WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Sunday said being gay is akin to choosing to drink alcohol or use profanity - lifestyle choices he says are appealing to others but not to him.


The former Baptist pastor, who is weighing a second run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, also claimed that forcing people of faith to accept gay marriage as policy is on par with telling Jews that they must serve "bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli." That dish would run afoul of kosher rules in the same way Huckabee sees asking Christians to accept same-sex marriages.


"We're so sensitive to make sure we don't offend certain religions, but then we act like Christians can't have the convictions that they have had for over 2,000 years," Huckabee said.

Huckabee has made cultural issues the cornerstone of his likely White House bid. The former Baptist pastor is counting on social conservatives and evangelicals who have great clout in early nominating Iowa to help him.


His comments about gays and lesbians seem targeted at the conservative corners of his party.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, said Sunday he is open to sending U.S. troops to the Middle East to defeat Islamic State fighters -- a bold foreign policy statement in contrast with the Obama administration’s position.

Walker told ABC’s “This Week” that he wouldn’t rule out sending troops, as Islamic State appears to grow and strengthen despite U.S.-led efforts to destroy the radical Islamic group.

“You can’t rule out anything,” Walker said. “Lives are at stake.”

King is working on something of a rope-a-dope strategy, letting the others tire themselves out in the hopes that he can be there in the end.

“My ideal situation is to be part of the debate and if I see that there is support building and others drop out, and there is a real opening and people who share my views come forward with funding,” he said.

King continued, “I go back to 2012 when you saw Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann. They all had a chance to get to the top without much money, and they were leading in the polls. If I get into their position I am not going to make the mistakes they did.”

This is a key part of King’s argument. He carries the brawling bearing of his father, a New York City police officer, but it may surprise people who have actually seen him that he has a polish some of his fellow Republican contenders do not.

This is very optimistic. No president slashes spending. Ever. To believe they would is fantasy, imo. And as presidents don't really have the power to create jobs (short of big government programs that directly employ people) and have never been particularly successful at fostering economic environments that do with any certainty, expecting Paul to magically succeed where no one before him has reliably been able to do so is expecting a lot of magic from one man. (The failure of trickle down economics to deliver on the promises made for it is pretty convincing at this point.)

I've seen this level of hype before, and I've seen how disastrously that man delivered on his promises. I have no reason to expect Paul is different from every other politician. After all, he belongs to one of the two parties that run this country. These guys may have slightly different flavors here and there, but at the root, they're all the same.

We'll have a very long period at 120-220 territory imo.

Enlightening.
People outside the US still believe in the American dream.
They think immigrating to the US is a ticket out of poverty.

One world government is fine as long as its a good one permanently right, 1 error somewhere in the future and we could wipe out billions.

3. RAND HITS THE ROAD

Rand Paul was the most active GOP contender early on, and Politico's Mike Allen reports the freshman Kentucky senator has a busy travel schedule ahead as he tries to build his support -- and not always in predictable ways.

"We're told that Rand Paul is going to travel every weekend, going forward-- he's not going to do many cattle calls," said Allen. "Everybody else was in Iowa last weekend, he's in Iowa next weekend, because he can draw a crowd on his own."

"And something that he's doing, as he travels the country, is meeting with physicians -- thinking about a way to bring in some people who are not necessarily politically active who can give, who can talk about among the community, so he's talking to the fellow doctors as he goes around."

But Paul is also including some GOP stops that are a bit more predictable: "He's back to red meat next weekend in Iowa," said Allen. "He's doing a liberty event and his big rally is audit the Fed. That's about the reddest meat that you can get."

“If we decide to do this, we will want to broaden the coalition to include a winning majority that means something, that appeals to people that have libertarian leanings, but also some people who are traditional conservatives, Christian conservatives and mainstream conservatives of all walks of life," Rand Paul said in an interview with The Texas Tribune, addressing the biggest difference of his approach to the campaigns his father ran.

Paul, who grew up in Lake Jackson, visited North Texas to give keynote speeches at a pair of North Texas GOP dinners. The trip reflected how Texas is central to his strategy.

But Texas' political operative talent and likely early March 2016 primary delegates are all but certain to be awarded to campaigns on a proportional basis – and Paul is making his play.

“Texas will be early. Texas is big and having roots here and all that sort of points [us] towards it,” he said. “I think that Texas is important for many reasons.”

At both GOP events he attended this weekend, he sported his black “Texas boots.” He said he purchased them 15 years ago for the Texas State Society’s Black Tie and Boots Ball during President George W. Bush’s 2000 inauguration.

His speeches were heavy on privacy, government waste and spending. And he hammered away at the likely Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for not taking stronger action as secretary of state to prevent the 2012 Benghazi attack.

Multiple times he referred to the United States’ intervention in Libya as “Hillary’s War.”

The problem is that people have been saying this all the way down.  Perhaps there isn't a bottom?  It irks me when people make such strong statements about a highly volatile investment.  There are a lot of gullible people out there who use forums to guide their financial decisions, unfortunately ..

snip

Quite simple. People who thinks that price will drop and wants to sell now and buy after some days.

We are the generation that gets to witness the end of the American Dream. The numbers that you are about to see tell a story. They tell a story of a once mighty economy that is dying. For decades, the rest of the planet has regarded the United States as “the land of opportunity” where almost anyone can be successful if they are willing to work hard. And when I was growing up, it seemed like almost everyone was living the American Dream. I lived on a “middle class” street and I went to a school where it seemed like almost everyone was middle class. When I was in high school, it was very rare to ever hear of a parent that was unemployed, and virtually every family that I knew had a comfortable home and more than one nice vehicle.

But now that has all changed. The “American Dream” has been transformed into a very twisted game of musical chairs. With each passing year, more people are falling out of the middle class, and most of the rest of us are scrambling really hard to keep our own places.

Something has gone horribly wrong, and yet Americans are very deeply divided when it comes to finding answers to our problems. We love to point fingers and argue with one another, and meanwhile things just continue to get even worse. The following are 22 numbers that are very strong evidence of the death of the American Dream…

#1 The Obama administration tells us that 8.69 million Americans are “officially unemployed” and that 92.90 million Americans are considered to be “not in the labor force”. That means that more than 101 million U.S. adults do not have a job right now.

#2 One recent survey discovered that 55 percent of Americans believe that the American Dream either never existed or that it no longer exists.

#3 Considering the fact that Obama is in the White House, it is somewhat surprising that 55 percent of all Republicans still believe in the American Dream, but only 33 percent of all Democrats do.

#4 After adjusting for inflation, median household income has fallen by nearly $5,000 since 2007.

#5 After adjusting for inflation, “the median wealth figure for middle-income families” fell from $78,000 in 1983 to $63,800 in 2013.

...

An internal ruling made by the Venezuelan Ministry of Defense, published on Tuesday, January 27, in state newsletter Gaceta Oficial, legalizes the use of lethal weapons by the national armed forces (FANB) against protesters.

Resolution 008610, signed by General-in-Chief and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, establishes the “use of force, with a firearm or any other potentially lethal weapon” as the last resort to “prevent disorder, support the legitimately constituted authority, and counter all aggression, immediately confronting it with the necessary measures.”

The Constitution establishes that all human-rights treaties signed and ratified by Venezuela take precedence over any law or resolution issued by the Venezuelan state.

Article 68 of the Constitution, however, stipulates: “The use of firearms and toxic substances to control peaceful demonstrations is prohibited.”

The new measures also specify that a new Public Order Manual for state security services will be created within the next three months to facilitate training and prevent abuses. However, the new rules on the use of force are to be applied “immediately.”

Under Venezuelan law, the Defense Ministry does not have the authority to override or ignore the Constitution and the norms contained therein. María Esperanza Hermida, coordinator for enforcement in Venezuelan NGO (Provea) argued that the measure violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), as well as transferring competencies to the military which are the preserve of the civil police.

In an interview with the PanAm Post, Jose Vicente Haro, a Venezuelan university professor of constitutional law, said that restricting or limiting the application of human rights is a measure that can only be discussed in the National Assembly, as a bill subject to modification that must be approved by two-thirds of legislators, as outlined in Article 203 of the Constitution.

Haro also explained that Article 23 of the Constitution establishes that all human-rights treaties signed and ratified by Venezuela have an overriding constitutional character, taking precedence over any law or resolution issued by the Venezuelan state.

A London politician said British men who join ISIS are just porn-obsessed losers looking for an ego boost.

The “tortured” men turn to jihad because they lack purpose and self-esteem, and can’t get a girlfriend, London Mayor Boris Johnson told the Sun in a recent interview. “They are just young men in desperate need of self-esteem who do not have a particular mission in life, who feel that they are losers and this thing makes them feel strong – like winners.”

“They are not making it with girls and so they turn to other forms of spiritual comfort, which of course is no comfort,” he added. Johnson, who is a leading candidate to be the next Tory leader, referenced an MI5 profile on jihadis as evidence for his claims.

“If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn,” he said. “They are literally wankers. Severe onanists.”
He said the best way to ensure more British men don’t volunteer to be martyred for Islam is to give them a job.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokesperson told The Guardian that Johnson has an “ever lovely turn of phrase,” but declined to say whether Cameron agrees with Johnson’s comments.

“The whole thing is ludicrous,” Charlie Winter told The Guardian on behalf of the Quilliam Foundation, an organization started by ex-Islamists to counter extremism. “To imply that they don’t have social skills is again a generalization … that has no evidence behind it. They are integrated, many of them are very well educated.”

Johnson told Sky News Friday his comments were not “remotely controversial.”

“The crucial thing is that these are young men, principally young men who are growing up without much sense of success in their lives, without a feeling that the world holds much for them,” he said. “And … their problems need addressing in all sorts of ways.”

He also took heat in August for the way he disparaged the ISIS member who killed American journalist James Foley. “I suspect most of us don’t give a monkey’s what happens to this prat in heaven, whether he meets virgins or raisins,” he wrote in a column for The Daily Telegraph. “We just want someone to come along with a bunker buster and effect an introduction as fast as possible.”

Walker 16%
Paul 15%
Huck 13%
Carson 10%
Bush 9%
Cruz 6%
Christie 6%

DALLAS, Texas — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—a former U.S. Senator from New York, the former First Lady of the United States, and the Democrats’ likely frontrunner and nominee in 2016—is “yesterday’s news.”

Breitbart News asked Paul—flanked by the new addition to his campaign team, Texas GOP chairman Steve Munisteri—for his thoughts on Mitt Romney bowing out of the 2016 GOP presidential contest at the Friday evening press conference held at the Renaissance Hotel.

“I supported and campaigned for him when he won the nomination in the fall,” Paul said of Romney. “I think he’s a great man personally, a great businessman, I think he would have run this country a lot better than this president. But he didn’t get enough electoral votes. I think what it’s going to take is something reaching beyond. There’s nothing that I’m saying is wrong, but it’s just got to be that plus something if we’re going to win a big election. I wish him well, and he’s somebody who I met several times and I have a great deal of respect for him and his wife.”

DALLAS — Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) accused Jeb Bush of hypocrisy after The Boston Globe reported the former Florida governor was a heavy marijuana smoker while at an elite prep school.

Bush opposed a Florida medical marijuana ballot initiative last year even though he partook liberally of the herb while in high school.

“You would think he’d have a little more understanding then,” Paul told The Hill while en route to a political event in Texas.

“He was even opposed to medical marijuana,” Paul said of Bush, a potential rival in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. “This is a guy who now admits he smoked marijuana but he wants to put people in jail who do.

“I think that’s the real hypocrisy, is that people on our side, which include a lot of people, who made mistakes growing up, admit their mistakes but now still want to put people in jail for that,” he said.

“Had he been caught at Andover, he’d have never been governor, he’d probably never have a chance to run for the presidency,” he added.

Bush told The Globe in a recent interview about his four years at Phillips Academy in Andover, one of the nation’s most prestigious prep schools, “I drank and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover,” explaining the behavior was “pretty common.”

lol, I will reserve my judgement for now.