Stephen Colbert on the chaos in the Republican party

He had a hilarious bit about the maneuvering to not become the next Speaker of the House of Representatives. I have not been watching his new show but it looks like the set-piece monologue segments like this are exactly like the ones he used to do on his old show and that is a good thing. The one difference is that he no longer has to act like a right wing nutter.
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And then there was one (young gun)

Every time I think that the state of US politics in general, and the Republican party in particular, has reached new depths of dysfunctionality and cannot sink any lower, I get proved wrong. The bizarre struggle to find a new Speaker for the House of Representatives truly marks a major new low. The Speaker’s post was until just recently something that ambitious young congresspeople aspired to as the pinnacle of their careers. It enabled the holder to wield considerable political power, someone who, along with the senate majority leader and the president, pretty much determined the agenda of the country. The Speaker was the second in line for the presidency, after the vice-president, which gives some idea of the importance attached to the position by the drafters of the US Constitution. (UPDATE: This is wrong. As Chiroptera points out in the comments, the complete line of succession is not in the Constitution but is specified by law. Ahcuah points out that some legal scholars say that the Speaker does not qualify to be in the list at all. Thanks to both!)
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Can you guess who said this?

When a couple were denied a marriage license because the justice of the peace said that their proposed marriage would be harmful to children and also violated his personal beliefs, the state’s governor was outraged and thundered, “This is a clear violation of Constitutional rights and federal and state law. Mr. Bardwell’s actions should be fully reviewed by the Judiciary Commission and disciplinary action should be taken immediately, including the revoking of his license” and when Bardwell finally resigned his position, the governor said that it was “long overdue”.

Give up?
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Sam Harris on killing people for thought crimes

I recently came across an item where the author claimed that Sam Harris had advocated that some beliefs are so pernicious that they merited the person holding them being killed. The critic was using this quote supposedly made by Harris that “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.” Although Harris has advocated ideas that are terrible (such as bombing campaigns against Islamic countries), racial profiling, and concocting elaborate scenarios to justify the use of torture, I thought that advocating killing people for thought crimes was a bit much and that he must have been taken out of context.
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Obama’s apology is not nearly enough for a possible war crime

The media are reporting that president Obama personally called the leaders of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to apologize for the bombing of their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. But MSF is saying that his apology is not enough and they are calling for an independent investigation into what they strongly feel is a war crime. The article looks into all the factors that make plausible the case that this was a war crime, because no warning was given of an impending attack and a hospital is considered a protected facility that warrants such an action.
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Ben Carson is even worse than Donald Trump

[UPDATE: Carson has now come out with an anecdote about how he once had a gun put in his ribs, presumably to demonstrate his coolness under threat. Not only does the story not reflect well on him (he told the gunman to aim at someone else), frankly it sounds bogus to me. I wonder if any reporter will try and track down the actual event.]

In an interview that Carson gave with Kai Ryssdal of the radio program Marketplace (you can read the transcript or listen to the full interview here) Carson revealed that he is an even bigger nonsense spouter than Donald Trump. He made grandiose claims for what he would do while speaking in only the vaguest generalities about how he would actually do them. He wants a balanced budget amendment. He says that you can get a balanced budget by having across the board cuts of 3% in government to ‘get rid of the fat’ (though if that is also applied to Social Security payments and Medicare that would be political dynamite, while if not, the cuts elsewhere would have to be much larger), lowering taxes to a flat value of about 15% (which everyone agrees would reduce revenues by at least 25%), while vastly increasing spending on the military (so that the US can achieve space and military domination).
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