They hate him, they really hate him

The Values Voters Summit is an annual event that gathers together all the religious right wing crazies, and politicians go and pander to them by throwing out red meat rhetoric on their favorite issues for them to devour. For these people, establishment Republican leaders are wimps who won’t really fight for conservative causes by threatening to bring government to a halt unless they get their way.
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Another farewell to Scott Walker

The ignominious early departure of someone as unlikable as Scott Walker was bound to create a great deal of schadenfreude, especially given the risible way he tried to describe his defeat as somehow a call by god for him to exercise a novel form leadership. Stephen Colbert decides to give Walker a farewell too, likening the elimination process in the Republican primary race to what happens in The Hunger Games. Not having read the books or seen the films, some of the allusions are lost on me.
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Not the UN’s finest hour

While the UN does a lot of good work, one of its biggest problems is that many of the roles on its committees are either arrived at by rotation or by some Byzantine process that can result in what to outsiders seems like utterly ridiculous outcomes. In this category is the news that Faisal bin Hassan Trad, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador at the UN in Geneva, has been appointed chair of a panel of independent experts on the UN Human Rights Council, even as that nation is about to behead a young man Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr “accused of a variety of crimes against the state, all stemming from protests he took part in against the Saudi government” and who was just 17 years old at the time of his arrest.
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Little girl with letter catches the eye of the pope

A five-year-old girl broke through the security barrier along pope Francis’s motorcade to try and reach him. Fortunately for her in this day and age, she was not immediately shot and while she was being escorted away by security, the pope noticed her and asked her to be brought to him and she managed to give him a hand-drawn picture and a letter.
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Carly Fiorina’s lies, distortions, and exaggerations exposed

Here in one sweeping article is ammunition for anyone wanting to expose the lies and distortions that Carly Fiorina peddles about her record. It is by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the senior associate dean of Leadership Studies and Lester Crown Professor of Practice Management at the Yale School of Management, whom both Donald Trump and Fiorina mentioned in the last debate.
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The CIA and Zero Dark Thirty

I did not see the film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) about the mission that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, an action that many of president Obama’s supporters hailed as the finest moment of his presidency, showing his toughness in the face of Republican charges that Democrats are wimps. In fact, in the 2012 election, vice president Joe Biden adopted the slogan that thanks to president Obama, “General Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead.”
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