The F-35 boondoggle

Nowhere is the power of business to drive US government actions more glaringly obvious than the way that taxpayer money gets spent on weapons systems that are not needed and sometimes don’t even work. The defense industry has long ago figured out that if you spread out production facilities around the country and especially in places where key politicians are from, you can be pretty confident that the system will never be eliminated, even if the military itself does not want it.
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Rewriting history

Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore on The Daily Show have another one of their insightful and entertaining discussions about race in America, this time about the revisionist idea that slavery was not the cause of the southern secession that led to the Civil War and that if that socialist Abraham Lincoln had not been such a hothead and rushed to war but had instead been patient and used capitalistic ideas, the bloodshed could have been avoided.
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The heartland speaks – and it sounds nuts

The individual states are popularly supposed to be the laboratories of US democracy where many ideas can be tried out and the best ones then adopted nationally. The Daily Show takes a look at some of the ideas that being proposed in states that, as we repeatedly told by idiotic politicians, represent the ‘real’ America, without them ever explaining why the rest of America in the big cities and the coasts are any less American.
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Barack Obama – master drone killer

The Daily Show looks at how the US government’s war on language increases along with its desire to break laws and violate the constitution. The latest trial balloon being floated is about how the Obama administration is once again ‘agonizing’ (translation: trying to find the best way to justify to the public) about its desire to summarily kill yet another American.
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Russia is the new paradise for US conservatives

Since today seems to be my day for winter Olympics-related posts, I thought I’d link to The Daily Show’s Jason Jones who has been in Russia during the games and discovers that the country that US conservatives used to hate for being the main component of the ‘evil empire’ now seems to have adopted all the attributes that US conservatives want to see in the US. They would feel right at home there.
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Will Farrell, figure-skater

His feelings hurt at being snubbed by the US Olympic figure-skating hierarchy and not given a chance to make the team (they did not even tell him when the trials were taking place) and suspecting that time is running out for him to get a medal since he will be 50 by the 2018 Olympics, Will Ferrell goes on late night TV to show the world the routine he was planning to perform if he had been at Sochi, complete with the costume. It looks to me like he coulda been a contender.
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