The Republican reaction to Obama’s gun control measures

Needless to say, there has been a lot of negative reaction from the Republican party and Fox News to president Obama’s modest proposals to curb gun violence. Part of the reason is that they and others are in thrall of the gun lobby. But part of it is undoubtedly because they simply hate Obama and have gone all out to discredit him and oppose anything that he advocates, unless it benefits the oligarchy. This time they focused their ire and poured scorn on, of all things, the tear that he shed when talking about the deaths of elementary school children in Newtown.
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Donald Trump’s shtick

Donald Trump continues to maintain his large lead nationally and in New Hampshire while trailing Ted Cruz slightly in Iowa. Trump’s sustained success since July, despite all the pundits’ repeated predictions that he would soon fade, has created a minor cottage industry of attempts to understand how he does it. One factor is undoubtedly the massive media coverage he continues to generate even as the major media begin to wonder if they are responsible for his success and have been complicit in creating a monster.
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This revolution is becoming a shambles

The armed group led by the sons of Cliven Bundy that came all the way from Nevada and other distant places and has taken over a remote wildlife refuge in rural Oregon near the small town of Burns in the hopes of starting some kind of uprising against the federal government seem to be running into opposition from the very people whom they claim to be protecting from tyranny, the local population. Those people are fed up.
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Democrats take on the gun lobby

Two days ago, president Obama laid out a new set of orders that he has issued on gun control. Here are the details of the measures. Since Congress is largely the captive of the NRA and refuses to countenance imposing even the slightest restrictions on gun availability, he has decided to implement them using executive orders. Although the measures are modest and reasonable, as could have been predicted, Republicans, the gun lobby, and others who think that there should be no restrictions at all are having a fit and denouncing Obama’s executive orders as more signs of his dictatorial tendencies and the first step in a plan to strip all Americans of their guns.
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Deliberately distorting arguments about the causes of terrorism

Although Tony Blair is mercifully gone from the British parliament, his toxic legacy still remains, both in terms of the mess that he helped create in the Middle East by his enthusiastic and dishonest support of the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq and because many of the Members of Parliament that he brought in still remain and are undermining current leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attempts to forge a more progressive agenda for the Labour Party.
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How influential are evangelical leaders in selecting Republican leaders?

On the surface, it looks like Ted Cruz has cornered the market on endorsements by big name evangelical leaders, edging out Marco Rubio in getting the collective endorsement in early December at a secret meeting of fifty religious conservatives led by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Then after Christmas, about 300 evangelical leaders met at a Texas ranch owned by Farris Wilks, a billionaire who has made his money in fracking, and is supporting Cruz with a Super PAC.
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Over to you Marco, once you’re done playing

As we head into the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses on February 1, if you live in that state expect to see a barrage of ads from each candidate featuring the familiar Republican story that the country is besieged by dangers on all fronts that is threatening the very existence of the republic and only their particular candidate knows what to do to meet the challenge.
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