Some members of congress are incensed by a story in the Wall Street Journal that said that the USA had monitored the communications of the Israeli government and its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those members of the US Congress that Israeli officials were speaking to during the negotiations between the US and Iran, in order to find out what they knew about the discussions and what they were doing to derail the deal.
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So we now have another standoff with heavily armed men defying the federal government. An earlier one was when Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy felt that he should not pay the fees that all ranchers pay for cattle to graze on federal land. When faced with the threat of arrest, armed men from all over the country arrived to warn law enforcement that they were willing to fight them. That happened in 2014 and Bundy continues to defy the authorities with no action having been taken against him.
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That Hillary Clinton is a warmonger is no secret, much as she tries to hide it. It comes out despite her recent attempts, as she tries to win the Democratic nomination, at downplaying her role in advocating for military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, all of which have turned out to be disastrous. But a speech she gave at an event that occurred last month that did not get much attention shows that her war-loving aspect is not far from the surface.
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I am not big fan of year-end reviews but I enjoyed this one by British writer and broadcaster Charlie Brooker. He gives us his amusing take on the events of 2015 and the way they were covered by the media, both the serious and the silly. It was interesting to see some items that seemed to have got serious coverage in the UK but not so much in the US, such as the furor over the boorish behavior and subsequent firing of a reality TV show host Jeremy Clarkson and the excessive ceremonial reburial of Richard III. He also had some good stuff about Jeremy Corbyn.
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During the Rose Bowl football game, multiple planes flew over the stadium and wrote the sentences ” AMERICA IS GREAT, TRUMP IS DISGUSTING” and “ANYBODY BUT TRUMP” in the sky. They also spelled out the tagline for an anti-Trump website ANYBODYBUTTRUMP.US. It was quite an impressive feat of skywriting, so neatly was it done.
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As Ben Carson’s campaign sinks in the winter of his discontent, Ted Cruz’s seems to be experiencing an early summer, so much so that he is telling supporters that he thinks that he will have the Republican nominations sewn up by March.
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Yesterday’s news was full of stories about the abrupt resignation of two top staffers from Ben Carson’s presidential campaign that resulted in 20 other members following them out the door. There had been rumblings for a while about dissention within the camp and Carson himself had at one point said that he was considering a shakeup in his team, which seems to have made things worse.
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I’d like extend best wishes for 2016 to all this blog’s readers.

Last year was a disturbing one in terms of American politics. We saw the unleashing of openly xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, militaristic, and anti-poor appeals to the public, and sufficient numbers of them were attracted to those calls that, although they are not the majority, they have created sufficient noise to have significantly influenced that direction of the Republican party primary race.
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As the first actual selection of delegates for the party nominations gets near with the Iowa caucuses on February 1 and the New Hampshire primary on February 9, the various candidates are moving their campaigns into top gear. On the Republican side, what seems to be shaping up are contests within two main subgroups, one claiming the outsider or insurgent mantle and the other the establishment mantle, though given the angry mood of the Republican electorate, even the establishment candidate has to wear at least a partial outsider veneer, to claim that they are not of the establishment even if they come from it.
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