The US’s obsession with death and killing and guns

The flip side of the US’s obsession with preserving the death penalty despite all its well-documented horrors is its obsession with the idea that the more that people carry powerful guns everywhere all the time, the safer they will be. Coupled with expanded ‘stand your ground’ and ‘castle doctrine’ legislation that enables people make much broader claims of self-defense, this has even led people to set traps for burglars, tempting them to enter their homes so that they could kill them.
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Jon Oliver interviews Keith Alexander

In order to try and build up buzz for the new show, HBO has out the entire first episode of Jon Olver’s new show Last Week Tonight on YouTube that you can see here. It seems to be similar to The Daily Show in style. To his credit, Oliver covered the Indian election currently going on, something ignored by much American media, and he excoriated them for it. He also covered the POM Wonderful v. Coca-Cola Supreme Court case in which there are no good guys.
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Parody of Matrix Reloaded

As long-time readers know, I am a sucker for parodies and if there was one set of films that were just begging to be mocked in that way, it has to be the Matrix series. I saw only the first one and while the special effects were fun, the story made little sense and its earnest attempts at philosophizing were so risible that I decided not to see anymore. I tend to avoid sequels anyway.
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Goodbye ‘Stephen Colbert’, hello Stephen Colbert

With the announcement that Stephen Colbert will leave his current show and replace David Letterman as the host of CBS’s The Late Show, there has been speculation of what he will do in his new venue and what Comedy Central will place in his time slot. Of course, Colbert going on broadcast TV, the supposedly mainstream entertainment channels, has made his right-wing enemies apoplectic as a further sign of traditional values being destroyed, with Rush Limbaugh fuming that “CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America. No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values, conservatism. Now it’s just wide out in the open.”
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Don’t show emotions if you are a woman politician

The Daily Show uses the absurd fuss over the news of the future birth of Hillary Clinton’s grandchild to examine how differently the media scrutinize male and female politicians. Although the clips are funny, it is not really a laughing matter. Talking of laughing matters, do people recall the time when she was running for president in 2007 and there was a period of intense focus on the way she laughed and whether it was an unbecoming cackle? It was ludicrous.
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