Fidel Castro forbade any memorials to him

I have strong dislike for the practice of naming buildings and creating monuments in honor of politicians, especially when these things are done soon after their deaths. The most contemptible are those who have these things done while they are still alive and even attend the opening ceremonies. The US seems to be particularly prone to this practice. At one time I thought that every public building in the Washington, DC would be named after Ronald Reagan who has been elevated by Republicans to the level of sainthood.
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Ignore the squirrels released by Donald Trump

I remarked during the debates about how easy it was for Hillary Clinton to have Donald Trump chase after the squirrels she released to deflect from her own problems. But it seems like Trump has learned the value of squirrels and is now using them whenever he needs to distract the media from focusing on anything embarrassing. And now it is the media that is chasing after the squirrels released by Trump, usually in the form of absurd tweets.
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The Israel lobby’s campaign against Keith Ellison and progressive campus student groups

You would think that the recent debacle of the elections would persuade Democrats that they need new leadership that would be more attuned to the needs of ordinary voters than the neoliberal elites that they usually cater to. But it seems like they are determined to stick with their old path. The have re-elected Nancy Pelosi to be minority leader again and it seems like Charles Schumer is going to be the head of their senate minority.
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Bogus religious liberty claims

Ever since the US Supreme Court ruled that state laws banning marriages were unconstitutional, opponents have shifted their tactics. We have seen the emergence of evangelical Christian claims that they need to protect ‘religious liberty’ and this tactic is being used as a wedge to allow religious people to freely discriminate against those of whom they disapprove, which usually means the LGBT community and those in same-sex marriages.
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How undocumented students go to college

In the heated debate about mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, some anti-immigrant groups are demanding that they not be given any services at all, including education. Some student groups in colleges are calling for them to be made ‘sanctuary colleges’, similar to proposed ‘sanctuary cities’, that will protect such students from being thrown out of the country.
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The perils of shopping for cheese while black

There is a weird story coming out of Virginia where two young black men went to a CVS store to buy some cheese and suddenly found that all the store employees had disappeared, as if they had been abducted by aliens or been raptured. They looked everywhere for them and finally the police arrived to join in the search to find that the employees had locked themselves in a back room out of fear.
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Nelson Mandela and the US media

After I watched and linked to the clip of Nelson Mandela giving Kenneth Adelman and Ted Koppel their comeuppance at an event in City College, New York during Mandela’s first visit to the US after being released from prison, I became interested in seeing more of that event and found these two clips of it. The clips are illustrative of how the US media serves the US establishment. It was more of an ambush than a town hall but Mandela turned the tables on Koppel.
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Review: Looking for Fidel (2004) and Castro and black America

Cuba is going through nine days of mourning for the death of its long time leader Fidel Castro, whose ashes will be taken around the country before being laid to rest in the same cemetery as Jose Marti, the freedom fighter who is revered through Latin America. Castro is viewed with great admiration throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia and you can be sure that his funeral will be attended by a huge number of national leaders. Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau issued a warm statement of condolences, recalling that his father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, was a friend of Fidel’s.
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