If you visit Sri Lanka, you will find a society that, on the surface at least, is quite modern especially when it comes to the status of women. Women have access to education and occupy high levels of the government and private sectors and there are few restrictions on their movement. Women can and do go about alone, drive, and do pretty much anything that men do. You will see women everywhere, dressed in all manner of styles from the latest western fashions to traditional clothing.
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Michael Grunwald writes that the Republican debates were so off-the-wall that many things that would normally have caused a sensation were completely ignored because of all the attention paid to Donald Trump’s utterances and the sniping by the candidates at each other, and that the only reason he noticed them at all was because he read through the transcripts.
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Politics can be a dirty business and while I am not a fan of either Carly Fiorina or Hillary Clinton, there is no excuse for the gender-based insults that have been directed at them. A day or so ago Fiorina accused an Iowa radio host who acts as a surrogate for Ted Cruz of calling her, as Fiorina said, a ‘V-word’.
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Donald Trump is a strange man, hard to pigeonhole into a simple ideological box.
All of us tend to be more kindly disposed to those who are nice to us and less so to those we think are being unkind. What makes Trump different is that, like in most things, he carries this to extremes. He seems to place great value on what people say to him and about him and as long as those things are complimentary, he responds in kind, sometimes with even effusive praise. But attack him or insult him, and he lashes back angrily. He does not do half-measures.
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Martin Shkreli is the former hedge fund money manager whom everyone loves to hate because his strategy is to buy up the licenses for out-of-patent drugs and immediately hikes their prices. The one that brought him the most infamy was when he abruptly raised the price per pill of the drug Darapim from $13.50 to $700. He was arrested recently by the federal authorities on charges of securities fraud. And there was much cheering in the land because, yea verily, Shkreli is an abominable excuse for a human being.
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After the fiasco of the Muslim student in Texas who was arrested for bringing his clock in to school, we now have the case of a 12-year old Sikh boy again from Texas who was handcuffed, suspended from school, and spent three days in a juvenile detention center because of fears that his backpack that contained a built in battery pack that enables one to recharge a cell phone was really a bomb.
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He joins Rick Perry, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal in realizing that his campaign was going nowhere. Most public figures who abandon a race say they want to spend more time with his families but since he has no partner or children, he probably wants to devote all his time to his favorite pursuits such as creating more fear in this country, sending more troops to fight in all the existing wars that he helped start, and starting new wars.
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I have described Ted Cruz as a flat-out sophist and creepy and it is undoubtedly true that he is unlikable except to his ardent fans. But Carly Fiorina gives Cruz a good run for his money on both deception and unlikability. Her campaign team must have realized this because they have tried to soften her hard, grating image by filming a commercial of her with a whole bunch of dogs
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They had two sketches last night, the first one reminding us once again of the low-level of rhetoric we heard during the Republican debate earlier in the week. The actor who did the Donald Trump impression was pretty good.
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