… elections were held for local offices and the Conservatives took a major shellacking, losing 1,269 seats leaving them currently holding 3,559. Labour lost too but just 63 seats, leaving them with 2,020, but they must be disappointed that the disgruntled Conservative voters did not switch to them. The big winners were the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and assorted others who gained 676, 185, and 285 seats respectively. This is a resurrection of sorts for the Liberal Democrats, who had been given up for dead after being thoroughly repudiated in the last national elections following their disastrous coalition with David Cameron’s Conservative party.
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Tim Dickinson and Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone have done a deep dive into the infighting within the NRA that resulted in the ouster of Oliver North as president and the multiple investigations and lawsuits now underway. At bottom is the familiar story of top executives (such as CEO Wayne LaPierre), contractors (such as its public relations firm Ackerman McQueen and outside counsel William Brewer), and board members (such as president Oliver North) of a big tax-exempt organization abusing their tax-exempt status by living high off the hog at the expense of their members and taxpayers.
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I have written before about how Ohio congressional districts are so gerrymandered that election after election sees 12 Republicans and 4 Democrats being sent to Congress even though the popular vote is much closer to a 50-50 split. In the statehouse, Republicans won 62% of the seats while getting slightly fewer votes than Democrats

In a major victory today, a three-judge panel of federal judges unanimously ruled that the Ohio congressional map was unconstitutional because of blatant gerrymandering and had to be redrawn by June 14.
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Abigail Disney, the great niece of the famous animator Walt Disney, has added her voice to those who criticize the excessive salaries paid to the CEOs of companies, including Disney CEO Bob Iger. His salary is 1,424 times the median salary of a Disney employee. It is interesting that she too uses the term ‘neoliberal’ as a pejorative, something that I wholeheartedly endorse.
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Addictions are frighteningly easy to acquire and tremendously difficult to get rid of. While no single treatment method works for everyone, the punitive approaches of harsh penalties such as prison time for possession and use of drugs for what essentially has become an illness seems misguided. But in the US, the heavy hand of the private profit-seeking pharmaceutical sector that benefits from creating drug addicts and the private prison system that benefits from incarcerating large numbers of people prevent more enlightened and humane methods from being widely used.
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It is quite extraordinary how on the one hand the US political-media class in the US is outraged, absolutely outraged, by alleged Russian attempts to sway US elections while at the same time they are openly calling for a military coup in Venezuela to overthrow president Nicholas Maduro and install Juan Guaidó as president. This is not the first time that the US has done it. The US expressed great joy when Hugo Chavez seemed to have been ousted only to end up with egg on its face when he beat back the coup.
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The Indian general elections began on April 11 and will continue until May 19, with the results to be announced on May 23. It is an important election that will show how much support current prime minister Narendra Modi and his ruling BJP party have for their right-wing, Hindu nationalist agenda. But in this post, I want to focus on the impressive way that Indian elections are conducted. It is a mammoth undertaking since 900 million people are eligible to vote for 2,354 registered political parties and the law requires that every voter should not have to travel more that 2 km (1.24 miles) to cast their ballot. This means that election officials have to lug some of the 2.3 million electronic voting machines to the remotest parts of the country. They have to take one machine up to a height of 15,256 feet and travel 35 km with another just to get to a single resident, the temple priest in the Gir National Forest in Gujarat.
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I am not naïve. I know that politics is a dirty business and that people will do unsavory things to help their chosen candidate win. But there are some things that so sicken me that I feel the urge to say the hell with it and go and become a hermit just to avoid reading about it.

One such case is the attempt by two Republicans to recruit gay Republicans to allege that Democratic contender Pete Buttigieg had sexually assaulted them. Fortunately that plot was exposed by Hunter Kelly, the person who was being used for the purpose
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