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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As usual, the Democratic debate was far more substantive and featured a lot less childish back-and-forth than the Republican one. (You can read the transcript here.) They quickly got past the whole data breach snafu that had exploded just the previous day, with Bernie Sanders giving his explanation for what happened and apologizing for what his campaign had done.
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… the Democratic party establishment is clumsily trying to undermine the Sanders campaign.
Today is the day of the third Democratic debate. (It will take place at 8:00pm Eastern Time and will be shown on ABC.) We have spoken about the struggle between the Republican party establishment and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and the difficulty the party has had in advancing the interests of its favorites Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. Less attention has been paid to the fact that the Democratic party establishment has been doing something similar, supporting Hillary Clinton and trying to counter the strong appeal of Bernie Sanders, especially among the young.
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The Republican primary race picture is getting a little clearer. There are really only three players in the game: Donald Trump (the insurgent who represents those who are angry and fed up with pretty much the whole world but are incoherent), Ted Cruz (the religious and anti-party establishment conservative), and Marco Rubio (the neoconservative and backup party establishment conservative), with Jeb Bush as an asterisk.
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The current high-levels of anti-Muslim sentiment in the US have resulted in Muslims being targeted for attacks. The most visible symbols of Islam are of course the mosques and Muslim women who wear black coverings of the face and body or men who pray in groups in the distinctive prostrate position.
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Election observers will long remember the night of the 2012 election when Republican strategist Karl Rove on Fox News went completely off the rails and challenged the results from Ohio. The Republican propaganda TV channel Fox News had called the state for Obama and this pretty much sealed the election and Mitt Romney’s defeat. Rove’s insistence that something must be wrong resulted in the infamous walk by Megyn Kelly through the halls of the studio and down to the room where the statisticians were to ask them whether they were sure of their call, to which they replied that they were 99% sure and refused to budge.
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The Republican debate on Tuesday was once again an awful display of the extremely low level of political discourse that we have descended to. This state of affairs is not funny but the debate itself was laughable and sometimes you have to laugh at such things simply to deal with the unpleasant truth. So here are some comedic reactions.
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One of the ideas that keep getting rediscovered is that if only we applied business principles to government and nonprofits like schools and charities, they would run much better, and the way to do this is to put business people in charge of them. This idea seems to never get old however many times it fails.
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Have you been wondering what Bobby Jindal has been doing since his run for the Republican nomination fizzled out? Me neither. I was about to write that his campaign had gone up in flames but that would be inaccurate since it never even got off the ground and the words ‘fizzled out’ seemed more appropriate. But I came across this editorial from the state’s largest newspaper that shows that as his last days as governor of Louisiana approach, he remains a true jerk.
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