Chris Hall has an excellent article on how the atheism movement has moved away from an almost exclusive focus on proudly declaring nonbelief and on debunking religion and superstitions and is now addressing social justice issues in a much more conscious way.
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I have long railed at how professional sports teams essentially blackmail cities, using the threat of moving teams to another city, into using taxpayer money to build fancy new stadiums while the wealthy team owners benefit from the profits.
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In theory, whistleblowers in the US who expose government wrongdoing are supposed to have legal protection as long as they go through the proper channels. This was the claim made by those who condemned Edward Snowden as a traitor or spy or stooge for not using those channels and instead deciding to leak documents to carefully chosen journalists. Those condemning Snowden included almost the entire political, military, and media establishments.
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The recent death of Morley Safer, veteran correspondent for the CBS news magazine program 60 Minutes, has led to an outpouring of tributes such as this one. Long before he became the genial avuncular reporter of human-interest stories that viewers were familiar with, Safer made his name for his hard-hitting reporting from Vietnam where, rather than depend on the sanitized and dishonest press briefings given by the US military, he and a few others went out with the troops and reported on the horrors being committed by the US military on hapless innocent Vietnamese villagers in angry retaliation for attacks on the US forces by the Viet Cong, something that came as a shock to American TV viewers who like to think of their military as always acting righteously and wholly on the side of angels.
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Saturday Night Live previews what Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders might talk about when and if they get together to have a beer and discuss their plans.
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The number of calls for the chair of the Democratic National Committee Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign has been steadily increasing. The impetus has come from the way that, rather than being scrupulously neutral in the Democratic primary contests, she has been perceived as stacking the deck in favor of her preferred candidate Hillary Clinton. In addition, she is seen as having aggravated tensions between the Clinton and Bernie Sanders camps rather than smoothing them over.
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The Hillary Clinton backers who are calling on Bernie Sanders to quite the race even as he continues to win primaries seem to have forgotten 2008 when Clinton contested the election all the way to the final California primary. As for the charge that his supporters are too angry, remember the PUMA movement back in 2008? That stood for ‘Party Unity, My Ass!’ and was the name adopted by those Clinton supporters who vowed never to support Barack Obama. Their numbers ranged in the 40%, far higher than the number of Sanders supporters who currently say they won’t vote for Clinton. In the end, those who voted for Clinton in the 2008 primary ended up splitting 83%-16% in favor of Obama over John McCain.
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Lorraine Berry uses the current long lines at airports due to cuts in the staffing of TSA personnel at the security checkpoints as the starting point to argue that there is an inherent contradiction in the SLFC (socially liberal but fiscally conservative) stance that is popular, especially among young people. The problem is that implementing socially liberal policies costs money.
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Samantha Bee interviews a wealthy man who has thrown a ton of money at losing candidates over the various elections cycles and is now kind of depressed about it. Going well back to her stint at The Daily Show, Bee has shown herself to be brilliant at faking empathy when interviewing people whom she is not sympathetic to and she does not disappoint here with this hilarious segment from her show Full Frontal.
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