Politics

A conservative friend e-mailed yesterday, about Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, What’s The Matter With Kansas?:

Officers from the riot police force in France (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité) have spoken out on Facebook saying that they believe a civil war is imminent.  In a post titled “Diary of a CRS” – police officers belonging to the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité say why they think France on the brink of total civil war, and accuse the media are completely hiding certain unpalatable facts from the public. From the Facebook post: Here is the story “Diary of a CRS” you will not find anywhere else as totally forbidden!

Sens. Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) repeated some boilerplate hawkish nostrums on foreign policy in a recent op-ed. They concluded:

We say this delicately, as we work hard to respect the office of the presidency, but our allies everywhere are baffled. We asked one head of state, What single lesson would you like us to report back to our bosses, our constituents? The reply: “Get us a U.S. president who will know that the U.S. needs to lead. We need you. All the freedom-loving nations of the world need you.”

Wouldn’t it be a strange world to live in if 50% of military spending was paid for by just 5% of the population? Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

Every year, the United States government spends the equivalent of $3,300 for each working citizen on its military budget. In aggregate, this grand total of $610 billion in defense spending amounts to about half of the dollars globally spent on the military.

Earlier today, we noted that going into the South Carolina primary, Donald Trump is sitting on a commanding lead not just in the state, where he’s up 17 points, but nationally, where his lead over Ted Cruz is an even larger 20 points.

Perhaps most disconcerting for Cruz, Trump has a nine point national edge among white evangelicals, a voter base the Texas senator should by all rights dominate. Trump is also only 3 points behind Cruz among voters who identify as “very conservative.”