Hillary Clinton finally clinched the Democratic party nomination with convincing wins in delegate-rich California and New Jersey, and narrow wins in New Mexico and South Dakota. Bernie Sanders won in Montana and North Dakota. Clinton now has the majority of elected delegates, total delegates, and votes and can rightfully claim the title of presumptive nominee.
[Read more…]
She looks back at how we got to this point in the Republican race where the media with its Trump-obsession helped give him $3 billion worth of free advertising and forced nearly all his former rivals to eat their words and support him. (She does not mention that Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush have not as yet capitulated to Trump.)
[Read more…]
Today is the day when the final six states (California, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota, and New Mexico) have their primaries. The District of Columbia (not a state, for the benefit of non-US readers) has its primary next week and that will be the final primary. There are a total of 694 pledged delegates to be elected today. Of the 4,051 total delegates that are elected in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton so far has 1,812 and Bernie Sanders 1,521, so Clinton needs just 214 today to put her over the top in terms of elected delegates.
[Read more…]
On his show Last Week Tonight focused his attention on the dubious business of debt collection in which people’s debts to some institution are sold cheaply by that institution to agencies that then try and strong-arm people into paying them back, even if the debts have expired. Oliver shows how easy it is to set up a company that can purchase the debts of people.
[Read more…]
The belief that “if you built it they will come” has not worked for the modern Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport (HRI) airport that was built by the Sri Lankan government in the southern part of the island at a cost of over $200 million that has just one daily flight and one weekly one. This article explains what happened.
[Read more…]
I expressed concern yesterday over the violence between political partisans that seem to be becoming a routine feature of this election. This is not a healthy sign. It is interesting how politics in US are a delayed mirroring of what I was used to in Sri Lanka. There too violence at political rallies was not uncommon. Another ugly feature there were the attempts by politicians to impugn the integrity of judges and even retaliate against them or threaten them and thus undermine their credibility or intimidate them whenever they ruled against the government in power.
[Read more…]
Cory Doctorow says that in China there is a group called the Chengguan that is an urban management police squad that is “charged with enforcing petty regulations and notorious for their violent tactics, which include beating a watermelon seller to death with his own weights.”
[Read more…]
This description of what happened at a Donald Trump rally in San Jose yesterday that was attacked by protestors is really disturbing.
[Read more…]
As Donald Trump tries to get the Republican party to unify around him, there has been some shifting around among the members of the various sectors within the right-wing party, such as the elected officials, the media, and the influence shapers. One is seeing the first two sectors falling into line behind Trump as they see it in their best interests to not defy the party nominee.
[Read more…]
We have seen that no one in the US government ever faces serious punishments for the torture, death, and destruction of innocent people in the many countries with which we are at war, except for those who reveal the truth about such events, as was the case with the punishment meted out to Chelsea Manning for her release of the Collateral Murder video.
[Read more…]