Matt Wuerker for February 03, 2017

The founders warned us of the dangers of political parties and theocracies as they had seen the harm that they caused in the old world. We are now in the hands of a minority that has played the system to get control of government and impose their vision on society.

The Neo-conservative and Neo-liberal ideologies, in spite of repeated failures, are being dusted off and presented as new ideas. If we survive, without a war, there will be an awful mess to clean up and repair. Rule by knee-jerk reactions tends to break things that have taken much thought and effort.

The low participation of apathetic voters is more than just a symptom of undesirable candidates selected by self-centered political parties … it’s a danger to the republic itself. It should be evident now that the opposing party system has done more harm than good.

“There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen.” -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Here is the latest news from the “Stock Exchange,” a website you’ve probably never seen that tracks news of interest to cattlemen and ranchers: Tracy Brunner, president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn. is worried that the Trump administration’s protectionist trade policies are going to be a disaster for his industry.

“Sparking a trade war with Canada, Mexico, and Asia will only lead to higher prices for American-produced beef in those markets and put our American producers at a much steeper competitive disadvantage,” Brunner said in a news release. “The fact remains that 96 percent of the world’s consumers live outside the United States, and expanding access to those consumers is the single best thing we can do to help American cattle-producing families be more successful.”

Now, there are a couple of interesting observations to make about this bit of news.

The first that comes to mind is the irony of all those ranchers and cowboys and small-town Westerners who decided to take a chance with Donald Trump and now face the possibility that their livelihoods will be wrecked by the new president’s naive, rant-driven policies.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-trump-news-20170202-story.html

You can’t be a traitor without having at least one trait!

This is your country on drugs.