As someone perceived as a capitalist mogul Donald Trump was associated with a certain type of political expectation if he chose to become involved in presidential politics.  At first blush the expectation was an issues approach comparable to Mitt Romney, seen in the context of a chieftain of wealth within the Republican Party.

Some seasoned pundits who make a living attempting to ascertain actions of politicians were taken aback last week when Trump fervently raised the birth certificate issue regarding President Obama.  

According to the conventional wisdom Trump would be expected to challenge former Massachusetts governor Romney for the more tidy and orderly Republican vote, those who follow the maxim of Calvin Coolidge that "The business of the country is business."

Trump instead invaded the province of Mike Huckabee without so much as a knock on the door and fought him tenaciously for the Tea Party vote.  After the initial shock waves wore off pundits began to analyze the surprising behavior of the mega rich property developer from New York City.

Eric Alterman wrote recently that Michele Bachmann should not be taken seriously as a national political force.

Alterman is correct that the public has a right to expect that a Member of Congress from Minnesota and putative Republican presidential aspirant like Bachmann has an obligation to possess a requisite amount of knowledge to fulfill any kind of positive role within the American political system.  

To be taken seriously Bachmann needs to have at least some of that quality they refer to as gravitas.  This stems from knowing certain important facts and taking sober and reasoned positions on basic issues.

What troubled Alterman and scores of other Americans is that recently Bachmann proclaimed that America's Founding Fathers detested slavery and eliminated it.  As many respondents pointed out, any informed grade school youngster knows that slavery was not abolished until Abraham Lincoln waged a bloody civil war.  

The CIA was on the job and ready to roll when it came time to overthrow a popularly elected leader in Iran to assist the interest of British Petroleum in Iran in 1953.

That same CIA was on the job to assist a future dictator named Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party gain power in Iraq.  It was the days of the Cold War so the rationale was that the Communists in Iraq must go, and so a dictatorship steeped in blood was launched.

There came a time when the New World Order, a term used reverently by President George H.W. Bush, decided that it was time to take over Iraq's oil interest and so conflict was launched.  

Can we suppose that U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie was just confused and making an independent blunder during that famous interview with Saddam Hussein when she said that an occupation of Kuwait on his part would be an "Arab-Arab" issue and not the concern of the United States?  Had she talked to no one in the Bush Administration in advance?

The recent Japan tragedy brings into sharp focus the ongoing debate concerning nuclear power.  

The loss of life and vast property destruction to a global economic power brings into focus with increased acuity the longstanding debate over nuclear power and the right's insistence that concerns about its inherent danger is a non-existent canard being promulgated by the lunacies of a panic stricken left.

Concerns about the potential danger of nuclear power are met with the same measure of ridicule as trepidations about climate change.  All too often points raised by scientific sources are trivialized by talk show noise and false bravado.  It is given traction by the ranks of listeners who derive comforting assurance by such verbal broadsides.

Rush Limbaugh has been a voluble and persistent source of comments to a sea of faithful listeners eager to devour such appetizing morsels.  In the cases of such disturbing instances of global tragedies occurring through climate and nuclear dangers, comfort via an "ignorance is bliss" scenario can be more understandable than other subjects in the Limbaugh lexicon.

The Gilded Age of America in the late nineteenth century embodied ownership of politicians.

While political bosses like Boss Tweed and Jim Fisk controlled and owned politicians, these representatives knew what their corporate sponsors expected.  It was a period when the United States Senate was called The Millionaires Club.  The corporate owners pulling the strings on their bought political puppets saw that they were sufficiently enriched as they did their bidding.

Similarities abound on what is occurring now and what happened in that corporate dominated post-Civil War period.  While reformers such as William Jennings Bryan and the populist movement called for the direct  election of United States Senators, corporate string pullers denounced such "radical" notions and preferred the then current system of state legislatures selecting them.  

Guess who pulled the strings on state legislators and observe what is happening currently.

The current conflict involving Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Republican attempts to prevent collective union bargaining is a resumption of a practice that has been long associated with the Republican right.

The Democratic president associated with nurturing America's labor movement was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  By developing a partnership between labor and the New Deal the crafty president developed, an association was in place between the union movement and the Democratic Party.  

It not only enabled Roosevelt to secure four presidential victories, but sowed the seeds for successes beyond Roosevelt's lifetime for liberal Democratic chief executives extending from Harry Truman's Fair Deal, to John Kennedy's New Frontier, and culminating with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to the end of the sixties.

Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932 on a platform of balancing the budget, one conservative enough that Barry Goldwater later remarked that he would have been comfortable running on it, began experimenting with Keynesian economics and therein forged a Democratic Party surge.  

The 1960 presidential election between Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Vice President Richard M. Nixon launched the modern political television era.  Following that exciting race, which ended with Kennedy scoring a wafer thin popular vote advantage of one-tenth of one percent, the art of political campaigning would be changed forever while also becoming considerably more expensive.

There were very few televisions around when President Harry Truman scored his huge upset win over Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York in 1948 and they were owned by the nation's more affluent citizens.  

Four years later the medium was in its teething stages in the political sphere.  A major ad run by Republicans on behalf of General Dwight Eisenhower recited some major economic party talking points followed by the candidate appearing and stating that he intended to change all that after the election.

As incumbent President Eisenhower was in his last few months of his second term he passed along advice to his vice president that it would be foolhardy to participate in televised debates against his Democratic Party opponent.  

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck ostensibly stand for freedom and extension of human rights but the facts reveal a different result.

A current case in point surrounds recent events in Egypt.  To lovers of democracy throughout the world the confluence of events, brought about through a coalescing of freedom lovers in Egypt seeking to bring an end to a three decade dictatorial regime noted for suppression of basic rights and rigged elections, was an example of grassroots democracy in action.

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck immediately sounded sirens of discontent to their loyal patrons.  Limbaugh was alarmed that the demonstrators were leftists and included a number of feminists.  

What is a leftist to Limbaugh?  Based on his alarmist messages to a core audience that has made him a multimillionaire, anyone to the left of the Limbaugh-Beck-Fox News axis constitutes a dangerous leftist threat.  

When the recent Egyptian uprising in the wake of three decades of power of President Hosni Mubarak began there were immediate comparisons made between current demands for democracy and the collapse of the Soviet Union, made abundantly manifest to an international audience with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The 1989 culmination of the Soviet Empire differed from the current events in Egypt in one basic area.  Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev demonstrated an awareness that times and circumstances had dramatically changed from the days of the unchallenged rule of Joseph Stalin.

Gorbachev's awareness led the Soviet government to institute glasnost and perestroika, Russian for openness and reform.  As a result sweeping changes had occurred by the time that the Berlin Wall was torn down, beckoning the death knell of a Soviet Union that had been experiencing enhanced economic difficulties for some time.

The current Egyptian protests were so spontaneous as to catch the world community flat-footed.  It was a product of the computer age, a shrewd use of social networking to promote a response to a rigid dictatorship through online communication followed by strategic coalescing.

President Barack Obama's State of the Union Message reveals a broad difference between his cool, dispassionate, conciliatory political operating style as contrasted with that of the more passionate Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Robert F. Kennedy.

Obama's address to the nation was a cooler, less passionate version of FDR's call to greatness to his fellow American citizens in his first inaugural address in which he stated, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

In the midst of the most gripping economic crisis since the Great Depression that greeted Roosevelt when he assumed office in March 1933, Obama spent much of his time extolling America as a great nation and Americans as doers determined to carry forward that legacy.  He sought to rise above partisan politics in summoning Americans to greatness.

A grand fallacy behind Obama's approach was soon revealed when Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin delivered the Republican Party's response.  The conciliatory style of Obama was sharply contrasted with more boiler plate neoconservative jargon reflective of the statement by Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after the 2010 midterm elections when he candidly explained that the party's goal was to make Obama a "one term president."

The destruction of world empires have important events that trigger the final results.  In the case of the American Empire that marked its apex  following World War Two the climactic event was the Vietnam War and the events that flowed from it.

The linchpin of destruction was launched by a military-industrial complex initiative carried out by what is now termed the New World Order.  Then Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who worked closely with the CIA in the critical period shortly after World War Two when America stood at its highest military and economic peaks, wrote later about the creation of a secret team.

The ambitious game plan of a new Secret Team was to set into motion actions precipitating war that would generate economic profits for the military-industrial complex.  

Mindful of the fact, made crystal clear by President Harry Truman's unleashing of the atomic bomb against Japan, that nuclear warfare would signal the end of humanity as we know it, the Secret Team sought to engineer conflicts that would provide huge enrichment to the military-industrial complex without escalating to the level of nuclear warfare.

Charles Grassley led the propaganda charge when it came to accusing the Obama Administration of intending to create a health care death panel.  

It is interesting to observe the stony silence of the senator from Iowa as well as that of his colleagues when a very real death panel has reared its ugly head in Arizona.

The high octane fuel that the Republican right runs on is propaganda and with it the concomitant byproduct of hypocrisy.  The name of the game is to keep accusations toward the opposition spinning while maintaining a bogus holier than thou attitude.

Such was the case with scores of issues designed to appeal to the pro-life religious right base.  One of the most heinous examples in recent memory was the conduct of the Bush brothers in the Terry Schiavo tragedy.  A loving husband, insisting that he was carrying out his wife's expressed wish, sought to bring a comatose life with no prospect of recovery to a humane end.

Perhaps the most revealing portion of Election Night 2010 coverage came when MSNBC pundits Chris Matthews and Lawrence O'Donnell asked one specific question that towered above all others.

The Republican right, the exclusive control mechanism of the party, had during the entire campaign leading up to Election Night coverage drummed over and over the point that if elected fiscal responsibility would be restored.  The era of high spending would end.

The Republicans were spurred on by the newest and most vocal element of their constituency, the Tea Party.  At scores of rallies held throughout America big government spenders were told that their days were numbered.  Tea Party members were, in the words of Peter Finch in the great seventies' hit film "Network", "mad as hell and were not going to take it anymore."

Two major Republican figures from the House of Representatives were asked the same question.  They were Tea Party favorites Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and forthcoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia.

Barack Obama has cited his current tax bill as an example that Democrats and Republicans can work together.

Of course they can.  This type of deal making was always available.  The current tax proposal is capitulation being packaged as compromise.  Republicans are always delighted to see capitulation.  

Only a Barack Obama would have the gall to stand before America and proclaim that outright surrender constitutes a grand triumph of the American political system.

Take your bow, Mr. Obama.  The top 1 percent of Americans possess better than 90 percent of the nation's assets.  More Americans are working longer hours for less pay.  When was the last time that the minimum wage was increased?  

I just finished calling Congressman Jim McDermott, my representative in Seattle.  I expressed my strong opposition to President Obama's caving in to Republican blackmail in agreeing under the guise of "compromise" to providing an extension to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

Progressives owe a debt of gratitude to Dan Bartlett for expressing the truth even if the intention was to boast about a "victory" that has been a tragic loss to the middle class and poor and a victory for the super privileged of American society.  

Bartlett was chortling over the Republicans having put one over on the Democrats when it came to the initial act whereby such irresponsible cuts would be imposed.  It was not done in a normal fashion through legislation but as an add-on and as such the cuts would thereby expire.

This was but phase one of the strategy.  The intent at that time was for those tax cuts for the top two percent of Americans to be extended.  This is certainly the present intention of Senate and House Republican leadership, spearheaded by Senator Mitch McConnell and Congressman and soon to be Speaker of the House John Boehner.