Good Morning!
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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings.
This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning
a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.
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Propaganda is amazing. People
can be led to believe anything.
– Alice Walker
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The obscuring of the horror of war. Although George Carlin gives us a dead-on example of the American variety, the obscuring of war’s horror is an ancient art. We wrap it in patriotism and resounding but empty phrases like ‘Our Glorious Dead,’ and ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.)
It is especially ironic to use these phrases in an age when the best-trained soldiers can be killed by an aerial bomb dropped from 16,000 feet up in the sky, or a shell launched from 15 to 25 miles away on the ground. Where’s the glory or honor in being blown to bits by an enemy you never see?
The current occupant of the Oval Office, who repeatedly called his opponent “too hawkish” when he was campaigning for office, has radically increased bombing in the Middle East. And worse, many of the dead are civilians.
“2017 was the deadliest year for civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria, with as many as 6,000 people killed in strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition, according to the watchdog group Airwars. That is an increase of more than 200 percent over the previous year. It is far more if you add in countries like Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and many others.”
— Margaret Sullivan, www.washingtonpost.com/…
The wimp who wouldn’t stand in the rain at a memorial for the dead soldiers of the first World War has no problem raining death on men, women and children in foreign countries — because they’re all terrorists and very bad people, right?
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Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
On the subject of Mr. tRUmp, we can easily adapt some of Groucho Marx’s best comments and quotes. They just seem to fit. For example:
“I have nothing but respect for you — and not much of that.”
[on Vietnam] “We should pull out. Which is what Nixon’s father should have done.”
The second one applies to his war in Syria and his own father.
I really hope we don’t have to endure two more years of occupant, but without a majority in the Senate, I’m afraid we’ll have to. At least without control of the House, it will be a lot harder for the Republicans to pass their planned decimation of Social Security and Medicare, and some of their more extravagant schemes may be thwarted.
But the carnage in the Middle East will undoubtedly continue, as well as mass shootings in the U.S.