I am not big fan of year-end reviews but I enjoyed this one by British writer and broadcaster Charlie Brooker. He gives us his amusing take on the events of 2015 and the way they were covered by the media, both the serious and the silly. It was interesting to see some items that seemed to have got serious coverage in the UK but not so much in the US, such as the furor over the boorish behavior and subsequent firing of a reality TV show host Jeremy Clarkson and the excessive ceremonial reburial of Richard III. He also had some good stuff about Jeremy Corbyn.
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During the Rose Bowl football game, multiple planes flew over the stadium and wrote the sentences ” AMERICA IS GREAT, TRUMP IS DISGUSTING” and “ANYBODY BUT TRUMP” in the sky. They also spelled out the tagline for an anti-Trump website ANYBODYBUTTRUMP.US. It was quite an impressive feat of skywriting, so neatly was it done.
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As Ben Carson’s campaign sinks in the winter of his discontent, Ted Cruz’s seems to be experiencing an early summer, so much so that he is telling supporters that he thinks that he will have the Republican nominations sewn up by March.
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Yesterday’s news was full of stories about the abrupt resignation of two top staffers from Ben Carson’s presidential campaign that resulted in 20 other members following them out the door. There had been rumblings for a while about dissention within the camp and Carson himself had at one point said that he was considering a shakeup in his team, which seems to have made things worse.
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I’d like extend best wishes for 2016 to all this blog’s readers.

Last year was a disturbing one in terms of American politics. We saw the unleashing of openly xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, militaristic, and anti-poor appeals to the public, and sufficient numbers of them were attracted to those calls that, although they are not the majority, they have created sufficient noise to have significantly influenced that direction of the Republican party primary race.
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As the first actual selection of delegates for the party nominations gets near with the Iowa caucuses on February 1 and the New Hampshire primary on February 9, the various candidates are moving their campaigns into top gear. On the Republican side, what seems to be shaping up are contests within two main subgroups, one claiming the outsider or insurgent mantle and the other the establishment mantle, though given the angry mood of the Republican electorate, even the establishment candidate has to wear at least a partial outsider veneer, to claim that they are not of the establishment even if they come from it.
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That is of course Donald Trump’s slogan though he does not say when he thinks it was great before. Below is a video that takes that slogan and parodies the Trump campaign. That such parodies exist is not surprising. But in this case, it was produced by a conservative Arizona group known as the Public Integrity Alliance that has also targeted other politicians whom they deemed were giving conservatism a bad name.
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Bernie Sanders has said that he could win the backing of Donald Trump supporters.

Sanders told CBS’s Face the Nation that many of Trump’s supporters have legitimate fears stemming from income inequality that Sanders is best positioned to address.

“What Trump has done with some success is taken that anger, taken those fears, which are legitimate, and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims,” Sanders said.

“In my view, that is the not way we are going to address the problems facing this country,” he said.

Instead, Sanders supports a platform of bringing citizens together to push Congress to pass laws that address income inequality. He said that many of Trump supporters are “working class people and they are angry” because they are losing their jobs to overseas firms, cannot afford to send their children to college and are working longer hours for lower ages.

Sanders also sent out a release on Sunday saying that Trump is “getting nervous” about working families getting a better understanding of his policies.

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Almost exactly seven years ago, just after the 2008 election when Barack Obama surprised the nation and the word by becoming president, I wrote a series of posts that looked at the possible future of the Republican party. I felt that the party was at a watershed moment with a loss hastened by the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. I said then that there were four groups vying for control of the Republican party.
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