At a recent luncheon, I got involved in a political discussion where I disagreed with the stance taken by another guest. That person said that what he was advocating was required by capitalist principles, and acted as if that settled it. I told him that I was a socialist and not a capitalist so I did not accept his premises. He seemed shocked and said that since America was a capitalist country, I had no choice but to accept it.
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I have been enjoying the comedy series Veep starring Julia Louis-Dreyfuss that I reviewed earlier. It is one of the many TV shows and films that purport to show what life is like in the executive branch of government, like The West Wing or House of Cards. This naturally raises the question of which program most accurately captures what life is like in that world.
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I have since read some of the reviews of the debates and was surprised to see many of them thinking that Hillary Clinton came out best last night, which was not the impression that I had at all. She was ok and did not make any major blunders but she seemed very equivocal on many issues compared to all the others, except for Webb who was hard to pin down.
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Defying predictions that it might be a snooze fest, last night’s debate between the five Democratic candidates for the party’s nomination turned out to be both lively and substantive. The comparison with the two Republican debates was like night and day. The topics ranged over gun control, climate change, income and wealth inequality, Glass-Steagall and breaking up the banks, immigration, criminal justice reform, and recreational marijuana. You can read the transcript here
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The always-entertaining Matt Taibbi has a new article where he says that Donald Trump is upsetting the business model that Fox News has created and forced them to consider treating the nutty Ben Carson as their candidate. The relationship between Trump and Fox, once so cozy and full of mutual admiration, began to fall apart following the angry exchange between Megyn Kelly and Trump.
“[Fox News Chairman] Roger [Ailes] was not happy,” a Fox source told New York Magazine. “Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump’s side.”
Neither Ailes nor Murdoch are too dense to know what this means. They know they’ve spent a generation building an audience of morons. Their business model depends on morons; morons are the raw materials of their industry, the way Budweiser is in the hops business.
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Today is the day of the first Democratic debate, featuring Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, and Lincoln Chafee. The debate begins at 9:00pm Eastern time and will be streamed live for free by CNN and will likely be mirrored by other sites to prevent the system freezing from overload. (Some sites are saying that the debate begins at 8:30pm.)
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Most ordinary people have worries that deal with their own lives and try to take steps to address them. Some worry on a larger scale such as about crime in general or the state of the economy or health care costs. But as Lynn Parramore says there are yet others who worry on a much larger scale, concerned about “financial breakdown, flesh-melting pandemics, magnetic pole shifts, cyber warfare, and Biblical tsunamis”, nuclear winter, asteroid strikes, zombies taking over, etc. that will cause the entire collapse of global civilization and lead to anarchy at best or planetary destruction at worst.
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Ohio is one of those states that unfortunately still closes schools and government offices on the second Monday in October to celebrate the mass murderer Christopher Columbus and so today is Columbus Day. The state’s capital city is even named after him.
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Now that Ben Carson has managed to draw attention to himself with his remarks about the Oregon shooting and the yet-uncorroborated story of having a gun dug into his ribs at a Popeye’s restaurant, people have started looking more closely at the other things he has said. (Too bad that Carson didn’t have the gun pointed at him at a Burger King instead of a Popeye’s because after all, that is the Home of the Whopper.)
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The head of the Freedom Caucus, one of the nutcase Republican groups in the US House of Representatives that has claimed John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy as victims, has said that they would agree to voting for Paul Ryan for Speaker under certain conditions.
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