How influential are evangelical leaders in selecting Republican leaders?

On the surface, it looks like Ted Cruz has cornered the market on endorsements by big name evangelical leaders, edging out Marco Rubio in getting the collective endorsement in early December at a secret meeting of fifty religious conservatives led by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Then after Christmas, about 300 evangelical leaders met at a Texas ranch owned by Farris Wilks, a billionaire who has made his money in fracking, and is supporting Cruz with a Super PAC.
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Over to you Marco, once you’re done playing

As we head into the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses on February 1, if you live in that state expect to see a barrage of ads from each candidate featuring the familiar Republican story that the country is besieged by dangers on all fronts that is threatening the very existence of the republic and only their particular candidate knows what to do to meet the challenge.
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People behaving badly

The Daily Show came back from its vacation and caught up on all the news that happened over holidays, which resulted a montage of people behaving badly.

For starters, they looked at what happened with Steve Harvey, Bill Cosby, and Ethan Couch. The last named, for those who don’t know, is the young man who fled to Mexico in violation of the probation sentence he was given after he killed four people while driving drunk.
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Same sex marriage is not legal everywhere in the US

After the US Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that state bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, I assumed that it was now legal everywhere within the US. But it turns out that I was wrong because I had not realized that since the tribal lands are sovereign, the US constitution does not apply within their boundaries and eleven of them continue to outlaw such unions
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Privacy for me but not for thee

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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These people are just itching to start a war

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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More evidence of Hillary Clinton as a warmonger

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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Charlie Brooker reviews 2015

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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