Dispatches from Vilnius

With homegrown terrorists like Robert Lewis Dear , who needs ISIS?  We have our own Christian State right here.  Of course, none of the GOP candidates want to take any blame for Dear's actions, but it is their fiery rhetoric on the campaign trail that inspire rogues like him to take action.  It took 48 hours for any one of them to respond.  All condemned the actions, but Ted Cruz artfully tried to lay the culpability at the liberal doorstep by calling Dear a " transgendered leftist activist! " I doubt the incident will stop these GOP candidates and their cohorts in Congress from hurling abuse at Planned Parenthood, which has become vilified on the campaign trail for " selling baby parts for profit ."  The candidates have also been throwing around absurd figures like 90 per cent of what PP does are abortions, which dates back to Sen. John Kyl's off-the-cuff comment during a Senate floor harangue against any further federal funding for the organization...

In one of the more surprising moves of the early presidential nomination season, Ben Carson decided to go to Jordan to see what's really up with all these Syrian refugees.  It was a whirlwind trip, taking advantage of frequent flier miles, to try to give his sagging campaign some kind of Foreign Policy heft, as he has been roundly criticized for being woefully deficient in this regard. The good doctor returned this weekend to tell us that the refugees just want to go home.  They don't want to come to America.  They are content to bide their time in Jordan, where they number approximately 600,000 at this point.  An additional 3.2 million Syrians currently reside in Turkey and Lebanon, but the busy doctor didn't have time to visit them too and further add to his first hand account of refugee camp life. His comments are vacuous at best and only serve to further show how hopelessly out of touch he is with current affairs.  However, the two guys leading th...

As has become all too commonplace, there are conflicting narratives when it comes to Thanksgiving.  You have copious memes presenting the Pilgrims as the first refugees to arrive on American shores.   Then there is Rush Limbaugh recycling his Thanksgiving story about how the Pilgrims ditched their socialist ideals to become free-market capitalists.  There is even a movie this year, Saints and Strangers , depicting a much harsher version of the Thanksgiving story, which is not for the politically squeamish at heart.  I guess you can take your pick like one does at the holiday dinner table.  Or, you can just watch football. It's pretty hard to have a serious dialogue, much less nuanced conservation about Thanksgiving, if no one is willing to agree on the particulars.  I remember spending the holiday one year with my cousins in North Carolina and we ended up getting into a nasty argument over how Indians abused the welfare system.  They saw the ...

If the Republicans wanted a lesson in why we shouldn't get anymore involved in Syria than we already are, they have one in Russia and Turkey.  Syria is a hornets' nest of hostilities with a deeply entrenched authoritarian government and a myriad of resistance forces, supported by different countries. This particular case had Russian jets targeting Turkmen opposition forces along the Syrian-Turkish border, which Turkey supports.  President Erdogan had repeatedly warned President Putin to lay off, as the jets had been encroaching on Turkish airspace, but Vlad being Vlad decided to call Erdogan's bluff and down went one of his SU-24 jets, courtesy of an American-made F-16.  Both Russian pilots ejected onto Syrian soil.  One was shot from the sky, the other lived to tell the tale, claiming his plane hadn't crossed the border. Tensions were already at a breaking point between Russia and Turkey, primarily over Putin's active support of Syria's President Assa...

For decades the first televised inter-racial kiss was thought to be between Capt. Kirk and Lt. Uhura during the third season of Star Trek .  The 1968 episode was  Plato's Stepchildren , where a group of Platonians have fun with the captain and crew, forcing them to do things they otherwise wouldn't want to do.  In this sense, Kirk and Uhura were literally powerless to resist the temptation, no matter how great it was.  It seemed both got into the role. Well, it turns out BBC beat NBC to the punch with a more friendly kiss  between a black man and a white woman in a play that focused on an inter-racial relationship called You in Your Small Corner (1962).   Guess Who's Coming to Dinner  (1967) dealt with a similar theme, but didn't go so far as to bring Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton to lock lips.  Too bad as they would have at least pre-dated the notorious Star Trek episode. Miscegenation laws made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner a r...

Mysteries at the Museum covers a broad range of subjects from a plaster cast of a foot apparently belonging to the Honey Island Swamp Monster to a small water barrel used to help find the La Belle shipwreck,  La Salle's ill-fated voyage to discover the mouth of the Mississippi River.  There was even a segment on a silver cigar box (located in the Washington DC Spy Museum), which Sidney Reilly had given to Bruce Lockhart after WWI to commemorate their escapades in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution.  The cigar box gained poignancy when Reilly returned to Russia only to get shot in the head.  Thanks to Lockhart's memoirs, Reilly served as one of the inspirations for Ian Fleming's James Bond, presumably  To Russia with Love . Don Wildman leads viewers on some pretty wild rides.  He has become one of the constant faces on Travel Channel, having started out with a far more interesting program called Off Limits , where he took viewers into places you wo...

ISIS learned this week that it doesn't even have to attack the United States to create panic in the streets .  It is much easier to attack more vulnerable cities like Paris and watch the American reaction.  It has really been something to see.  I never would have imagined it could be so horrible.  Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse , Donald Trump comes out with yet another  outlandish statement .  The fear that has gripped the Republican Party is as great as that which gripped the nation following 911. It seems a lot of Democrats are also feeling the fear as 47 Congressional representatives joined Republicans in issuing a "veto-proof bill" that would place severe restrictions on the acceptance of Syrian refugees.  Screening procedures are already very tough, not that anyone bothered to read them, as it takes an average of 18-24 months for a refugee to be cleared for entry.   As it is , very few Syrian refugees have been grante...

There is almost as much anticipation for Bernie's speech on Democratic Socialism as there was for the first GOP debate.  It's pretty safe to say that more persons will be tuning into his speech on the Internet than Hillary's foreign policy speech scheduled for the same evening.  After all, we have heard so many bad things about socialism.  It has been compared to Soviet and Chinese communism and Nazi national socialism. It used to be that socialism was a good word.  NPR and other news outlets have been more favorably comparing Sanders to Eugene Debs.  From what I've heard so far, Bernie is closer to William Jennings Bryan who ran as a Democrat back in 1896.  His was a populist form of socialism that resonated with a greater number of persons, especially his Cross of Gold speech , which called for the federal government to back the dollar with silver so that it would have a far greater circulation. Bernie is not a socialist in the strict sense of ...

Within a week of the Paris bombings, virtually every GOP presidential candidate and Republican leader have called for a ban on Syrian refugees, unless of course they are Christian, as Jeb Bush was quick to distinguish .  He's since backtracked on that statement, but the sentiment is clear, no more Muslims in America.  They are seen as an existential threat to our Christian society, with many conservative leaders calling for the closure of mosques in this country.   Even the Trumpster believes "if the mosque is, you know, loaded for bear," it should be closed. Twenty-six Republican governors have issued bans on Syrian refugees, claiming security fears.  This despite no direct link having yet been made between a Syrian passport found at one of the bombing sites and the terrorists who pulled off these latest crimes against humanity.  Just the possibility that an ISIS member could be among the Syrian diaspora is enough to send governors scurrying into their...

Sadly, we are learning a very bitter lesson in terrorism.   The Death of Bin Laden , in 2011, was seen by many as the end of al Qaeda.  However, ISIS has emerged, which is every bit as well organized and deadly as was its predecessor.  It has quickly morphed into a major global threat, as witnessed this past Friday in Paris, and is planning more international strikes in its effort to bring its jihad to Europe.  At least, that is what many would like us to believe. I don't think for one moment that ISIS actually entertains the idea of a global jihad anymore than al Qaeda did when it coordinated attacks in the US in 2001.  What it wants is to drag the US and Europe into wars in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.  How it plans to do that isn't very clear, as it would be coming against a combined firepower the early Mohammedans (who they purportedly model themselves after) never had to face.  But, I guess they think they can win a war o...

I think anyone would be forgiven for not knowing there was a Democratic debate last night.  It's hard to compete with  the fallout of the fourth Republican debate and the Paris attacks.  Bernie Sanders' campaign was apoplectic over the format changing at the last minute to reflect the coordinated ISIS attacks on Paris.  This pretty much made foreign policy the center piece of the night, which isn't exactly Bernie's calling card.  Surprisingly, it was Martin O'Malley who had the quote of the night , "my son is not a pair of boots on the ground," which he took from a mother of a young man who served two tours during this neverending "War on Terror." It was a much more manageable event with Jim Webb and Lincoln Chaffee dropping their campaigns.  Lawrence Lessing also dropped his bid , but I don't think many persons noticed he was even running. This opened up the stage for former Maryland Governor O'Malley, allowing him to lock horn...

I suppose Ben Carson can use Quentin Tarrantino's WWII pulp fiction to prove his point that if Jews had guns they could have defended themselves from the Holocaust, or better yet won World War II.  This is the case Tarrantino makes in his movie, albeit the band of Jewish resistance fighters is led by an elite American special forces fighter with a Kentucky accent, covertly assigned to the mission by his commanding officers.  Lt. Aldo Raine literally brings down a reign of terror on the Nazis with a team of crack shots, vicious killers and a gargantuan "Bear Jew," who does Nazis in with a baseball bat, offering up his kills to Ted Williams.  As far as movies go it is pretty good until the utterly absurd ending, but then so are Ben Carson's stories. That's why I suggest Armstrong Williams, the good doctor's business consultant, contact Tarrantino and enlist him to make a biography of Carson.   Gifted Hands was child's play.  Dr. Ben needs far more a...

At 82, Ruth Bader Ginsburg who has found new celebrity as the Notorious RBG, a moniker she has adopted as the most liberal judge on the Supreme Court.  Shana Knizhnik is the one who came up with the blog but didn't feel confident enough to write the book on her own, so she solicited the help of MSNBC journalist Irin Carmon. Justice Ginsburg has stood out over the years for her sharp dissents of conservative majority opinions on everything from Citizens United to Shelby County v. Holder, which further eroded voting rights in America.  It is the Shelby dissent that inspired Knizhnik, a law student at the time.  You might say that Ginsburg is the "Bernie Sanders" of liberal law students. I have great respect for Ginsburg but wonder how much longer she can hold up.  Of course, the Senate would fight any Supreme Court nominee Obama would put up in her place, especially with Chief Justice Roberts no longer a reliable conservative vote on the bench.  I would...

Your Money, Your Vote should have been the moniker for this latest debate as well, as Fox Business Network hosted the fourth debate on the economy.  The latest GOP debate was interesting for a handful of reasons, none of which had to do with the overall performance of the candidates, which was bad as usual.  This time they were called out not by the moderators, but by their fellow candidates.  John Kasich repeatedly took his Republican peers to task on immigration and government spending, inserting himself into exchanges where he was clearly not wanted.  Rand Paul chastised  Marco Rubio on military spending.  Of course, the candidates responded, and Rubio got the better of Paul as far as the conservative crowd was concerned, this being Veteran's Day, but it was refreshing to see some alternative opinions being expressed. The undercard was interesting largely because who was not there, Lindsey Graham and George Pataki, who were both deemed to be too ...

It depends on how you look at.  As far as getting the necessary EPA approvals to go through key stretches of environmentally sensitive land, the deal is dead , at least for the time being.  However, about 40 per cent of the pipeline has already been built and is pumping "dirty oil" through the US.  One way or another, this project will probably be finished, even if it has to bypass key sections that would have reduced the length of its flow. Obama seems to have waited until he got a sympathetic government in Ottawa.  Stephen Harper, the former conservative MP, was the one who pushed this project the past 10 years.  It was all about getting Canadian oil to the Gulf of Mexico, where it would have greater access to international markets.  It was never about jobs or providing oil to the US.  That flow never stopped.  In fact, it greatly helped Harper fund this project.  However, with oil prices currently very low, Canada is finding it no...

It was only a matter of time before the Ben Carson campaign imploded, but there are still many persons who want to believe in him, even after his campaign admits he lied about ever being extended an invitation to attend West Point. Much of his youthful experiences have been called into question , but that doesn't deter his supporters, who believe that CNN is mounting a witch hunt against their revered candidate.  It had been Carson's firm religious beliefs driving his campaign and like one of those tele-evangelists flushed out by the news media, his "flock" sticks with him. The odd part is that Carson has displayed virtually no charisma throughout this campaign.  His biggest appeal seemed to be his "calmness," which Trump has been deriding as "low energy."  This imperturbable nature seems a throwback to Clint Eastwood's Western characters, which I guess gives voters a sense of security, especially with Trump and other candidates appear...