Mitt Romney has said that he has decided to withdraw from the race for the Republican nomination for president in the 2016 election. His withdrawal seems to have surprised observers just as much as his previous announcement that he was thinking of entering the race. His latest statement was a little equivocal, suggesting that he still thought he was the best candidate and could win, and hinted that he was open to being drafted as the party nominee if no suitable candidate emerged from the large scrum of current hopefuls and the party is deadlocked at the convention.
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I came across this article about the inability of the Republican party leadership to pass a piece of legislation further restricting abortion rights on the occasion of the annual rally in Washington on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. When there was some dissension within their ranks, especially from women members of their caucus, they pulled the bill from the floor before the vote. As you can imagine, this abrupt change did not go down well with those who felt that they had been betrayed and one abortion foe was so furious that she complained angrily, saying, “What in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks just happened?”
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The US government lets torturers, people who lie to get the public to support illegal wars, and the top executives of big banks whose greed, deception, and recklessness led to a global recession that hurt so many people go scot free. What the government really cares about and prosecutes vigorously are those who expose its wrongdoings by leaking information.
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Recently a friend and colleague of mine, while he and a female colleague were seated at a table in a lounge area discussing a paper, was accosted in the very building where he works by a campus police officer who was looking for someone who was reported to be a trespasser,.
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On the surface, there is something quite mystifying about the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia. That nation acts like it can do anything at all and the US will not say a word against it. Their human rights record along practically any axis you choose (gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, freedom of speech, you name it) can only be described as appalling, with harsh punishments routinely meted out for people exercising what we would consider to be the most basic of rights. There is not even a pretense of democracy, with an autocratic monarchic system ruling the country. Even the fact that 15 of the 19 people who carried out the 9/11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia did nothing to shake this relationship and instead the US attacked Iraq on wholly trumped up charges.
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As part of the deal to improve relations with Cuba, that government released Alan Gross from its prison and sent him back. Gross has been portrayed as a naive and innocent individual, a do-gooder trying to help ordinary Cubans and who, while engaged in perfectly innocuous activities on the island, was caught in the net of an oppressive government and unjustly held. That has been the dominant media narrative about Gross. At the State of the Union address, he was one of the president’s guests of honor and was given a shout-out during the speech.
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Yesterday’s election results showed that the left-wing party Syriza led by a 40-year old former communist Alexis Tsipras has won . As an aside, I was encouraged to see that he departed from tradition and rather than being sworn in by the archbishop as tradition dictated, he had a civil ceremony.
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