before. Understanding...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/americas-future-is-texas

I did a search for the article but it did not come up as being previously posted. Mea culpa if it has.

Wow - this absolutely the adage of All Politics is Local. These people need to stopped in try to spread the cancer that is the modern GOP throughout the land. Holding Medical Licensure hostage for a bathroom bill.
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I’ve lived in Texas for most of my life, and I’ve come to appreciate what the state symbolizes, both to people who live here and to those who view it from afar. Texans see themselves as a distillation of the best qualities of America: friendly, confident, hardworking, patriotic, neurosis-free. Outsiders see us as the nation’s id, a place where rambunctious and disavowed impulses run wild. Texans, it is thought, mindlessly celebrate individualism, and view government as a kind of kryptonite that weakens the entrepreneurial muscles. We’re reputed to be braggarts; careless with money and our personal lives; a little gullible, but dangerous if crossed; insecure, but obsessed with power and prestige.

Texans, however, are hardly monolithic. The state is as politically divided as the rest of the nation. One can drive across it and be in two different states at the same time: FM Texas and AM Texas. FM Texas is the silky voice of city dwellers, the kingdom of NPR. It is progressive, blue, reasonable, secular, and smug—almost like California. AM Texas speaks to the suburbs and the rural areas: Trumpland. It’s endless bluster and endless ads. Paranoia and piety are the main items on the menu.

Texas has been growing at a stupefying rate for decades. The only state with more residents is California, and the number of Texans is projected to double by 2050, to 54.4 million, almost as many people as in California and New York combined. Three Texas cities—Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio—are already among the top ten most populous in the country. The eleventh largest is Austin, the capital, where I live. For the past five years, it has been one of the fastest-growing large cities in America; it now has nearly a million people, dwarfing the college town I fell in love with almost forty years ago. Because Texas represents so much of modern America—the South, the West, the plains, the border, the Latino community, the divide between rural areas and cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, and Kansas and Louisiana more out of whack, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future.

I’ve always had a fascination with Texas’s outsized politics. In 2000, I wrote a play that was set in the state’s House of Representatives. The protagonist, Sonny Lamb, was a rancher from West Texas who represented House District 74, which, in real life, stretches across thirty-seven thousand square miles. (That’s larger than Indiana.) While I was doing research for the play, I met in Austin with Pete Laney, a Democrat and a cotton farmer from Hale County, who, at the time, was the speaker of the House. Laney was known as a scrupulously fair and honest leader who inspired a bipartisan spirit among the members. The grateful representatives called him Dicknose.

Arrest made after Ten Commandments monument at Arkansas Capitol toppled, shattered

A 6-foot-tall stone Ten Commandments monument installed Tuesday on the Arkansas Capitol grounds was toppled less than 24 hours later after a 32-year-old Arkansas man drove a vehicle into the statue, apparently while streaming the act live on Facebook, officials said.

Chris Powell, a spokesman with the Secretary of State's Office, said he was called early Tuesday and told a man drove a vehicle through the monument. That driver — identified in an arrest report as Michael Tate Reed of Van Buren — was arrested by Capitol police shortly after, Powell said. News reports indicate Reed was previously accused of destroying a Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma.

The Arkansas arrest report said an officer around 4:45 a.m. spotted a dark-colored vehicle "start from a stopped position and ram the Ten Commandments monument."

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2017/jun/28/ten-commandments-monument-arkansas-capitol-toppled/

Right-Wing Billionaires Have a Project Going to Rewrite Our Constitution, and They Are Shockingly Close to Pulling It Off
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-billionaires-have-project-going-rewrite-our-constitution-and-they-are?akid=15289.162216.Jt7SFs&rd=1&src=newsletter1073670&t=2

By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet March 10, 2017

Imagine if the U.S. Constitution barred the EPA and Department of Education from existing. All union protections are dead, there are no more federal workplace safety standards, and even child-labor laws are struck down, along with a national minimum wage.

Imagine that the Constitution makes it illegal for the federal government to protect you from big polluters, big banks and even big food and pharma—all are free to rip you off or poison you all they want, and your only remedy is in state courts and legislatures, because the Constitution prevents Congress from doing anything about any of it. The federal government can't even enforce voting or civil rights laws.

To add injury to insult, the federal government has to shut down Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because all of these programs (along with food stamps, housing supports and any programs that help the middle class, the less fortunate or disabled) are “beyond the reach” of what the federal government can do.

A few years ago, it would have been a thought experiment; now it's nearly reality. Billionaires and the groups they fund are working to rewrite our Constitution to provide corprations and the rich with more and more protections and benefits, and chop away at anything smelling of “socialism” like Social Security or child labor laws.
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I am so disturbed by this article that it is hard to really post about it.

http://www.alternet.org/media/vampire-webpages-suck-content-legitimate-progressive-news-sites

Vampire Webpages Suck Content From Legitimate Progressive News Sites
A parasitic business model thrives on Facebook.
By Steven Rosenfeld, Ivy Olesen / AlterNet March 6, 2017

Some new media vampires on the internet block are pilfering content from independent journalism websites and deceitfully posting it as their own on Facebook, the premier social media platform.

These Facebook pages and their affiliated websites pose as progressive champions, but their content is largely copied, if not plagiarized, from legitimate news and opinion outlets with real reporters and analysts, not rewrite teams. Their goal appears to be making money by attracting millions of readers as unknowing users click on links or share their memes—photos with slogans—because viewer traffic generates advertising revenues via Google ads.

Anyone who has a Facebook page and pays attention to politics—and shares with a circle of friends—has seen the vampires’ work. Even professionals in media, information technology and progressive politics often share posts and links to affiliated sites such as Occupy Democrats (5.9 million Facebook likes and 1.1 million monthly U.S. viewers on its website, according to Quantcast), The Other 98% (4.5 million Facebook likes; its related The Other 98 Percent Action Fund has 214,000 monthly U.S. viewers) and USUncut (1.5 million Facebook likes and 2.8 million monthly viewers). Indeed, there are hundreds of other pages and sites like these, such as Addicting Info, with 1.2 million Facebook likes, Liberal America with 754,000 Facebook likes, and a new six-week-old Facebook page, Resistance Report, with 144,000 Facebook likes.

[snippage]

To investigate this phenomenon, AlterNet started a free 14-day trial from Spike to track the vampire sites and their audiences. The New York Times magazine wrote about this trend last summer, but missed the plagiarism aspect. Nonetheless, its profile, titled, “Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Intentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine,” with the subhead, “How a strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take over our news feeds,” affirms the basic contours of the online vampire media industry. Surely, you’ve noticed: “A video of Bernie Sanders speaking, overlaid with text, shared from a source you’ve never seen before, viewed 15 million times. An article questions Hillary Clinton’s honesty; a headline questioning Donald Drumpf’s sanity.”

much more at link
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I've been noticing that people are posting from these vampire sites instead of the original journalistic site. Quite possibly these sites need to be blacklisted. We have to fight tooth and nail for investigative journalism and we do not need to "steal" money (from clicks) from them. They need every dime they can get.

[link:http://|

Just wondering...

CBS Confirms Drumpf Brought His Own Studio Audience To Clap For Him At CIA Speech
By Sarah Jones on Mon, Jan 23rd, 2017 at 12:20 pm

CBS News confirmed reports that President Donald Drumpf brought a studio audience to his visit with the CIA on Saturday. The news agency reports that an official said the visit left a wake of "unease," “made relations with the intelligence community worse," and was “uncomfortable.”

CBS News confirmed reports that President Donald Drumpf brought a studio audience to his visit with the CIA on Saturday. The news agency reports that an official said the visit left a wake of “unease,” “made relations with the intelligence community worse,” and was “uncomfortable.”

Intelligence people were “stunned” and “offended by the president’s tone,” CBS reports. “U.S. government sources tell CBS News that there is a sense of unease in the intelligence community after President Drumpf’s visit to CIA headquarters on Saturday.”

Also, Drumpf did bring cheering props, which fits with how he has operated previously in requiring a cheering section – a sort of laugh track of supportive extras like those his campaign hired for his announcement event. It has been confirmed by Drumpf insiders that the President loves props.

more at: http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/23/cbs-confirms-reports-donald-trump-brought-cheering-props-cia-visit.html
...

Maybe we will finally get journalism back from the hinterlands.

http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/womens-march-for-arkansas/Slideshow/4800466

http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2017/01/21/scenes-from-the-womens-march-for-arkansas

Arkansas represented too

This is a true to life movie, especially if a person is very very smart. I'm not going to out any spoilers but if you sit back (you've got 2 hours) and watch and think about it, a person could do the same as Toby. He's quite brilliant actually in how he thinks out on saving the family land.

One thing that struck me is how the cinematographer and director captured the America we (rural) live in: dying, dusty towns that have been left behind, with only the Debt Relief mafia's left, with railroad tracks running through the middle.

So when you watch film, watch the background too of each shot. That's where we are. We've been left out since the 1970s and there are no start-up funds bailing out our downtowns. No money in it.

Jeff Bridges chews up the scenery because he was given that free hand to do so. He is any cop USA.

Good film which gives you lots to think on, which is what a good movie does.