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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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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Last night Sanders appeared on the Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show to loud and prolonged applause and they had an extended discussion on the issue of ISIS, climate change, income and wealth inequality, and police brutality.
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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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Is there anything that Ben Carson cannot do? He has already told us of some of his exploits, how he confronted a gunman at a Popeyes restaurant and his attempt to stab a friend (or maybe it was a relative) in his wild youth, though some of his peers from those days seem to recall that he was the same kind of nerdy person then that he is now.
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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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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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Some members of congress are incensed by a story in the Wall Street Journal that said that the USA had monitored the communications of the Israeli government and its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those members of the US Congress that Israeli officials were speaking to during the negotiations between the US and Iran, in order to find out what they knew about the discussions and what they were doing to derail the deal.
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So we now have another standoff with heavily armed men defying the federal government. An earlier one was when Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy felt that he should not pay the fees that all ranchers pay for cattle to graze on federal land. When faced with the threat of arrest, armed men from all over the country arrived to warn law enforcement that they were willing to fight them. That happened in 2014 and Bundy continues to defy the authorities with no action having been taken against him.
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That Hillary Clinton is a warmonger is no secret, much as she tries to hide it. It comes out despite her recent attempts, as she tries to win the Democratic nomination, at downplaying her role in advocating for military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, all of which have turned out to be disastrous. But a speech she gave at an event that occurred last month that did not get much attention shows that her war-loving aspect is not far from the surface.
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