The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Burying Lindsey Graham Won’t Be Easy Karen Kwiatkowski Photo by Simone Pellegrini on Unsplash Long ago, great Senators existed. Resolute and accountable, they represented their governors and state legislatures and asserted those interests in Washington. They aspired to conduct themselves as statesmen; we the people expected statesmanship. We the people also hoped they would be better than we could be, while we agreed with the fundamental truth of Colonel Ludlow in Legends of the Fall . No longer. A regal Senate with a bold populist House of Representatives do not exist. What we call Senate and House do not make federal law, nor do they perform the small number of defined duties described in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. The making of law has become the work of lobbyists and the regulatory bureaucracy, while other Constitutional duties have become entirely too frightening to even consider, much less perform. The hydra-headed executive branch has become the permanen...

  Patriotic Purge: The Real Cost of War Fighting for corruption and profits   Donald Jeffries The great Gen. Smedley Butler wrote his classic  War is a Racket  in response to the pointless carnage of WWI. Some 15-22 million largely adolescent boys died for absolutely nothing. That fact that they can’t provide a more accurate estimate than that tells you clearly about the incomprehensible numbers involved. In 1846, President Polk decided to wage war on Mexico. Was the land grab that followed, including what became California, worth the lives of the nearly 14,000 Americans who were killed? Or the 25,000 Mexicans, including an unknown number of civilians? Mexico in fact lost 55% of its territory to the U.S. from 1836-1848. No wonder the La Raza folks hate gringos. In April 1847, the Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution denouncing the war as “a gigantic crime” waged against a “weak neighbor” for the purposes of conquest, territorial aggrandizement, and the ...