The former president has some very harsh but accurate words about the state of the US, following the ruling by the Supreme Court in Citizens United allowing the almost unlimited and unregulated amounts of money into the political system.
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One of the problems with the coming Republican debate on Thursday is that with 10 candidates in a two-hour format, and allowing for the time taken by the moderators for their questions, that averages out to at most 10 minutes per person. But the stage will contain people who are anxious to make a big impression and want to make sure they are noticed. Furthermore, they are not used to just waiting silently and this can pose a problem for the moderators if people start interrupting each other.
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While Donald Trump has riveted people’s attention to the Republican race for the nomination, let us not forget that the Democrats also have a race. It has not drawn much attention since the pundits initially assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to win in a walk but recent events have suggested that Bernie Sanders is not merely a sideshow. He has succeeded to some extent in beating back the fringe candidate label and is thus getting some of the valuable free publicity that comes with reporters for national publications covering his campaign.
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This time it was about the two sinister, secret meetings between Jon Stewart and president Obama where it was insinuated that they had coordinated a policy agenda. It never seems to dawn on Fox News that trying to attack Stewart and The Daily Show never fails to boomerang on them. They seem to be really slow learners. And as Stewart says, just because you don’t know something does not mean it is a secret.
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It is a cliché that politics makes for strange bedfellows but surely one of the strangest is that between the hardline pro-Israel evangelicals in the US on the one hand and the extreme right-wing politicians in Israel and their neoconservative allies and the Israel lobby in the US on the other. The strong bonds between them are not based on any fondness for each other but purely due to each side seeing the other as serving its own interests.
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As if Sandra Bland’s death in the jail where she ended up following a traffic stop for not signaling while changing lanes was not bad enough, now a police officer in Cincinnati Ray Tensing has been indicted for murder following the death of an unarmed black man Samuel DuBose at another routine traffic stop, this time for lacking a front license plate, something that the state of Ohio requires but not all states do. It turned out that DuBose was not carrying a driving license either but he claimed that he had it. What is clear that neither of these facts should have ever resulted in a shooting, even if DuBose was trying to leave the scene without Tensing’s permission. There is no excuse for shooting someone who is not posing a threat to the police or is a potential threat to others.
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Among other things, on his show Jon Stewart points to what I wrote about yesterday, about this practice of the US lecturing other countries about their failings, even when our record is not that great. As I said, it is not necessary that the country giving the lectures be free from sin (so to speak) but that there should be reciprocity.
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Former Texas senator Phil Gramm and one-time Republican candidate for president says that there is only one form of bigotry that is still tolerated in America. Can you guess what it might be? Your first guess might be that it is the bigotry against transsexuals. Or against Mexicans. But that is because you are a bleeding heart liberal. Since Gramm is a conservative Republican, you might think that he is referring to Christians because they never stop claiming victimhood.
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The issue of undocumented immigrants is turning into a big issue in the Republican primary race and you can be certain that it will feature in a big way in the debates and that any crime committed by such a person is going to get huge amounts of attention and be promoted by Fox News and other conservative media as proof positive that these people are a serious menace and will kill us all in our beds if we don’t immediately round them up and throw them out.
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President Obama is visiting Kenya and Ethiopia and as is usual when an American president visits a non-European country, he uses the occasion to point out flaws in those countries’ policies and gives them advice on what they should do to improve. In Kenya he highlighted the way women are treated as second-class citizens and later called for the relaxing of curbs on free speech in Ethiopia, among other things.
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