But when societies face economic pain, they sometimes turn to reforms, and other times to scapegoats (like refugees this year). So the historic question for 2016 is which direction the popular revolt among American voters will ultimately take. A President Trump or President Cruz would build walls and waterboard suspected terrorists, a President Clinton or President Sanders would raise the minimum wage and invest in at-risk children.
.. After a characteristically brilliant speech by Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956, a supporter is said to have bellowed, “Every thinking American will vote for you!”
Legend has it that Stevenson shouted back: “That’s not enough. I need a majority!”
.. The pharmaceutical industry, for example, has used its lobbying heft — it spent $272,000 in campaign donations per member of Congress last year, and it has more lobbyists than there are members of Congress — to bar the government from bargaining for drug prices in Medicare. That amounts to a $50 billion annual gift to pharmaceutical companies.
How can we experience true transformation?
Give people a common enemy, and you will give them a common identity. Deprive them of an enemy and you will deprive them of the crutch by which they know who they are.
-James Alison
When we realize that everything belongs, when we discover who we truly are as God’s beloveds, there is no longer any reason to scapegoat or exclude anyone. Rather than directly fight evil and untruth, we must bring it into the Light of Love.
I do believe that we come from God and are returning to God, but we need a softening of the heart in order to see again and find our way home. I know of no way for hearts to be softened other than by a combination of love and suffering.
-Ruth Patterson
How Trump let himself get out-organized
For months, Donald Trump’s allies urged him to invest in the technology necessary to identify and mobilize his supporters, sources close to Trump’s campaign told POLITICO, but the billionaire barely budged, apparently believing his star power would provide a new way to mobilize voters.
By the time his campaign began investing in voter data and targeting analytics, his rivals for the GOP nomination — particularly Iowa winner Ted Cruz and third-place finisher Marco Rubio — had spent millions building sophisticated voter-targeting machines.
.. At one point early in the campaign, Trump representatives talked to Cambridge Analytica ― the firm now being credited with engineering Cruz’s cutting-edge targeting operation ― about retaining the company’s services, but they decided it was too expensive.
..Through the end of last year, the period covered by the most recent Federal Election Commission filings, Trump’s campaign had spent only about $560,000 on data-related costs, compared with at least $3.6 million for Cruz.
.. The campaign’s lackadaisical data effort is seen in some quarters as coming down to Trump’s lack of willingness to use his own cash on something that’s seen as essential in modern-day presidential politics.
.. “We didn’t have much of a ground game because I didn’t think I was going to be winning and you know, etc. etc.,” he said. “That’s why I’m so honored to have come in second.”
.. The company, which is owned by one of Cruz’s biggest donors, worked with both the campaign and a network of linked super PACs to identify Cruz supporters and persuadable voters using what it called “psychographic” profiles culled from social media, and commercial and political data.
.. The team divided the undecided voters ― who were heavily evangelical and 91 percent male ― into more than 150 different subgroups based off ideology, religion and personality type, Wilson said. It used Facebook experiments to determine which issues jazzed up their voters the most.
Measure of a Man: How he treats his inferiors
He will show his goodness in the kindly consideration he shows those less favored than himself. It is the way one treats his inferiors more than the way he treats his equals which reveals one’s real character.
—Rev. Charles Bayard Miliken, Methodist Episcopal, Chicago.
The words above of Reverend Miliken were published in multiple newspapers in 1910. By 1911 a comparable statement delivered by another religious speaker named Dr M. C. B. Mason was printed in newspapers [DRCB]: