Fun times in West Virginia

The state of West Virginia has as its slogan ‘Wild, Wonderful, West Virginia’. Tomorrow will see a primary race for the US senate where the ‘wild’ part is clearly on display. The Republicans will choose a candidate to run against the Democratic incumbent Joe Manchin. One of the people vying is Don Blankenship, the CEO of a coal mine that collapsed in 2010 killing 29 workers. He was convicted for negligence and served a year in prison and was released last May. He now wears that as a badge of honor. No, really. He says that he was framed by (of course) Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
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Great moments in evangelical hypocrisy

One of the amusing things to observe is how so many leading lights in the evangelical Christian movement have abandoned all pretense of upholding moral standards in their efforts to defend their support of Donald Trump. That support was always highly hypocritical even at the best of times, excusing vicious assaults on the poor and the LGBT community and other marginalized groups as long as the politician opposed abortion and spouted pieties about their god and family values. But now even that fig leaf is gone and they have been revealed to be absolutely shameless in their abandonment of even the rhetoric of morality.
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Film review: The Young Karl Marx (2017)

Today marks the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth (1818-1883). I recently watched this film that covers the period when the young Marx became friends with Friedrich Engels, a relationship that lasted a lifetime. It deals with the period from 1843-1849, a time as Marx, his wife Jenny, and his young daughter moved from Paris to Brussels before ending up in London. The film ends with Marx and Engels publishing the Communist Manifesto.
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Why is Giuliani still around?

Rudy Giuliani happened to be mayor of New York when the attacks of 9/11 happened and that put him at the center of events and he has since milked his fame to the last drop, speaking of that event whenever he gets the chance. I was never impressed with him, seeing him as someone who was not very smart, a loudmouth who just blusters and attacks the weaker elements of society. So it baffled me that Donald Trump would hire him as his personal lawyer at a critical time.
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The lies of the Customs and Border Protection agency

The Customs and Border Protection is an agency whose members were ardent supporters of Donald Trump in the last election. So it should be no surprise that it too plays fast and loose with the facts to advance Trump’s and their agenda by trying to portray undocumented immigrants in the worst possible light in order to deflect attention from their harsh treatment of them. Debbie Nathan exposes the latest CBP attempt to further the Trump agenda of hyping hatred against undocumented immigrants by inflating statistics about the number of border patrol agents assaulted by them.
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Hitler’s American inspiration

There have been a huge number of books devoted to Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazis, trying to understand what drove his thinking and how he was able to win the allegiance of the nation in his monstrous plans and almost succeed. In the April 30, 2018 issue of The New Yorker Alex Ross reviews a series of books and focuses on the American sources of inspiration that Hitler drew upon to justify his policies and to believe that the world would overlook his actions. In particular he felt that American racism, with its extermination of Native Americans, subjugation of the black population, and exclusion of non-white immigrants, was pursuing the same policies of trying to create racial purity that he sought to implement. Furthermore, he was impressed with American insouciance, the ability to practice utterly racist policies while acting like it was a deeply religious nation and a beacon of freedom and equality. He felt that he too could ride out any opprobrium by simply asserting that what he was doing was actually virtuous.
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