Radley Balko highlights another case where police were caught red-handed completely manufacturing false charges against Stephen Dendinger whose only ‘offense’ was that he was the person who delivered process papers to a police officer at a police station who had been charged with acting brutally against his nephew. This serving of papers is something that happens routinely all the time as part of the legal process.
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Jon Stewart is at his best when responding to Fox News attacks on him. His announcement that he was leaving the show sometime later this year led them to reflect on his influence and argue that he brought little to the national political conversation except lies, snarkiness, selective editing, and unfair characterization of them and the Republican party. It is clear that, as one of the major media figures who consistently outs their deceitful propaganda, he has got under their skin.
In responding, he gives an excellent analysis of what they stand for, why they are so successful at driving home their damaging message, and how we should respond.
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If you are a member of a group in America that is viewed with disdain by conservatives, there are few faster ways to career advancement than to espouse the views of those same conservatives. You will be hugely rewarded with political support, jobs, and media visibility on conservative outlets like Fox News. Conservatives will gratefully accept the chance to have people of color spout derogatory statements about other people of color, since this enables them to get those views out but provides them immunity from the charge of racism.
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This is an absolutely riveting, must-see HBO documentary directed and edited by Kate David and David Heilbroner about four men accused in 2009 of plotting to carry out a terrorist plot. We all know that the US government uses money and other lures to coax young minor criminals who have no prospects and little sense into signing on to hare-brained schemes of violence so that the government can then triumphantly unmask the plot. They also carefully manufacture a link with a mosque in order to exploit the fears and anti-Muslim sentiment of the US public.
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Public Policy Polling has come out with new survey results of the views of Republican primary voters and it is quite sad. They have the usual questions about whom they favor as candidates for the presidency and the leaders are Scott Walker with 25% followed by Ben Carson 18%, Jeb Bush 17%, and Mike Huckabee 10%.
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The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines to approve chair Tom Wheeler’s proposal to reclassify broadband under Title II of the federal Communications Act., which means they can be treated as common carriers like landline phone service, which means that they are subject to FCC regulation and must treat all users equally and cannot give preferential faster service to companies that pay them more. This is what has come to be known as ‘net neutrality’.
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Rahm Emanuel, the former congressman and chief of staff to president Obama and now mayor of Chicago, represents the worst elements of the Democratic party, someone who is authoritarian and slavish in his devotion to the oligarchy. He had been a leader in the effort to destroy the Chicago public schools and hand them over to private interests and has been brazen in his favoring of cronies using the funds of the city.
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In some Orthodox Jewish circles, it is the practice for infant boys to be circumcised, not by a doctor in sanitary conditions, but by a religious person known as a mohel who then sucks out some blood from the penis with his mouth. This extremely unhygienic practice can lead, and has led, to serious infections, and “City health officials linked 17 cases of neonatal herpes to direct oral suction in the last 15 years. Of those, two have died and two more suffered brain damage.”
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The disgraceful and criminal torture practices of the US government have not aroused as much anger and disgust here as they should have. People seem to find reasons to excuse them, using various arguments depending on their political views. The excuses range from the ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario that actually justifies torture to regretful expressions that because the people being tortured were ‘captured on the battlefield’ there exists the possibility that they may be guilty. These are arguments whose absurdity I will not even bother to refute. All these excuses have at their root the feeling that torture is being used only on other people, foreigners, and Muslims, people who are ‘not like us’. The rest of us are safe.
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