A Nature Climate Change letter posted online today (and reported in the New York Times) predicts that, under a business-as-usual scenario, temperatures will increase in the area around the Arabian Gulf to the point that human habitation will be impossible. The combination of temperature and humidity known as the wet-bulb temperature will exceed 35 degrees Celsius in places such as Doha, Qatar around the Arabian Gulf by 2100. Previous predictions did not have the temperature increasing so rapidly; intolerable temperatures were not predicted until 2200. The letter reports a new, more detailed analysis of future weather conditions. The temperature increase is not as great a consequence in the affluent parts of the Gulf as it is in poorer areas like Aden and coastal Yemen; more well-to-do inhabitants will at least have air conditioning. Those who cannot retreat to air-conditioned houses during the heat of the day will probably be driven out of these areas in the summer.
It is already hot in this part of the world; temperatures sometimes exceed 55 degrees Celsius. In the coastal areas of the Arabian Gulf, humid air makes the heat even more stressful. The Muslim pilgrimage, or hajj, frequently occurs in the summertime in this area and higher temperatures are expected to cause severe heat stress for pilgrims who are obligated to perform outdoor rituals during daylight hours. There are over two million people participating in the hajj every year, and a 2 degrees Celsius increase in average maximum temperature is likely to cause additional distress.
Ironically, this area is also the site of some of the largest and easiest to reach oil deposits in the world. Burning this oil has helped to bring on the climate change which is threatening to make the area uninhabitable.
Earlier this week, Jeb Bush attempted to capitalize on the recent email controversy by tweeting “Transparency matters. Unclassified @HillaryClinton emails should be released. You can see mine, here jebbushemails.com.” Bush’s attempt to score quick political points exposes him to a powerful hypocrisy attack. As governor, Bush used private emails; thus far he has not disclosed them all. There is even early media speculation that Bush’s actions may have skirted Florida law.
via MEMO: Jeb Bush Hypocrisy on Email Disclosure | American Bridge PAC.
During his tenure as governor of Florida, Jeb Bush used a private email server for all of his public and private emails– over three million of them. He has released some 250,000 private emails, less than ten percent of the total. Yet his Republican cronies have castigated Hillary Clinton for using a private email account when she was Secretary of State, as if she was doing something unheard-of, dangerously insecure, and possibly illegal.
Well, that’s not so. It wasn’t illegal, it wasn’t against policy, and it wasn’t even that unusual. Colin Powell did it. Ex-Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker did it, and he’s “at the center of a Wisconsin controversy” over his use of a private email address. Florida Senator Marco Rubio deleted emails from his private account that he deemed unsuitable for release. Governors Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry did it too. Mitt Romney destroyed the hard drives from his government-owned computer when he left office as Governor of Massachusetts.
There’s plenty of suspicion to go around: high government officials from both parties have deleted or decided not to release millions of emails that may have revealed inconvenient aspects of their governing behavior while in office. The Bush Administration lost millions of emails, a story which was largely ignored by the “Beltway media.” As many as 22 million emails were sent using a private email server, possibly a violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978. This damaging information didn’t come to light until after Bush had left office.
See these stories in the blogs for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Wikipedia for more information.
Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman, referred reporters to Mr. Netanyahu’s 1993 book, “A Place Among the Nations,” which details the mufti’s close ties to Nazis and uses Nuremberg testimony to buttress the argument that the mufti protested plans to expel Jews from Europe and promoted the Final Solution.
“The mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser” in the “execution of this plan,” the book quotes Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, as having testified. “He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”
But the book says that the mufti “met Hitler in person for the first time” on Nov. 28, 1941 — two months before the Final Solution was formalized and the construction of extermination camps accelerated, according to historians, but after the mass murder of Jews had begun, and roughly one million had perished.
Professor Zimmermann, the Hebrew University historian, said on Israel Radio that Mr. Netanyahu was “doing something he must not do,” and that in “the protocol” of the 1941 meeting between the mufti and Hitler, “the text that Netanyahu speaks of does not appear.”
“He moves the responsibility of the Holocaust, for the destruction of the Jews, to the mufti and the Arab world,” Professor Zimmermann said. “This is a trick intended to stain the Arabs of today because of the Arabs of the past. To pile on the Arabs of the past by easing up on the Germans of the past.”
via Netanyahu Denounced for Saying Palestinian Inspired Holocaust – The New York Times.
What’s the argument? Adolf Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews. The “Palestinian” Grand Mufti of Jerusalem wanted to exterminate the Jews. The Grand Mufti worked with Adolf Eichman. The Grand Mufti influenced Adolf Hitler to exterminate rather than expel the Jews? Maybe.
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
via Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots.
Yes, it’s true, the smartest man in the world thinks that capitalism is bad. Therefore, we should follow his advice, or he’s not the smartest man in the world– take your pick.
The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for September 2015 was the highest for September in the 136-year period of record, at 0.90°C (1.62°F) above the 20th century average of 15.0°C (59.0°F), surpassing the previous record set last year in 2014 by 0.12°C (0.19°F).
via Global Analysis – September 2015 | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
In addition, the New York Times claims that “Scientists say it is now all but certain that the full year will be the hottest on record, too.” So there cannot be any doubt that global warming is occurring, at least over the last 136 years that temperatures have been recorded. In addition, there is strong evidence that temperatures have been rising since about 1750 and are the highest that they have been in about 800,000 years, coinciding with a peak in global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Human processes have been pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, by burning first wood, then coal, then operating internal combustion engines, and not least by production of concrete and cement. At the same time, human processes have been impairing the extraction of carbon dioxide by cutting down the world’s forests; so far, about half of all forests have been eliminated. The net effect of these human activities has been a 3-4% imbalance of carbon dioxide production over removal, resulting in a 1 to 1-1/2 part per million per year increase in carbon dioxide concentrations.
The train of cause and effect that connects carbon dioxide concentrations to rising average temperatures operates very slowly. Industrial processes will continue for many years and carbon dioxide levels will continue to increase for many years. Unless action is taken by all countries and emissions are reduced, carbon dioxide will increase from the current 400 ppm to 800-1200 ppm by the year 2100. Even if emissions are dramatically eliminated, carbon dioxide levels will remain the same for a long time because of its long half life of 100-300 years. Temperatures will continue to increase for a long time as well because the effects of high carbon dioxide take a long time to manifest themselves.
The only way to prevent continuing temperature increases and worsening ill effects is to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere directly by sequestering it on a massive scale or finding some other method to remove it from the atmosphere. An example would be abiotic photosynthesis by chemical methods. Planting enormous numbers of rapidly growing trees is another possibility: reforestation on a massive scale with genetically enhanced trees is potentially feasible. There are deficiencies in the degree of carbon dioxide sequestration in most species of trees that can be remedied by judicious genetic engineering. Planting trees that fix carbon dioxide more efficiently would multiply the effects of afforestation.
There is an argument that afforestation causes net warming because a forest has lower albedo than a non-forest. This argument seems specious because the relative effects of sunlight absorption are different in a living versus a nonliving absorbing surface. Absorbing sunlight leads to photosynthesis in one case, whereas in the other, it merely increases temperature.
In any case, the relative contributions of lowered albedo and lowered carbon dioxide concentration can be measured. Whether afforestation can reduce global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations enough to ameliorate the environment is academic, however; the policy will never be pursued because governments are not effective enough. The only organizations with enough power to affect climate change are transnational corporations. It is unlikely that such corporations will find it in their interest.
How many constitutional violations will it take before the New Orleans district attorney’s office is held to account for the culture of negligence and outright dishonesty that has pervaded it for decades?
Source: Justice Gone Wrong in New Orleans – The New York Times
Former District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr. was responsible for systematic flouting of the Brady rule, which requires prosecutors to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense. At least 36 convictions have been overturned as a result of such violations. Only in September 2015 was a crucial memo revealed that in 1996 supported the defense against a life sentence imposed on an innocent man by the New Orleans prosecutors. Yet the Supreme Court denied that this evidence of systematic wrongdoing existed in their 2011 case in which they overturned a $14 million judgement against the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office. By a 5-4 margin the Supreme Court denied the obvious and consistent evidence showing that the New Orleans District Attorney ignored his responsibilities towards innocent citizens and repeatedly failed to turn over exculpatory evidence.
Here is a quote from a judge’s scathing opinion about this systematic misconduct by prosecutors:
When a public official behaves with such casual disregard for his constitutional obligations and the rights of the accused, it erodes the public’s trust in our justice system, and chips away at the foundational premises of the rule of law. When such transgressions are acknowledged yet forgiven by the courts, we endorse and invite their repetition.
It’s not just the District Attorney’s Office of every jurisdiction either. The investigators and forensic experts who examine the evidence and compile reports are often sloppy or incompetent. From the next paragraph of the same judge’s opinion:
Olsen’s case points to another important problem—that of rogue investigators and forensic experts. Melinkoff’s long history of misconduct, resulting in the wrongful conviction of numerous innocent people, is hardly unique. Just last month, Annie Dookhan, a Massachusetts crime-lab technician, was sentenced to 3–5 years imprisonment after spending several years filing positive results for samples she had not properly tested. Her misconduct tainted over 40,000 drug samples, implicating several thousand defendants (hundreds of whom have already been released).
The judge goes on to recount dozens of other cases in which forensic evidence has been found to be mishandled or falsified, resulting in wrongful convictions for hundreds or thousands of defendants. Finally, from the same judge’s report:
Because modern criminal trials frequently turn on forensic reports, these incidents of misconduct raise the frightening prospect that many of the over 1.5 million people now populating state and federal prisons might, in fact, be innocent. See E. Ann Carson & Daniela Golinelli, Prisoners in 2012—Advance Counts, Bureau of Justice Statistics (July 2013). How do rogue forensic scientists and other bad cops thrive in our criminal justice system? The simple answer is that some prosecutors turn a blind eye to such misconduct because they’re more interested in gaining a conviction than achieving a just result.
These stinging accusations are part of a dissent filed December 10, 2013, in the case of US v. Olsen, which can be found here. It seems that there is no crime venal enough to be punished if it is committed by a United States District Attorney. It is very likely that a significant proportion of the record number of prisoners we have behind bars are innocent. Another, unknowable, number are guilty, and there is no reliable method of distinguishing guilt from innocence except to review every case in excruciating detail. Even then, many cases must be concluded as uncertain because of doubtful methods and unreliable informants.
With all of these uncertainties, I think it is likely that the disproportion in criminal offenses between black and white citizens is more notional than real. Despite the fact that blacks, being more economically challenged, are more likely to violate the law for economic reasons, there is reason to doubt some of the convictions for other reasons.
There remains the disproportion in black victims of homicidal violence, usually mediated with firearms. These victims demonstrate less economic motive and more anger and violent impulses. Are the perpetrators of these black on black homicides impelled by anger to take out their frustration on the most proximate victims?
The concept of black on black homicide as a form of racial suicide has not been adequately explored. There is deep, personal violence imposed on blacks every day, in countless social encounters with whites who represent an oppressive system. Having no available outlet, his resentment turns inward and flails at the only target, himself. This suicidal violence has no explanation except as internalized anger.
Comment of the Day: A Dismal Prediction
John F. McBride
is a trusted commenter Seattle [10/16/2015]
Over $300,000,000 has been donated so far to buy the White House in 2016 and over $176,000,000 came from just 158 households of 20,000,000 households in the U.S.
138 families, 87%, were giving to Republicans.
Bernie is right; taking down Glass-Steagall was a huge mistake, Shadow Banking not withstanding. The destruction of it was a decades long process that warned us with the failure of the Savings & Loans in the Reagan area what was in store.
Not even the failure in 1998 of Long Term Capital could scare the financial world. Why would it be afraid? The Fed arranged LTC’s rescue.
The U.S. is a Democracy only in name. We live in an era in which for the first time in history the majority of Congress is seated with millionaires. When a Jaime Dimon worth over $1 billion and a family living under a freeway come calling on Congress who is most likely to be listened to and favored?
The Koch brothers alone are alleged to have slated over $1 billion to invest in elections.
Yet, survey the damage of financial regulation and anti-labor legislation and what do you see? Of the states hurt worst by The Great Crash most voters favor Republicans; they choose elected officials most likely to hurt them.
Paul’s right; regardless of whether a Democrat gets elected, Bernie or Hillary, the best we can hope for is to keep a thumb in the dike. If Republicans win control of the White House in addition to the Senate, House and Supreme Court this Oligarchy will be cemented in place.
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Soak the Rich and Save Our Infrastructure
An article in today’s New York Times online demonstrates that hundreds of billions of dollars can be raised simply by modestly increasing the rate of taxes that the top 1% of the American people pay. The amounts are astounding: raising the top tax rate from 33% to 40% would bring in $157 billion a year. Since the top 1% make $1.2 million a year, it is laughable to argue that such persons would feel a serious pinch unless they were already spending more than they were making. There is a certain degree of pain involved in raising taxes, but if the pain is needed to fix our crumbling infrastructure, to give just one example of where we are falling short, then let us have the pain fall on the smallest percentage and those least likely to feel the pinch.
Such sentiments would carry the day in a moment if we were living in a real representative democracy. How could the desires of the 1% outvote the needs of the other 99% ?? Simple. Careful research examining the structure of our government reveals that it behaves like an oligarchy of rich people. This research is objective, comprehensive, and convincing to any reasonably open minded person. The conclusions are plain as the nose on your face even without objective research.
The reasons why our country behaves like an oligarchy of rich people are also easy to see: our system of campaign financing makes certain that only candidates who favor the needs of the rich receive any significant money backing. On the Republican side, this is blatantly obvious, but on the Democratic side, the malign influence of big donors works subtly to temper the impulse towards aiding the majority.
Gerrymandering aids the Republican cause by diluting and concentrating adverse votes into contorted districts. Although the voting totals favored the Democrats in 2012, they lost the majority they had held in the House. The division of the Senate, with 2 votes for each state, large or small, also favors conservative states with small populations as compared to liberal states with large populations. If the Senate were composed with proportional representation, California would have ten senators.
A combination of factors makes the House and Senate unrepresentative of the the mass of people at large. The President is more a representative of the majority of all the people, although the Electoral College still introduces some imbalance.
A concerted propaganda effort by the rich, rabidly conservative Koch brothers in combination with a few of their wealthy friends has put the icing on this cake of deception, corruption, and bought influence by the wealthy. For thirty years, the Kochs have been secretly funding groups whose sole function is to spread deceptive propaganda that hammers at the themes of libertarianism and government support of business aids. Every kind of phony organization has been tried, from think tanks to speaking tours to panels of experts to radio hosts to direct mail advertising.
Every device that favors the aggregation of wealth by those who already have a superabundance has been used, and used successfully, but despite the propaganda and naked violence a few people have dared to speak out. Our next President will face a persistent storm of counterpressure from the forces of wealth, and there will be no help from Congress or the Supreme Court. The oppressed will need to be patient a few years longer, until demographic changes overwhelm the conservative districts that now reliably send reactionaries to Washington. In 2020 or 2024, things will be different. Maybe we’ll get the first Hispanic President.
We tested the hypothesis that an altered community of gut microbes is associated with risk of colorectal cancer (CRC) in a study of 47 CRC case subjects and 94 control subjects. 16S rRNA genes in fecal bacterial DNA were amplified by universal primers, sequenced by 454 FLX technology, and aligned for taxonomic classification to microbial genomes using the QIIME pipeline. Taxonomic differences were confirmed with quantitative polymerase chain reaction and adjusted for false discovery rate. All statistical tests were two-sided. From 794217 16S rRNA gene sequences, we found that CRC case subjects had decreased overall microbial community diversity (P = .02). In taxonomy-based analyses, lower relative abundance of Clostridia (68.6% vs 77.8%) and increased carriage of Fusobacterium (multivariable odds ratio [OR] = 4.11; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.62 to 10.47) and Porphyromonas (OR = 5.17; 95% CI = 1.75 to 15.25) were found in case subjects compared with control subjects. Because of the potentially modifiable nature of the gut bacteria, our findings may have implications for CRC prevention.
Recent studies have shown that individuals with colorectal cancer have an altered gut microbiome compared to healthy controls. It remains unclear whether these differences are a response to tumorigenesis or actively drive tumorigenesis. To determine the role of the gut microbiome in the development of colorectal cancer, we characterized the gut microbiome in a murine model of inflammation-associated colorectal cancer that mirrors what is seen in humans. We followed the development of an abnormal microbial community structure associated with inflammation and tumorigenesis in the colon. Tumor-bearing mice showed enrichment in operational taxonomic units (OTUs) affiliated with members of theBacteroides, Odoribacter, and Akkermansia genera and decreases in OTUs affiliated with members of the Prevotellaceae and Porphyromonadaceae families. Conventionalization of germfree mice with microbiota from tumor-bearing mice significantly increased tumorigenesis in the colon compared to that for animals colonized with a healthy gut microbiome from untreated mice. Furthermore, at the end of the model, germfree mice colonized with microbiota from tumor-bearing mice harbored a higher relative abundance of populations associated with tumor formation in conventional animals. Manipulation of the gut microbiome with antibiotics resulted in a dramatic decrease in both the number and size of tumors. Our results demonstrate that changes in the gut microbiome associated with inflammation and tumorigenesis directly contribute to tumorigenesis and suggest that interventions affecting the composition of the microbiome may be a strategy to prevent the development of colon cancer.
Given the trillions of microbes that inhabit the mammalian intestines, the host immune system must constantly maintain a balance between tolerance to commensals and immunity against pathogens to avoid unnecessary immune responses against otherwise harmless bacteria. Misregulated responses can lead to inflammatory bowel diseases such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. The mechanisms by which the immune system maintains this critical balance remain largely undefined. Here, we demonstrate that the short-chain fatty acid n-butyrate, which is secreted in high amounts by commensal bacteria, can modulate the function of intestinal macrophages, the most abundant immune cell type in the lamina propria. Treatment of macrophages with n-butyrate led to the down-regulation of lipopolysaccharide-induced proinflammatory mediators, including nitric oxide, IL-6, and IL-12, but did not affect levels of TNF-α or MCP-1. These effects were independent of toll-like receptor signaling and activation of G-protein–coupled receptors, two pathways that could be affected by short-chain fatty acids. In this study, we provide several lines of evidence that suggest that these effects are due to the inhibition of histone deacetylases by n-butyrate. These findings elucidate a pathway in which the host may maintain tolerance to intestinal microbiota by rendering lamina propria macrophages hyporesponsive to commensal bacteria through the down-regulation of proinflammatory effectors.
Gut commensal microbes shape the mucosal immune system by regulating the differentiation and expansion of several types of T cell. Clostridia, a dominant class of commensal microbe, can induce colonic regulatory T (Treg) cells, which have a central role in the suppression of inflammatory and allergic responses. However, the molecular mechanisms by which commensal microbes induce colonic Treg cells have been unclear. Here we show that a large bowel microbial fermentation product, butyrate, induces the differentiation of colonic Treg cells in mice. A comparative NMR-based metabolome analysis suggests that the luminal concentrations of short-chain fatty acids positively correlates with the number of Treg cells in the colon. Among short-chain fatty acids, butyrate induced the differentiation of Treg cells in vitro and in vivo, and ameliorated the development of colitis induced by adoptive transfer of CD4(+) CD45RB(hi) T cells in Rag1(-/-) mice. Treatment of naive T cells under the Treg-cell-polarizing conditions with butyrate enhanced histone H3 acetylation in the promoter and conserved non-coding sequence regions of the Foxp3 locus, suggesting a possible mechanism for how microbial-derived butyrate regulates the differentiation of Treg cells. Our findings provide new insight into the mechanisms by which host-microbe interactions establish immunological homeostasis in the gut.
Results
We transplanted fecal microbiota from three CRC patients and three healthy individuals into germ-free mice, resulting in six structurally distinct microbial communities. Subjecting these mice to a chemically induced model of CRC resulted in different levels of tumorigenesis between mice. Differences in the number of tumors were strongly associated with the baseline microbiome structure in mice, but not with the cancer status of the human donors. Partitioning of baseline communities into enterotypes by Dirichlet multinomial mixture modeling resulted in three enterotypes that corresponded with tumor burden. The taxa most strongly positively correlated with increased tumor burden were members of the Bacteroides, Parabacteroides, Alistipes, andAkkermansia, all of which are Gram-negative. Members of the Gram-positive Clostridiales, including multiple members of Clostridium Group XIVa, were strongly negatively correlated with tumors. Analysis of the inferred metagenome of each community revealed a negative correlation between tumor count and the potential for butyrate production, and a positive correlation between tumor count and the capacity for host glycan degradation. Despite harboring distinct gut communities, all mice underwent conserved structural changes over the course of the model. The extent of these changes was also correlated with tumor incidence.
Conclusion
Our results suggest that the initial structure of the microbiome determines susceptibility to colonic tumorigenesis. There appear to be opposing roles for certain Gram-negative (Bacteroidales and Verrucomicrobia) and Gram-positive (Clostridiales) bacteria in tumor susceptibility. Thus, the impact of community structure is potentially mediated by the balance between protective, butyrate-producing populations and inflammatory, mucin-degrading populations.
A review of recent microbiome studies on human and mouse colon cancer models shows numerous different microbial species and groups associated with cancer. Lack of consistency in species findings relates partly to location studied; microbiomes differ dramatically from region to region. However, certain specific genes appear in association with tumors rather than being confined to individual species. Most interesting are the mouse models in which transplanting certain tumor-associated colon microbiomes into germ-free mice induces inflammation and colon cancers. Tumorigenesis could be suppressed, partially, by treatment with antibiotics that killed tumor-inducing bacteria.
Researchers also found that butyrate production by commensal bacteria resulted in T-cell differentiation and reduced inflammation, reducing tumor counts, and glycan degradation (associated with mucin) was positively associated with tumors.
Here is the evil underside of the money pumped into political campaigns: 501c4 groups authorized by the IRS as nonprofits with anonymous donors, claimed by the groups to be engaged in spending on “social welfare.” They are supposedly making videos shown on television as education for the public but in many cases their sole video output is clearly advertisements for a particular candidate.
An example is Senator Marco Rubio. A nonprofit group, with anonymous donations of $18 million so far, has spent $5.5 million, so far, exclusively on videos shown on TV promoting his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President. The donations are of course “anonymous” but it is well known that Rubio has courted Sheldon Adelson, a casino mogul. Rubio has gone so far as to support a ban on Internet gambling, a position which Adelson favors because such gambling represents competition for his casinos in Las Vegas. No doubt there are many other positions that Rubio supports which Adelson favors. Lower taxes on wealthy people are one example. Regulations that favor Adelson’s position and profitability in Las Vegas are another.
Rubio is depending completely on this nonprofit, run by close associates who were formerly part of his formal campaign, so completely that he hasn’t spent any of his campaign’s money on TV advertising. Even his super PAC hasn’t laid out anything for TV ads.
We don’t know, of course, that Adelson is Rubio’s only wealthy supporter. It is possible that several people are behind Rubio, but we won’t know by perusing the source of TV ads promoting him. The IRS is overextended and has little time available for investigating 501c4 organizations. In fact, the IRS has suffered political setbacks related to its policies in evaluating such groups. A scandal in which IRS employees were alleged to use discriminatory criteria in deciding which groups to investigate was manufactured in an attempt to prevent the IRS from investigating controversial conservative groups. The 501c4 groups are clearly abusing their tax-exempt status in another attempt to shift the costs of their propaganda to the taxpayers.
Rubio’s positions on the issues are almost identical with the other Republican candidates. He opposes “Net neutrality” because he claims that it would be too much regulation on Internet providers. He says the corporate tax rate should be reduced to 25%. while retaining all of their deductions; there should be only two individual federal tax rates, 15 and 35 percent, and taxes on capital gains should be eliminated, since the current tax treatment of capital gains is not liberal enough. He proposes freezing all federal spending at 2008 levels except defense spending, which should be increased. He demands repeal of “Obamacare” (the ACA) and its replacement with tax credits and “fewer regulations.” He also wants to ban abortion after 20 weeks.
This post was inspired by an article in the New York Times discussing Rubio’s activities and his spending on TV ads.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 