Democratic war hawks

I like Elizabeth Warren’s policies on the economy and reining in the financial institutions. But when it comes to foreign policy, she turns out to be your run-of-the-mill pro-war Democrat. She voted along with other Democrats in Congress in support of a resolution backing Israel when it was assaulting Gaza but otherwise has avoided making any comment on the issue, running away when asked about it.
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The killing of Kajieme Powell

Kajieme Powell was a mentally disturbed man who was shot dead on the streets of St Louis by police on August 19, 2014, just four miles from the place in Ferguson where Michael Brown had been killed just 10 days earlier. Powell was reportedly carrying a knife and acting erratically and talking to himself and had taken some items from a store without paying for them. Here is what St. Louis police chief’s version of what happened.
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And we still wonder why they hate us

Neoconservative Bill Kristol, whose major accomplishments are pushing for war against Iraq and any other country that happens to not do the bidding of the US and urging John McCain to select Sarah Palin to be his running mate, has exercised his considerable analytical powers to come up with a strategy for dealing with the chaos that his earlier policy recommendations have created in the Middle East.
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John Oliver on net neutrality

Net neutrality is a really important issue that is hard to get people excited about, except for those who are really into internet policy. But John Oliver did an long segment about it that got to the core issue so clearly and understandably that Tim Wu, the Columbia University professor who coined the term ‘net neutrality’, said that it had “rendered every other explanation obsolete.”
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We fight in wars on all sides now

Glenn Greenwald writes that developments in Syria and Libya illustrate the same pattern that we saw in Iraq earlier, of how the US destabilizes countries on the blithe assertion that it can once and for all time militarily install a stable regime that will be friendly to it, only to end up creating fertile breeding grounds for violent groups like ISIS/ISIL I Syria and Iraqqand the militant groups dueling for power in Libya.
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The counterfeit president

The academic Cornel West was one of the first prominent African-American supporters of Barack Obama’s candidacy for president to denounce him for serving as a neoliberal opportunist once he got into office after his election in 2008, and going back on so many of his campaign pledges. In a recent interview with Thomas Frank, he says that Obama posed as a kind of Lincoln but what we got was a “brown-faced Clinton”.
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Atheist politicians in the UK and US

There is no reason to think that the level of unbelief among elected officials in the US is much less than it is in the general public so it is really quite embarrassing that there are no openly atheist members of the US Congress. Compare that with the UK where they actually have a state religion of which the Queen is the head but where their All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group has 150 members, most of them elected atheists.
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