One of the propositions of generational theory is that the Fourth Turning is a time when a new values regime is instituted in the civic order. As the 2016 elections unfolded, I got the impression from the successes of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump that the country was indeed ready to move on from the Culture Wars and focus on building government. This was because both of those candidates were galvanizing voters with offers of Big Government solutions - whether enhancing the social welfare state with a better healthcare program and free college tuition, or investing money in infrastructure and job creation. There was even the promise of a giant wall to protect us from illegal migrants - simultaneously creating construction jobs and protecting the jobs that the migrants are stealing!

But now that Donald Trump has been elected and has appointed an alt-right cabinet, it appears that the true Trump domestic agenda will be the annihilation of the New Deal order - which has lately earned the derisive moniker of the 'Deep State' - and the undoing of recent advancements in instituting progressive values. Is he just a con artist, or is he too stupid to see what his own advisors are up to - who knows? There has been an upswelling of resistance against his agenda, with the same energy that charged the election - suggesting that the Culture Wars rage on.

Or perhaps the Culture Wars are in their denouement, with a final push back from the right, after which the lines will be drawn and the values regime will be established for the next couple of phases of the secular cycle. Here is where I see some of those values lining up, based on recent trends and my impression of the broad consensus, if such a thing exists:

* Pro-gun rights. 

* Marijuana becomes legalized.

* Equal rights for gays, but not so much for the transgendered.

* Abortion remains legal, but heavily restricted.

* Gambling and pornography mainstreamed. And tattoos.

* Entertainment, in the form of music, TV and movies - gets darker for awhile as all those mid-life Xers brood.

* We remain essentially a multi-cultural society with religious freedom.

Less clear to me are where the lines will be drawn on these issues:

  * Are we abandoning the old welfare nation-state model and settling on a corporatist oligarchy, with little to no protections for the lower economic classes - the 99 per cent left to fend for themselves?
  
  * Are we willing to sacrifice the environment to keep the fossil-fuel industry strong, in the name of jobs for some of those 99 per cent?
  
  * Will we reform our justice system, or continue to have a huge prison population and intractable tension between law enforcement and racial minorities?  
  
It seems that if the New Deal Deep State does implode, we could be stuck with a world of corporate mastery - ruled by banks, energy companies, and a privately operated police state. Or maybe progressives will rally and rebuild a New New Deal on the ashes of the old. My feeling is that resolving these conflicts is where we are at now in this Fourth Turning.

I would love to know what others think about this!

Words fail to express my complete lack of interest in your opinion of me. 


I personally think you're being ridiculous, but to each their own, I guess.

The public trust is essential to the legitimacy of any government.  Whatever weakens faith in a republic's institutions and leaders invites extremism from the Right or Left.  The Fourth Estate is just one of the pillars on which our democracy relies.  That the first amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of the press underscores the essential nature of a free and vibrant press to our republic. 

But more and more lately, the phrase "fake news" has seeped into our public discourse, never more apparent than in President-elect Trump's first press conference.  When CNN's Jim Acosta attempted to ask Trump a question, the following testy exchange took place in the glare of the media spotlight:

"Your organization is terrible," Trump told Jim Acosta when he tried to ask a question.

"You're attacking us, can you give us a question?” Acosta replied.

"Don't be rude.  No, I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news," Trump shot back, before calling on a reporter from Breitbart.

I fear that the "fake news" meme has entered the American lexicon, bandied about almost as an epithet.  One of the more troublesome aspects of the growing prevalence of "fake news," especially in a highly polarized society such as ours, is that one man's "fake news" is another man's "truth."   

In a recent article historian Frances Fukuyama seems to suggest that "fake news" is symptomatic of the emergence of a post-fact world.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoin...ma-2017-01

Some excerpts appear below, minus Fukuyama's many references to Donald Trump, who certainly has no monopoly on mendacity among politicians of whatever stripe:

One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a “post-fact” world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.

[/url]The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded...

The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilization that fueled various democratic “color revolutions” around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.

While there was some truth to this positive narrative, another, darker one was also taking shape. Those old authoritarian forces were responding in dialectical fashion, learning to control the Internet, as in China, with its tens of thousands of censors, or, as in Russia, by recruiting legions of trolls and unleashing bots to flood social media with bad information. These trends all came together in a hugely visible way during 2016, in ways that bridged foreign and domestic politics.

Use of bad information as a weapon by authoritarian powers would be bad enough, but the practice took root big time during the US election campaign...

The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The Internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information. 

[Indeed, I would interject here that a modified version of Gresham's Law may apply: "Bad journalism drives out good."]

[i]This highlights a more serious problem than individual falsehoods and their effect on the election outcome. Why do we believe in the authority of any fact, given that few of us are in a position to verify most of them? The reason is that there are impartial institutions tasked with producing factual information that we trust. Americans get crime statistics from the US Department of Justice, and unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times were indeed biased against Trump, yet they have systems in place to prevent egregious factual errors from appearing in their copy...[/i]

[i]The inability to agree on the most basic facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and around the world. And this is where the democracies are headed for trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay...[/i]

[url=https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-emergence-of-a-post-fact-world-by-francis-fukuyama-2017-01#][i]And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that everything has been rigged or politicized, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favored candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to perform better in a debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.[/i]

Fukuyama's conclusion troubles me not a little, and casts some doubt in my mind as to whether we have really embarked on any real regeneracy in this Fourth Turning.  Still smells like unraveling to me.

There are two ways that progressives can proceed going forward:

The first one involves abandoning federal remedies altogether and concentrating on what can be done on the state level - unless of course the final ACA repeal bill includes a ban on any state versions of the ACA or anything substantially similar.  Then any state solutions will have to be designed differently, most likely with emphasis on charity-care reimbursements to hospitals and other health care facilities; i.e., community health centers, particularly in states that have legalized recreational marijuana use.  Private charitable organizations, most notably the Catholic Church, can also be called upon to help in the effort - and Pope Francis would undoubtably be interested.

The second approach involves doing nothing so that progressives have it as an issue to use against the conservatives in 2018 and especially 2020.  If enough people die due to the ACA's repeal - and especially if enough "nice," read, white, non-poor people, die - it will be a powerful issue indeed.  But could progressives live with themselves that they were complicit in the death of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people?

But they do not have much time to decide.

what's going on with you?

I got offered that other job. After reviewing all the pros and cons about it balanced against health concerns, I have ended up staying where I am. For now, I may or may not regret my decision, but ultimately I can't do a lot of things requiring me in full sunlight for numerous hours of the day. On the personal front, I have gotten business cards and a website beyond Facebook up and running for my sewing. April was my best month ever for personal sales. I was really grateful for this since right after all that my rescue kitty was determined to be a diabetic, a week at the veterinarian clinic later and a shot a day of insulin, he is on the mend. I'm just really grateful my beloved kitty is going to be ok.

Donald Trump's 100-day plan to Make America Great Again -- only if one is already super rich.


https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/_landing...actv02.pdf


I regret being an American.

(to death for a mass murder in a church)

Dylann Roof, the avowed white supremacist who massacred nine black churchgoers at Bible study in 2015, was sentenced to death on Tuesday.
[/url]
The jury deliberated for nearly three hours before announcing the decision.
Roof was [url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dylann-roof-convicted-in-slayings-of-black-church-members_us_5852fb48e4b0b3ddfd8bc23f]convicted of the Charleston, South Carolina, killings last month, following six days of testimony. He was found guilty of 33 federal charges, from hate crimes to obstruction of the practice of religion, of which 17 carried the possibility of the death penalty.


On June 17, 2015, Roof walked into Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The historic black church, affectionately called Mother Emanuel, was hosting a Bible study that evening. The 21-year-old sat down with the parishioners for a while before pulling out a gun and firing.

He killed Susie Jackson, the Rev. Daniel Simmons, Ethel Lance, Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, the Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Myra Thompson and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor of the church.
Prosecutors argued in favor of the death penalty.

“They welcomed a 13th person that night ... with a kind word, a Bible, a handout and a chair,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Richardson said during his closing argument at Roof’s sentencing on Tuesday. “He had come with a hateful heart and a Glock .45.”
Roof chose to represent himself during the punishment phase of his trial. He called no witnesses.
In his opening remarks to the court on Wednesday, Roof said there was nothing wrong with him “psychologically.” He had previously written in a journal that psychology was a “Jewish invention.”

“My opening statement is going to seem a little bit out of place,” Roof told jurors. “I am not going to lie to you. ... Other than the fact that I trust people that I shouldn’t and the fact that I’m probably better at constantly embarrassing myself than anyone who’s ever existed, there’s nothing wrong with me psychologically.”

 Last year, following his arrest, Roof had spoken with FBI agents for two hours. Video played in court showed him admitting to his crimes.
“I am guilty,” he said. “We all know I’m guilty.”

He told agents he had killed nine innocent people because he believed that white Americans had become second-class citizens and that white women were being raped “daily” by black men.


In his closing argument on Tuesday, Roof stood by his decision to gun down the innocent churchgoers.

“I felt like I had to do it, and I still feel like I had to do it,” he told jurors.

He added that he could ask the jury to spare his life, but wasn’t sure “what good that would do.”

At a Bible study on the one-year anniversary of the killings, church member Thomas Rose prayed for those who had died. The 66-year-old was born inside Mother Emanuel and had left the church that night only about an hour before Roof began his slaughter.
“I still haven’t recovered,” Rose told The Huffington Post. “It’s just gonna take a while. I forgive the guy for doing what he did, but he took away [my family members]. That’s something I’ll never get over.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dyla...586487cb14?

I found this article I think you shuold see. Here is the URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-siege...92304.html

Here is the article:

Quote:In 1928, despite Democrat Al Smith’s loss to Republican Herbert Hoover, political scientists found critical changes in American electoral and demographic patterns that began the reversal of the three decade Republican lock on party identification. These changes led to a restructuring and realignment of the major American political parties that lasted for generations. I believe that the 2016 and 2020 elections can repeat the sequence of the 1928 and 1932 resulting in sustained Democratic political domination and a potential long-term hemorrhage of Republican party support on the national level.
There are three reasons for the realignment that is already underway. First, the new demography of the United States is dramatically changing party identification and the current Republican Party doesn’t look or think like the new America. Second, the Trump phenomenon has ruptured the Republican political brand and accelerated the party’s fatal weaknesses with the expanding constituencies of this new America. Third, the coincidence of the 2020 decennial census and a presidential election will swell Democratic turnout for down ballot elections of Governors and state legislatures that will subsequently redistrict the House of Representatives for a decade.
The 1928 campaign of Governor Al Smith of New York expanded the demography of the Democratic Party to embrace urban voters, workers, blacks, academics, the senior citizens and Jews. The campaign began to uproot the Republican political dominance that had been in place since 1896. Political scientists label 1928 a “critical election” because it signaled the beginning of a structural change that culminated in the 1932 “realigning” election of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt.
Data on the American electorate since 1988 shows a dramatic demographic shift that has now reached critical mass: the white electorate has shrunk from 88% of overall turnout to an anticipated 69% this year. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are expected to comprise 31% of the 2016 electorate, with Hillary Clinton expected to receive between 80-92% of the non-white vote. Voters under 30 have single digit support for the Republican ticket and single women are repudiating not only Trump, but traditional Republican ideology by dramatic margins. These increasingly powerful demographic constituencies identify and vote significantly Democratic, thus making a Republican national election victory — even if Republicans had a strong, non-controversial candidate — improbable.
The Republican Party conducted an “autopsy” after its 2012 defeat. That RNC report concluded that the Party must reach out, programmatically and symbolically, to blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and women. Yet, the only response by Republican State parties to these recommendations has been not to reach out to these growing constituencies, but rather to adopt voter suppression legislation to prevent them from voting. And as the Republican base of old white men dies off, the demographic base of the Democratic Party continues to attract the expanding constituencies of the new American electorate.
The votes of the Electoral College states that consistently vote Democratic has now swelled to a reliable 244, just 26 electoral votes from the majority needed to win. For Republican presidential candidates to prevail in the Electoral College, they must thread the needle of marginal “purple” states, needing to win ALL of them to succeed.
Current demography makes a Republican win increasingly difficult, exacerbating recent historical trends. In the last six presidential elections Republicans have lost the popular vote five times. They prevailed in the Electoral College in 2000 and 2004 with 284 and 286 Electoral College votes, a margin of 14 and 16 electoral votes out of 538. In the last four elections won by Democrats, they received 370 Electoral College votes in 1992, 379 in 1996, 365 in 2008 and 332 in 2012, margins of victory ranging from 52 to 109. Democrats can afford to lose almost all purple states and still top 270.
The Trump-ization of the Republican Party in 2016 makes the future of the party even more problematic. The outlook for Trump’s candidacy points to the same losing Electoral College pattern — or worse — with even the “red” states of NC, AR, GA and MO now in play. And demographic projections currently predict that Texas, the most critical Republican prize of all, with 32 electoral votes, will slip from “red” to “purple” to “blue” within two cycles as a result of of the rapid acceleration of the Hispanic electorate. When — not if — Texas turns blue, the Republicans, under the best of conditions, will cease to be a competitive national political party in presidential elections.
But what about the future control of the House of Representatives? The Republicans, principally because of skillful redistricting, have a 30-vote majority. This is where the coincidence of the census and presidential elections comes into play. The Republican Party, in the tsunami of the 2010 midterm election, took control of 22 state legislatures. In the reliably blue states of MI, PA and WI, Republicans seized control of the redistricting process. They also controlled redistricting in the purple states of OH, FL and NC. In these six states combined, the Republicans gerrymandered the map to create 34 new (and non-competitive) safe Republican House seats.
For example, as a result of this off-year election gerrymandering, in blue Pennsylvania Republicans control 13 of the 18 House seats despite the fact that Democrats cast 100,000 more popular votes for House candidates than Republicans in 2014. In Florida, Republicans have 63% of the House seats, in Michigan 64%, in OH 75% in NC 77% and in WI 63%. A Democratic controlled redistricting in some or all of these states after the 2020 elections and census could very well reverse party control of the House of Representatives for at least a decade.
All of these factors make it reasonable to predict that 2016-2020 will give political scientists what they have not seen for almost a century: a “critical election” (2016) followed by a “realigning election” (2020) resulting in Democratic domination on the national level of the emerging era of American politics.

Due to holiday travel I wasn’t able to moderate the forum is closely as usual; I’m back and will now be monitoring it more closely.

Recent events show that the Republican Party is far from united around Donald Trump. A recent hearing from Congress shows that many Republicans are not going along with Donald Trump and especially on the subject of Russia.