He received a sustained and enthusiastic response from the audience and then he and Colbert had an extremely substantive discussion about important issues and how so many of the ideas that he pushed that were considered fringe are now part of the mainstream conversation. You can easily see that Sanders, as a lifelong socialist, has held these views for a long time and is not just pushing them for short-term political gain.
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Alex Fields Jr. was the 21-year old man from Ohio who went to the neo-Nazi ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville last year and was the driver of the car that drove through a crowd of protestors against the rally, killing 32-year old Heather Heyer and injuring numerous others. At his trial, he pleaded that he had feared for his life and was trying to escape and that there was no deliberate attempt to harm anyone. Today a jury took less than a day of deliberations to find him guilty of murder.
He faces 20 years to life in prison and will be sentenced at a later date.
The jury at Charlottesville City Circuit Court, which deliberated for less than a day, found him guilty on all the charges including murder; five counts of aggravated malicious wounding; three counts of malicious wounding and one count of hit and run.
Fields, from Ohio, also faces 30 other federal charges relating to hate crimes to which he has pleaded not guilty.
The weeklong orgy of official lamentation over the death of former president George H. W. Bush, including the mystifying tradition of declaring a federal holiday, is finally over. It has served its purpose of such events, to scrub away all the misdeeds that the president committed and leave everyone with the impression that things were so much better in the past when presidents were decent and honorable people and all the awful acts by the current president are just an aberration that we must endure until he leaves office and the dignity of the office is restored by a new person.
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Comedian Kevin Hart was tapped to host the 2019 Academy Awards and then it was discovered that he had made homophobic tweets about a decade ago. When asked about them he said that all that was in the past and that people should not be held accountable for what they said a long time ago and that he has grown since then. He refused to apologize for them. But that did not end the controversy and the Academy asked him to apologize or that he would be replaced. He still refused to apologize but then issued a statement saying that he was withdrawing from the event and also issued an apology of a sort.
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The idea that December is now a general season of celebration for everyone has taken hold, aided by the addition of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa to the mix. The commercialization of Christmas, with retailers seeking to draw everyone in to the gift-giving frenzy whatever their religious beliefs further cements that idea, and you can be sure that ‘Happy Holidays’ and ‘Season’s Greetings’ will remain in stores despite all the efforts of the Christian warriors, aided by that extremely religious person Donald Trump, to force people to only say ‘Merry Christmas’, though that too has been largely drained of any religious sentiment.
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I wrote last month about how, as a result of gerrymandering, the representation of Republicans in the state and federal legislatures far exceeds what they should be entitled to by the proportion of votes they got, with 49.2% of the votes netting them 62.1% of the seats in the state legislature. I wrote that Ohio could be called the gerrymandering capital of the US but it looks like Wisconsin can give it a good run for the money.
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When in 1998 an organization called the Friends of Benjamin Franklin House decided to restore the house that Franklin had occupied while he was the American ambassador to England, workers discovered a trove of about 1200 human bones buried in the basement.
Initial reports said the bones were from the remains of more than 15 bodies — six of them children. Some of the bodies were dismembered, or with trepanned skulls (skulls with holes drilled through them).
The bones were dated to be just over 200 years old, which would mean they were buried around the same time Franklin lived in the house. So where did the bones come from? Did Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, kill people and hide their remains in his London basement or could there be another answer to this creepy story?
One of the goals of the Israel lobby in the US is to make sure that the ‘two-state’ solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict remain the only option that is discussed, even though the expansionist settler policies of successive Israeli governments has made that option dead. The only possibility now is a single state and the debate really should be about what form that state should take, whether it be a democratic state in which Israelis and Palestinians everywhere in Israel and the Occupied Territories and Gaze have equal rights, or a formalized theocratic Apartheid state to replace the informal Apartheid state that currently exists.
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In the last show before he goes on break until 2019, he tackled the topic of the dangerous spread of false information on the internet and how companies like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are conveniently switching between portraying themselves as publishers and platform providers to escape responsibility for not doing much to stop it.
An Australian journalist was asked to leave the premises of the parliament because because her outfit was too revealing in that “you can allegedly see too much skin”. I naturally had to click on the article to see what scandalous clothing had prompted this decision. See-through blouse? Plunging neckline? Very short skirt? Here is a photograph of Patricia Karvelas in her offending outfit.
