The senate in Argentina recently voted to not allow abortions in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy and the Catholic church was instrumental in achieving that outcome.
The Catholic Church lobbied aggressively against the legalized abortion bill. Every year, about 500,000 illegal and unsafe abortions take place in the country, and since the abortion rights vote, at least one woman has died from an attempt to perform an abortion on herself.
Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh used to be constantly in the news because of the extreme views he expressed. His radio show is still on the air daily, as far as I know, but we rarely hear about him. The same goes for other conservatives like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin who used their ability to take extreme stands and shock people to gain publicity for themselves.
I do not miss them at all but am curious as to why they have become largely marginal figures. It could be due to the operation of a media version of Gresham’s law that “bad money drives out good”. Alex Jones and Donald Trump have cranked up the outrageousness to 11 and thus hogged all the media attention and effectively muffled the voices of others in the marketplace of conservative extremism.
I am sure that there are still ‘dittoheads’ (what Limbaugh fans are called) out there who listen faithfully to his show. But he himself does not seem to be able to gain much attention from outside that world.
Most of us believe that money plays a huge negative role in American politics. Wealthy individuals, organizations, and lobbying groups give huge sums to politicians and those politicians then act in ways that benefit their donors either directly or indirectly. Of course, both parties vehemently deny that there is a quid pro quo, arguing that donors merely contribute to those elected officials and candidates who already agree with them. Some studies have seemed to provide support for this position.
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That the prison industry in the US is abusive towards its inmates is well known. What is perhaps not so well known is how it takes advantage of their captivity to squeeze even more money out of them and their families. As Victoria Law writes, one way they do that is by demanding that families can only communicate with inmates through private companies that have been granted monopoly rights to provide this service at exorbitant rates. Since both prisoners and their families are desperate to keep in touch with each other, they are ripe for exploitation. One of the worst companies is called JPay.
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No one could ever figure out what Omarosa Manigault Newman’s job was as an aide to Donald trump. The only thing we heard about was that she spent a lot of time planning an elaborate wedding for herself using the White House as a background. But now it is becoming clear that she spent a lot of time talking to people and, according to her, secretly recording the conversations.
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Lost in the primary news from last week was one item. You may recall me writing about Arthur Jones, described as “an outspoken Holocaust denier, activist anti-Semite and white supremacist”, who is now the Republican nominee for a US Congressional seat in Illinois. He ran unopposed in a district that is strongly Democratic and the Republican party did not think it worthwhile to run someone against him in the primary, since the winner was likely to lose in the general election anyway.
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You may recall the horrific killing by Israel in 2014 of four young children playing on a beach in Gaza. Robert Mackey writes that a confidential report reveals that these children were murdered using drones operated remotely.
Testimony from the officers involved in the attack, which has been concealed from the public until now, confirms for the first time that the children — four cousins ages 10 and 11 — were pursued and killed by drone operators who somehow mistook them, in broad daylight, for Hamas militants.
The testimony raises new questions about whether the attack, which unfolded in front of dozens of journalists and triggered global outrage, was carried out with reckless disregard for civilian life and without proper authorization. After killing the first boy, the drone operators told investigators, they had sought clarification from their superiors as to how far along the beach, used by civilians, they could pursue the fleeing survivors. Less than a minute later, as the boys ran for their lives, the drone operators decided to launch a second missile, killing three more children, despite never getting an answer to their question.
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I was traveling to attend a wedding over weekend and so did not get to follow the news but was gratified upon my return to read that the much-promoted Unite the Right 2 rally that was supposed to be a show of force of the white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and fascists in front of the White House where they now think they have a friend turned out to be a total bust, with the number of counter-protestors utterly dwarfing the few people who turned up for the rally under heavy police protection.
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Cory Doctorow has a good essay where he critiques the recent alarms sounded by conservatives (triggered by the banning of Alex Jones and his Infowars from some social media platforms) that the left is dominating the digital media world. These conservatives are arguing that America always used to be a country where people would ‘fight to the death’ to defend the right of those with opposing views to express themselves, and that that ethos is now disappearing. Doctorow says that this rosy view of the past is rubbish.
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The latest gossip about the shenanigans in the White House comes via a new book written by former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman. In it she claims that her former boss Donald Trump is a racist, misogynist, and bigot. Is anyone really surprised by this?
Donald Trump is a “racist” who has used the “N-word” repeatedly, Omarosa Manigault Newman, once the most prominent African American in the White House, claims in a searing memoir.
…She also claims that she personally witnessed Trump use racial epithets about the White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s husband George Conway, who is half Filipino. “Would you look at this George Conway article?” she quotes the president as saying. “F**ing FLIP! Disloyal! Fucking Goo-goo.”
Both flip and goo-goo are terms of racial abuse for Filipinos.
…In another damning passage, she describes his “broken outlook” and how “the bricks in his racist wall kept getting higher”, wondering if he did “want to start a race war”. She adds: “The only other explanation was that his mental state was so deteriorated that the filter between the worst impulses of his mind and his mouth were completely gone.”