In the latest investigative segment on his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looks at how poorly the credit reporting agencies function, despite their immense impact on people’s lives.
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The sordid details have emerged about why Dennis Hastert the former speaker of the House of Representatives agreed to pay $3.5 million to someone. It turns out that he had molested students while he was a high school wrestling coach before he went into politics and that this was hush money when they threatened to reveal it.
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Most of you would have seen images of the front page of the Boston Globe newspaper yesterday suggesting what it might look like a year from now in the event that Donald Trump becomes president. You can see it here. It is accompanied by a scathing editorial titled The GOP must stop Trump.
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This is an excellent documentary that deals with a complicated and troubled period in American history and the role in it of an organization that is still shrouded in controversy. The documentary covers the six-year period from 1967 to 1973 that saw the rise and fall of the original Black Panthers. It uses archival footage, mixed with current interviews of former members who look back on those events and provide perspective.
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Bernie Sanders had difficult moment yesterday at the end of a town hall event at the landmark Apollo Theater in Harlem, when a questioner raised some ugly stereotypes about Jews. I thought Sanders handled it as best as he could by addressing the Israel-Palestinian question. The crowd became pretty raucous, largely in support of Sanders and against the questioner. You can see Harry Belafonte sitting on the stage.
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Ted Cruz’s campaign to win the New York primary resulted in him visiting New York City and it got off to a rocky start. The Daily Show has fun with it.
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The former head of the CIA is making the rounds plugging his book. He was interviewed by Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera news and it was a refreshingly hard-hitting interview where Hasan pressed him on the issue of whether waterboarding was torture. The whole 15-minute interview is good but the key point to listen to is the part beginning at around 5:00 minute mark where Hayden tries to defend the abominable practice of ‘rectal feeding’ of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Then at about the 6:00 mark, Hayden suggests that waterboarding when done by the US is not torture but if done by (say) Syria it would be.
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A few weeks ago, I posed the question of whether when he entered the race last June, Donald Trump really expected his campaign for the Republican nomination to take off and become so viable or whether he did it mainly for a brief moment of publicity. Since then there have been two reports that provide support for both possibilities.
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One of the interesting things about the increased acceptance of gays and lesbians has been the fact that as more of them have come out, people have been startled to discover that many of the people around them, their friends and relatives and co-workers, are gays and lesbians. Having known them for so long with no problems, it becomes harder to maintain their prejudices that they are different in any way other than in their sexual orientation, which has no impact on anyone else.
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The Panama Papers has led to the resignation of the country’s prime minister but the government itself has refused to dissolve parliament and call for new elections, choosing instead to name a new prime minister from among their ranks. This is because the most popular party right now is the Pirate Party that has the support of 43% of the public, although it only has three seats in the current parliament. The two parties that make up the current government only get 29.5%.
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