There is a well-known idea proposed by psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross that people pass though five stages of grief when they are given a diagnosis of a terminal illness: (1) Denial (2) Anger (3) Bargaining (4) Depression (5) Acceptance. Some have expanded this to seven stages, adding Shock/Disbelief and Guilt: (1) Shock or Disbelief (2) Denial (3) Anger (4) Bargaining (5) Guilt (6) Depression (7) Acceptance and Hope.
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[This post has been updated as new information comes in.]

And so we have another mass shooting less than a week after the last one. This time 14 people were murdered and 17 wounded in a matter of minutes because people were able to easily and legally obtain the kinds of lethal weaponry that combat troops use. And as usual, those opposed to any kind of reasonable checks on the ability to obtain such weapons have tried to find ways to not address this glaring problem.
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While the brutal murders at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado has focused attention on the most extreme forms of violence that is being aimed at women’s health clinics, we should not forget that abortion providers and their patients and clients are the victims of daily, ongoing, routine threats and harassment.
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Human Rights Watch, a major human rights group in the US, has issued a report detailing all the abuses committed by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others and calling for them to be prosecuted.

It is now well established that following the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operated a global, state-sanctioned program in which it abducted scores of people throughout the world, held them in secret detention—sometimes for years—or “rendered” them to various countries, and tortured or otherwise ill-treated them. While the program officially ended in 2009, the cover-up of these crimes appears to be ongoing.

Many detainees were held by the CIA in pitch-dark windowless cells, chained to walls, naked or diapered, for weeks or months at a time. The CIA forced them into painful stress positions that made it impossible for them to lie down or sleep for days, to the point where many hallucinated or begged to be killed to end their misery. It used “waterboarding” and similar techniques to cause near suffocation or drowning, crammed detainees naked into tiny boxes, and prevented them from bathing, using toilets, or cutting their hair or nails for months. “We looked like monsters,” one detainee said of his appearance while in CIA custody.
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One of the perennial puzzles that political observers in the US have struggled to understand is how it can be that a political party like the Republicans that is so nakedly supportive of the interests of the plutocracy manages to win so many elections. The Republicans consistently advance policies that are harmful to practically everyone except the very wealthy and yet they currently have majorities in the US Senate, House of Representatives, governorships, and state legislatures.
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If you are asked to name a single concrete issue that is singularly identified with any of the presidential candidates, then on the Democratic side Bernie Sanders’s call for free tuition at public colleges and to expand Medicare to cover everyone stands out. On the Republican side, the only one that comes to mind is Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall along the entire US-Mexico border and round up and forcibly deport every undocumented immigrant in the country That is his signature issue that he harps on over and over again, starting with his speech announcing his candidacy:
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The revelation that the man who shot up the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado killing three and wounding nine made comments about ‘no more baby parts’ has added support to the idea that he was motivated by the furor created by the false allegation that the organization illegally trafficked and profited from the sale of organs from aborted fetuses.
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