More hospitals bombed, this time in Syria

Another war atrocity has occurred, this time in the Syrian city of Idlib where it appears that a hospital has been bombed, killing at least twelve people. It appears that Russian forces now fighting on behalf of Syrian president Assad are behind this latest attack. Like in Kunduz, Afghanistan the medical director says that it looks like the hospital was directly targeted. This was apparently the third such attack on a hospital since the Russian intervention began.
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Critical time for Jeb Bush

When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker dropped out of the Republican presidential race, he claimed that he was doing it for noble reasons and called for other candidates to follow his lead and also drop out for good of the party so that the party could coalesce around an anti-Trump candidate. Of course, this caused much laughter in the land since he and the rest of this bunch of clowns are only in it for themselves, with the party and the country way down on their list of priorities. So of course no one followed his lead. Now that he and Rick Perry are gone, that leaves 15 still formally in the running, though Jim Gilmore’s poll numbers are so low that he was not invited to even the second-tier debate last time so that leaves just 14.
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Martin O’Malley on The Daily Show

He was pretty good in stating his case for why he should be president. He was clear and articulate in stating his vision for what he wanted to achieve. He is a candidate that I could see myself voting for enthusiastically. His main weakness was that while mayor of Baltimore, he was swept up in the tough-on-crime, lock-up-everyone mentality that was prevalent at the time and which we now realize was far too harsh.
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Let the Republican food fight continue!

The Democratic candidates have generally avoided attacking each other up this point. Even during the debate, they refrained from exploiting too much the media’s perceived weaknesses of each candidate. Not so on the Republican side where the infighting is getting quite nasty. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, after starting out professing their friendship and admiration for one another, have now started attacking each other. Donald Trump said some time ago that their friendship was a façade and that they really hated each other and it turns out that he was right.
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Liberals win Canadian elections on anti-austerity platform

I was following the Canadian election returns last night and it soon became clear that the Liberal party led by Justin Trudeau was on its way to being able to form a government on its own, ending ten years of the awful Stephen Harper conservative government. The Liberals got 184 seats (‘ridings’) in the 338-seat parliament, Conservatives 99, NDP 44, Bloc Quebecois 10, and Greens 1. The vote totals were Liberals 39.5%, Conservatives 31.9%, NDP 19.7%, BQ 4.7%, and Greens 3.5%. Pre-election polls had suggested that the Liberals would not get the necessary 170 seats to form a government on its own.
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Beetle Bailey surprises me

Beetle Bailey is a long running comic strip that began in 1950 about an army base where the soldiers are never actually called upon to fight in any wars. Its title character is a private who is a total slacker and tries to shirk his duties whenever he can. The rest of his troop also consists of misfits who have no interest in fighting and for whom the army seems to be a sinecure. The camp is overseen by an alcoholic general whose main interest is playing golf.
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Chris Hedges on why the surveillance state is a threat

In the October 2015 issue of Z Magazine (paywall) John Malkin interviews veteran journalist Chris Hedges and there is one answer that the latter gave that I think is worth reproducing in full because of its importance to our times.

Malkin: How do you respond to people who say, “I don’t mind being watched. I don’t do anything wrong.”
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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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