In a discussion Harris says:
“Given a choice between Noam Chomsky and Ben Carson, in terms of the totality of their understanding of what’s happening now in the world, I’d vote for Ben Carson every time,” Harris stated. “Ben Carson is a dangerously deluded religious imbecile, Ben Carson does not…the fact that he is a candidate for president is a scandal…but at the very least he can be counted on to sort of get this one right. He understands that jihadists are the enemy.”
When people think of violent Islamist groups, the image they have may be of disaffected young people who are the outcasts of society, poor and poorly educated. But a new book titled Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education based on research done by two academics Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog finds a surprisingly large number of engineers among the people labeled as Islamic radicals.
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I think we have to be resigned to two things: (1) Donald Trump will keep raising the stakes on saying crazy things and that many of the other Republican candidates will follow him and even try to outdo him; and (2) his popularity among Republican voters will keep increasing even as the rest of us look on in horror.
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I had been wondering when Michael Moore would come up with another of his zany documentaries and whether he was working on one at all. I was glad to see that he was and that he did it in secret to enable him to employ his usual guerilla filmmaking tactics more effectively. It is going to be out soon. In this one, Moore ‘invades’ Europe to see how those countries differ from the US and to seize all their good ideas, rather than invade countries for their oil.
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Readers will have noted that I am an admirer of Matt Taibbi’s writings, quoting extensively from his articles because I see him as an accurate observer of the American political scene with a witty style. I also cannot stand New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and am baffled by the admiration he seems to generate with his vacuous pieties. I first came across Taibbi a long time ago when he was writing for a regional paper because of his hilarious and brutal takedown of Friedman’s inanities. Taibbi and Friedman seemed to be made for each other. (See here, here, and here.)
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Jeb! Bush’s plan to prevent terrorists sneaking into the US by hiding among the refugees fleeing from the chaos in that region is to allow only Christian refugees. When asked how he could distinguish who was a Christian he replied vaguely that it should be easy for them to prove it. And he is right, as this cartoon shows.
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We are now well into full-blown anti-Muslim hysteria with every right-wing politician trying to outdo each other as to who can come up with the most outrageous suggestion. No suggestion is too bonkers if it has as its basis the idea that all Muslims and immigrants of color, however benign they may seem on the surface, are people who might well have a desire to slit your throat in the night.
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There are those in the US who want to privilege Christianity in American public life by demanding the right to have prayers and Bible readings in schools and at public governmental functions, and by erecting Christian religious symbols and monuments such as the Ten Commandments tablets and crosses and paintings in public spaces.
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Joshua Holland gives seven reasons why the right-wing backlash against Syrian refugees is so misguided. Meanwhile, Seth Myers, the host of a late night talk show, gave an excellent commentary on the absurd anti-refugee stances taken by mostly Republican governors and presidential candidates following the recent attacks by ISIS.
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Yesterday, Bernie Sanders gave his speech on what he means by calling himself as a Democratic socialist. He identified it squarely with the polices advocated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt following the Great Depression, by Lyndon Johnson as part of his Great Society initiative, and incorporating the vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., thus highlighting that his vision of socialism lies well within the mainstream of American politics.
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