September 11, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
9/11 should, after this 10th anniversary, and in the aftermath of the deviation from and restoration of core values that we have undergone, become a national day of solemn recognition, collaborative restoration, and an affirmation of our civic space, in which citizenship is a sacred trust and human interest in the principal goal of our activity. It should be a day of national reflection and of the reaffirmation of the value of an open, democratic and voluntary civic space.
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August 18, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
As I go back and look over what was being written about the economy, and the federal budget, the lost Clinton surpluses, falling wages, and the property bubble, throughout George W. Bush’s second term in office, it is clear the signs were there throughout that a major financial collapse was coming. Many observers, some more astute than others, predicted a correction was in the offing, without having to depend on very complex analysis.
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March 3, 2011 :: staff :: Comments Off
Every wave on the ocean that has ever risen up and refused to lay back down has been dashed on the shore, but it is the very purpose of a wave to rise up, because once it rises up above the horizon it finally has the perspective to see that it’s not just a wave, that it’s a part of a mighty ocean. And the sharpest rock on the wildest shore can never break that ocean apart, they can never wear that ocean down, because it’s the ocean that shapes the shore.
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January 18, 2011 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
There is little doubt that the United States is experiencing a long-term crisis in the scarcity of gainful employment. It is, in fact, persistently difficult for many laid off workers to find jobs even at a steep pay cut. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did a great deal to staunch the bleeding, and has helped move the economy toward a grudging reversal in job trends, but we are still saddled with two major Bush-era policy shifts that are hampering job creation almost across the board.
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November 14, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The United States government is facing historic budget deficits. A wave of new Republicans are going to Washington, DC, with the idea in mind they will slash “spending”, “shrink the federal workforce” and reduce benefits for “entitlements”, i.e. social programs. What they do not have a way to understand is that the entire budget deficit crisis is a direct result of specific policies enacted by former president George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress of 2001-2006.
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November 1, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The federal government of the United States is experiencing major annual budget deficits. Republicans have spent most of the last two years decrying “tax and spend liberals” for causing such deficits. But every penny of the current federal budget deficit is directly attributable to specific policies enacted under George W. Bush. And Republicans are promising to return to and expand the very same policies put in place by Bush.
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January 15, 2010 :: staff :: Comments Off
Pres. Obama has asked former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to join together to help oversee the administration of the massive relief effort now descending on Haiti. The Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund is now online at ClintonBushHaitiFund.org, with a mission to ensure that funds coming in are directed to where they are most needed.
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October 15, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
School taxes are soaring, but schools are losing funding. States are going bankrupt and teachers are being threatened with mass layoffs. Property taxes are high, but property values are falling, and banks won’t refinance and won’t make new loans. The federal government is working to foster economic recovery through targeted investment, lending and community-building projects. But states are dealing with the budget crisis by hiking property taxes and shifting more responsibility to municipalities.
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September 9, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
When Barack Obama, not a month into his first term as president of the United States, announced a far-reaching, phased-in recovery plan, this February, he was trying to do something more clever and more appropriate than an all-or-nothing one-shot stimulus. That would have been a ham-fisted gamble at best, in the midst of a complex banking crisis, especially because such an attempt had failed in Bush’s last year to stave off recession.
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September 4, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
After reviewing the CIA inspector general’s (IG) report on prisoner abuse during and surrounding the Bush-era “war on terror”, the watchdog Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) says doctors not only attended and supervised prisoner abuse, but recorded information that “may amount to human experimentation”.
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September 3, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 6 Comments
With a profound philosophical rift emerging in the nation’s chief opposition party, intolerance and programmatic lack of empathy are becoming the hallmarks of a troubled Republican minority. Party strategists are now worrying that, whatever the benefit might be for “building the base”, a more hard-line, less flexible, less inclusive vision of Republicanism will hurt the party’s chances in national elections.
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August 26, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
A special prosecutor’s investigation launched under the Bush administration, to collect evidence relating to the CIA’s destruction of video tapes of abusive interrogations has been expanded to include possible illegal activity carried out in connection with the “war on terror”. Holder announced on Monday that US Attorney John Durham will expand the videotape-destruction probe to include potential illegal activities related to abusive interrogations and potentially the circumventing of due process laws, both international and domestic.
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July 22, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is filing a federal lawsuit to force release of documents the intelligence community has refused to turn over in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. US intelligence agencies keep records of internal reports and investigations of alleged wrongdoing, and are obliged to report that wrongdoing to the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), but may have failed to do so in recent years.
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July 3, 2009 :: staff :: One Comment
Police departments around the US are calling for comprehensive immigration reform, saying fears over deportation and document status exacerbate security risks in major cities and hamper law enforcement. With police chiefs meeting in Miami to discuss issues relating to immigration reform, Miami police chief John Timoney said “Immigrant victims and witnesses of violent crimes will not come forward if they fear their local police will deport them”.
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May 18, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
As a lawyer at the Justice Department, under attorney general John Ashcroft, John Yoo came to national prominence for opinions he provided to the White House as part of the process to lay out the legal framework for abusive interrogations. Last year, in a debate with international human rights expert Doug Cassel, Yoo reiterated a point he had argued previously, that Pres. Bush had, in his opinion, the inherent right to torture, and even to torture the children of prisoners being interrogated.
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May 8, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Newt Gingrich is trying to reinvent, or rehabilitate, himself. And he’s doing it by trying to whip up reflexive anger across his party’s base. Without citing one single point of Pres. Obama’s policy or one single piece of historical evidence, he has classed Obama’s call for a world free of nuclear weapons as “a dangerous fantasy”. He is situating himself firmly in the camp of make-believe “values conservatives” whose world view is actually an adolescent reading of Machiavelli (and a fantasy already proven to be dangerous).
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May 6, 2009 :: Webb Tisch :: Comments Off
Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State, was national security adviser to Pres. George W. Bush throughout his first term. She was there when decisions were made about how to change US counterterrorism policy, in the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001, and during the planning for the global ‘war on terror’. She was asked last week by a university student, with video cameras rolling, whether she authorized torture. That set off a wave of such interrogations, to which Dr. Rice has responded nervously and erratically.
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April 30, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón is now reported to be opening a preliminary investigation to the acts involved in creating the Guantánamo Bay prison camp where the Bush administration held hundreds of alleged terror suspects without charge for up to 7 years. The investigation will target “any of those that executed and/or designed a systematic plan of torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of the prisoners [at Guantánamo] that were under their custody”.
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April 29, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
The US-based watchdog group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a report on the 1st 100 days of Pres. Barack Obama’s first term in office. The report praises Obama for key reforms banning abusive treatment and moving toward a system of due process for detainees, but is critical of some holdover policies from the Bush era, which Obama has yet to reform or plans to keep in place. On the whole, Obama is rated by HRW as having “got off to a great start when he issued executive orders to close Guantanamo and ban CIA prisons on his second full day in office,” while “failure to reject the substance of the Bush-era ‘war on terror’ framework was a tremendous disappointment.”
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April 24, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The Pentagon is releasing today as many as 2,000 photos never before seen, some showing prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay. The photos were tied up in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, calling for evidence of Defense Department actions at the prison camp to be made public. According to The Washington Post, the release will contain “21 images depicting detainee abuse in facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan other than the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, as well as 23 other detainee abuse photos”.
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April 23, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
David Frum likes to think he knows what he’s talking about, but here’s the main reason he so often does not: he tends to link ideological assumptions with cynical bad-faith arguments about geo-politics. He mixes willing naïveté with the radical pretense of cynical omniscience. Frum would have us commit to the dangerous gamble that is selective non-proliferation, because he can’t think a better way.
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April 22, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
While clearly showing caution, taking care to repeat his position that prosecutions of former officials could be counterproductive, Pres. Obama today signaled that he does not rule out that some legal avenues may exist by which former Bush officials could face charges in relation to “enhanced interrogation” policy. The president did not, however, endorse any process of prosecution or call for action against any officials, saying instead “I don’t want to prejudge” what the attorney general might find legally necessary.
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April 21, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
Today comes the news that the Taliban have taken more territory in Pakistan’s Buner district, just 100 km from the capital Islamabad. The shockingly weak government of Pres. Zardari has already ceded the Swat Valley to the Taliban, allowing harsh shari’a law to be imposed. The local government has been forced out of Buner, and the area is becoming a stronghold. If the Taliban reach Islamabad, they may be able to seize control of the one of the world’s 9 known arsenals of nuclear weapons.
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April 18, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
The UN rapporteur on torture responded to the announcement by US pres. Barack Obama that CIA agents who engaged in practices the Justice Dept. had authorized as legal would not be prosecuted by saying that such an amnesty would violate US treaty obligations under international law. Manfred Nowak told the Austrian newspaper Der Standard that any acts of torture must be investigated and those involved prosecuted.
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January 19, 2009 :: Denver Lessing :: 2 Comments
Facing an economic crisis of historic proportions, and with the nation reeling from several years of soaring fuel prices, in the face of mounting risks from climate destabilization, President-elect Barack Obama may issue an executive order to require fuel-efficiency be raised on all new vehicles.
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January 19, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Thailand has jailed an author for 3 years for “insulting” the king and crown prince in just one paragraph in a self-published novel that sold only 7 copies; Harry Nicolaides, an Australian, received the 3 year sentence, in part because he pled guilty, earning him a lower sentence. According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Most [...]
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January 19, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The New York Times edition on this Sunday two days before the inauguration of Barack Obama as 44th president of the United States is a time-capsule, a probing glimpse of the nation at this pivotal moment in history. The president-elect’s road to inauguration is graced with stellar poll numbers, but also beset on all sides with crises and conflicts of daunting complexity.
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January 18, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
The Isreali government of PM Ehud Olmert has announced what it is calling a “unilateral” ceasefire in its offensive against Hamas-controlled Gaza. The ceasefire comes after a flurry of diplomatic activity in recent weeks, with mounting pressure from Europe, the UN, Arab neighbors and even the US, to end the offensive, in which at least 1,205 Palestinians were killed, with more than half thought to be civilians.
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January 16, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
China has sentenced a would-be Olympic protester to 3 years in prison. The Beijing government set up a process whereby protests could be held only in specifically designated zones, and only with a permit; Ji Zizun appears to be victim of a deliberate strategy of using the application process to ferret out protest leaders, then jail them.
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January 16, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
George W. Bush, one of the most controversial presidents in living memory, throughout the fall had the lowest recorded approval ratings in history, and will leave the country with two wars and a deep recession. He is reported to believe his presidency will be remembered as consequential and as a period of tough choices, in service of his country, and has made that case in his final televised address as president.
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January 15, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Eric Holder today told the Senate judiciary committee he views the practice known as ‘waterboarding’ as torture. That makes the ‘enhanced interrogation’ technique illegal under a number of US laws and international treaties, and Holder’s view —in keeping with those of the committee chair, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Pres.-elect Obama— raises the question as to whether he would seek to prosecute individuals in the outgoing administration who engaged in or ordered such practices.
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January 15, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
According to the Financial Times, “Susan Crawford, the Pentagon official responsible for convening the military commissions at Guantánamo, told the Washington Post that interrogators had “tortured” Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker.” The finding puts serious pressure on the White House and outgoing Bush administration, as the president-elect has vowed he will reverse US policy [...]
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January 15, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Always, and especially in the crucible of these global challenges, our overriding duty is to protect and advance America’s security, interests and values: First, we must keep our people, our nation and our allies secure. Second, we must promote economic growth and shared prosperity at home and abroad. Finally, we must strengthen America’s position of global leadership — ensuring that we remain a positive force in the world, whether in working to preserve the health of our planet or expanding dignity and opportunity for people on the margins whose progress and prosperity will add to our own.
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January 14, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Reports from Gaza now place the number of Palestinians killed in the ongoing Israeli offensive against Hamas at over 1,000. Israel says it does not target civilians, but top UN officials have questioned whether Olmert’s government is doing enough to abide by legal requirements to avoid civilian deaths. Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United [...]
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January 14, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Citigroup forced to join with Morgan Stanley —which will hold 51% of shared assets— to hold onto Smith Barney, which accounts for 30% of its profits. Analysts suggest government of $45 billion to prop up massive bank now “underwater”, Citi will be forced to start selling assets. US retail sales fell by 2.7% last month, [...]
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January 12, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Pres.-elect Barack Obama’s aides have told members of the press that he will in fact issue an executive order in the early days of his administration to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Obama had said yesterday in an interview that he acknolwedges the closure will be complicated and will take some time; his aides have not specified how long the president-elect plans to take to close the facility or what plan he will enact to deal with the 250 people detained there, some of whom will likely face trial in US federal criminal courts.
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January 5, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The ground invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces is now being supported by air attacks and by naval operations. The Israeli government has said it does not intend to re-occupy the Gaza Strip, and it has hinted that it is not seeking to “crush” or eradicate Hamas or to topple its rule in Gaza, only to prevent the future firing of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel.
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December 22, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
In the spring of 2008, it was becoming apparent that a deep-seated financial crisis was threatening to overwhelm credit markets in the US. The major Wall Street investment bank, Bear Stearns was the first towering financial entity to have its fate decided by a government-backed transaction designed to prevent a crisis in confidence from spreading. But questionable financial dealings, which had become standard and were now underpinning important investments held by the majority of major Wall Street firms, were coming to light and inspiring a wildfire spread of uncertain credit valuations.
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December 18, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
President-elect Barack Obama today named another three members of his overall economic team. Announcing appointments to financial regulatory positions, Obama pledged that “financial regulatory reform will be one of the top legislative priorities” in the early days of his administration. He spoke of the need to “crack down on the culture of greed and scheming that’s led us to this moment of reckoning”, warning repeatedly that failure to regulate properly has led to historic losses and a dangerously weak economic outlook.
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December 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
A hard core of Republican senators demanded ideological concessions from autoworkers, blaming the front-line manufacturing workers —whom John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, repeatedly called “the best in the world” during their campaign for the White House— for America’s embattled automakers’ financial hardships. The bloc included all 8 senators from the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, where foreign automakers, like Toyota and Hyundai, have spent billions to build factories that have led to the creation of thousands of jobs in those states.
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November 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Pres. George W. Bush has been planning a broad array of sweeping rules changes, related to environmental regulation of industry, and the protection of wildlife and unspoiled natural preserves. One rules change would open 2 million acres of protected parkland across three states to oil-shale development, which is one of the dirtiest, least efficient fuel production methods in the world.
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November 23, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The media are ablaze with speculation about whether President-elect Obama will be able to “control the Clintons”, whether his stature is so monumental and secure, after an admittedly meteoric rise, that the vanquished senator from New York will devotedly voice his foreign policy and look good doing it, whether the White House will be infiltrated by “re-treads” from the Clinton years, whether the socialist bailouts of George W. Bush’s own red October are enough to give Obama a pass on the anti-supply-side dictates of a potentially necessary “new New Deal”.
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November 17, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
The Iraqi cabinet has approved a security deal with the US, governing the role of US forces in the country. According to the deal, the US will withdraw its soldiers from Iraqi streets sometime in 2009 and will withdraw entirely from Iraq by the end of 2011. The Associated Press has circulated a photo of Iraqi police dancing with a US soldier in apparent celebration of the withdrawal agreement.
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November 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The “conservative movement” in America is struggling to understand its most important setback in a generation, in part because its worldview takes for granted that what has happened simply cannot be real. In today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes about the growing rift between the conservative “Traditionalists” and the “Reformers”. He suggests the traditionalists, who say their losses come from not clinging firmly enough to the tax-cutting, slash government, immigration-crackdown agenda, will prevail in coming years, due to institutional entrenchment.
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November 10, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
President-elect Barack Obama has been welcomed by Pres. Bush as the two confer on the work of governing, the process of transition, the inner workings of the residence and security issues. It is Obama’s 8th trip to the White House, his first to the Oval Office itself. Reuters reports that Bush and Obama “were expected to discuss the global financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other challenges the Republican president will bequeath to his Democratic successor”.
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November 10, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
A new report —drawing from “More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, [who] described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature”— says the United States has conducted more than a dozen secret special forces raids, across borders around the globe to target Al Qaeda or other terrorist-linked sites, since 2004.
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November 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
To understand the relevance and virtues of Barack Obama’s economic vision, we have to look at the long history of struggle between American laissez-faire capitalism and American middle-class capitalism. We are on the verge of what is likely to be a comprehensive philosophical shift in economic policy toward generative investment, which means counting as economic imperatives the resilience and productive expansion of the positive bases of economic growth, i.e. human and environmental health and well-being, resource-density and cyclical models of resource use and reproduction.
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November 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
Barack Obama’s election victory, making him 44th president of the United States, was resounding not only for its historic significance, not only because the nation faces monumental crises and is calling for serious reform at a potential turning point in political trends, but because mathematically, it was decisive. Obama carried at least 28 states —with Missouri still in recounts—, won more than 65.1 million votes —nearly 8 million more than McCain—, and if McCain takes Missouri and the one unassigned Nebraska vote, his Electoral College margin is 364 to 174.
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November 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The Republican party has seen virtually every one of its over-arching policy assumptions discredited or rejected, in the 2006 and 2008 elections. It now faces an historic challenge, to reinvent itself in a climate where the other party dominates both houses of Congress and has elected a popular new president by a wide margin. The campaign of Sen. John McCain struggled to overcome the Obama message, in part because it was relying on the assumption that specific Republican party platform planks were the political ideas most en vogue with the electorate, when they were in fact at odds with current economic and political reality.
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November 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
John McCain used to be a “maverick”, an independent thinker, a rebel against his party’s leadership, and that entailed adopting, promoting and furiously defending ideas that diverged from his party’s stated agenda and its leaders’ most prized political philosophies. He shed the trappings of the true moderate or independent in an apparent effort to win favor among his party’s decision-makers and financial backers, which dampened his appeal as an independent thinker. And most importantly, he seemed blind to the real spirit of the times, which rejected the politics of fear and called for an activist approach to crisis.
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