FCC chair comes out strong for net neutrality

The chair of the Federal Communication Commission Tom Wheeler has come out with what looks like a strong proposal in favor of net neutrality. This a really important development since the cable companies wanted to provide different levels of speed and service to different companies based on their ability to pay, rather than treating them all equally. In other words, the companies could provide the internet equivalent of a superhighway to (say) Netflix or Amazon while this blog gets shunted to a dirt road.
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Vaccination suddenly becomes a major political issue

The recent outbreak in measles cases has become a politically hot topic and brought to the forefront the problematic issue of balancing various rights. Politicians, especially in the Republican party, are having to dance around the issue to avoid stepping on the toes of their various bases of support and in the process have sometimes fallen flat on their faces. So as usual, they are trying to muddy the issue by blurring the lines between some fairly clear positions.
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Huckabee’s smarminess

The odious Mike Huckabee is continuing to make the rounds of interviews and trying to have it both ways on homosexuality. He seems to think that by smiling a lot and acting all folksy and telling people that he has gay friends, he can hide the fact that he is a hateful religious bigot who strenuously opposes giving equal rights (such as marriage) to the LGBT community.
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Latin America now leads the world in opposing torture

A few decades ago, when one thought of nations that practiced torture, those in Latin America immediately came to mind. That continent was notorious for being ruled by brutal dictators who would overthrow, often with help from the US, democratically elected governments and thought nothing of torturing and murdering their opponents. So-called ‘death squads’ consisting of paramilitary forces supported by the government and acting under its auspices would seize people in the middle of the night and they would ‘disappear’, sometimes never to be seen again, sometimes their mutilated bodies would be found later.
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Hyper-patriot games

Some years ago, when my children were in high school, I went to a local 4th of July open-air concert in my town. It featured the high school band playing the usual tunes that bands play. In between, the band-leader spoke about the meaning of Independence Day and what struck me was how over-the-top his praise of the US was. In his words, it was the greatest, freest, most noble, most [insert any good quality here] in the world and always had been. What was striking was that he was an immigrant and still spoke with the strong accent from his native nation.
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The other evil but forgotten war

The war that the US waged against Vietnam was a monstrous war crime that inflicted immense death and destruction from the air on a defenseless people, using defoliants like Agent Orange as chemical weapons and napalm and all the other horrors that the military managed to think up to inflict on a backward nation that was trying to shake off the yoke of colonialism. It was understanding the true nature of this war that radicalized me personally.
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What made Romney change his mind?

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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Israel shows its power over the US again-but pays a price

There has been an unusual development in US-Israel relations. The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been invited by the speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner to give a speech to a joint session of Congress on February 11. This by itself is not too unusual. It is an honor given to foreign leaders and Israeli leaders have done so many times and the routine is that they are given multiple standing ovations by members who are eager to demonstrate to the Israel lobby how supportive they are of Israel.
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