John Oliver risks jail in Canada for a good cause

Today is election day in Canada where voters have the chance to throw prime minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party out of office. The NDP started out the unusually long campaign (all of 78 days!) favored to win, reaching its high point in late August but then faded steadily and is now in third place. Currently the Liberal Party is in the lead, though it is not clear that it will get enough seats (170) to form the government by itself. The latest polling is here. First results are due around 9:30 tonight.
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Possible motive emerges for the US bombing of the MSF Kunduz hospital

The picture on the bombing On October 3 of the Kunduz hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is becoming clearer and it looks increasingly like the US committed a war crime and is now trying to cover it up. To recapitulate the events, a US AC-130 gunship repeatedly fired upon the main hospital building over a period of 75 minutes, killing 22 people (medical people and patients alike) with some people in the ICU burned in their beds. This was despite the fact that the hospital compound is spread over two football fields and is away from other sites, the MSF hospital is a well known landmark, they had informed the US-led coalition of their GPS coordinates, and that the bombing continued for at least 30 minutes after desperate hospital officials told the US that they were bombing the hospital.
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Was George W. Bush president on 9/11?

The most extraordinary kerfuffle has broken out between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. You may recall that during the second Republican debate, when Trump said that the poor record of George W. Bush helped lead to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and was a reason to be wary of his brother, Jeb Bush made the assertion to loud applause that his brother had ‘kept us safe’.
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Bill Maher tries to undemonize socialism

Maher is a supporter of Bernie Sanders and he had him on his show to try and make the word socialism not be so scary to many people. It actually was a good discussion that got into some real details about what Sanders means by socialism, something that has been discussed in the comments on this blog. I liked the fact that towards the end Sanders emphasizes that Democrats should not write off the large numbers of working class people all over the country who traditionally vote Republican but actually support his policies.
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Trying to reclaim their reputations

Politics is full of characters who don’t do the right thing when they are in office but become righteous after they leave. For example, when he was Attorney General, Eric Holder and president Obama refused to prosecute those people who were responsible for torture and stonewalled any attempts to shed light on them. He was also terrible when it came to prosecuting the top executives at the big banks. Dan Froomkin says that Holder is now calling for the release of documents about the torture program.
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Paul Ryan gets Playboy’d

As the Republican party flails around trying to find someone willing to be elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Jessica Williams explains that the process by which Paul Ryan went rapidly from being a right wing extremist darling to being seen as suspiciously liberal is similar to what happened with Playboy magazine, because extreme right wing politics and hardcore pornography have a lot in common.
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Whistleblower reveals information on drone killings that contradict US claims

The Intercept has come up with a blockbuster report about the US drone killing program that demonstrates the many lies used by the government to justify its killings. The series of articles by Jeremy Scahill, Cora Currier, Josh Begley, Ryan Devereaux, Ryan Gallagher, and Nick Turse are based on secret documents released by an internal whistleblower who, like Edward Snowden, felt that what the US government was doing was wrong and that the public needed to know what was being done in its name.
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What the post-debate debate on the debate teaches us

There has been an intriguing post-debate debate on who ‘won’ the Democratic debate. I commented before that the professional pundits in the media seem to be overwhelmingly of the opinion that Hillary Clinton won while my opinion of it was that Bernie Sanders did much better. Of course, all these are just subjective opinions and colored by one’s own preferences. Since I am a Sanders supporter and a Clinton skeptic, my views have a high probability of being skewed.
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The issue of migrants and refugees

The issue of migrants has dominated the news recently, both in terms of US domestic policies in the Republican primaries and in Europe where people are taking desperate measures to flee horrendous conditions in their effort to find a more peaceful life. The media uses scary language to create a sense of foreboding among people that these migrants are going to destroy their way of life.
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