President Obama announced that he was sending an additional 200 troops to Iraq to add to the 275 troops that were sent in earlier and the 300 advisors. Although these people are called advisors, they are not accountants and lawyers and economists and academics in suits. They are usually Special Forces and other armed military personnel who could well end up in a shooting war. So the number of armed personnel sent back is now actually 775 and there is a real risk of some incident where they kill or otherwise injure Iraqi civilians.
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(Thanks to Sarah Baker)

The whole issue with restricting access to safe, affordable birth control shows that if there is one thing that conservatives in the US hate, it is the thought that women should have the freedom to decide when and where they have sex and with whom. Denying them contraception is a means of restricting their choices by threatening them with the possibility of a pregnancy.

For someone who has been in politics for so long and who seems to want to carefully craft her image, Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be surprisingly maladroit. She recently said that “the Bible was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking”. Does anyone really believe that bit of shameless pandering to the religious? Then after the silliness about she and her husband being ‘dead broke’ when they left the White House, she later acknowledged that they had made a lot of money since then but claimed that it was by ‘dint of hard work’.
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The US government captured Abu Khattala, a suspect in the Benghazi attacks, and has brought him to the US. He has been charged as a criminal and will be tried in the regular US justice system. But it was not long before politicians started clamoring that he should be sent to Guantanamo and face a military tribunal. And in a survey conducted by Fox News (interpret that as you will), 63% said that he should be treated as an “enemy combatant who should be tried in a military tribunal” while only 29% said that he should go through the regular courts system.
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Woe to anyone who happens to get on the vindictive side of the US justice system. While there is nothing wrong with the government using its resources to capture criminals and prosecute them, the danger is when it decides to persecute ordinary people using the vast resources at its disposal. We have seen how they are very solicitous of the big financial banks and their executives but they can be tireless and ruthless when ordinary people appear in their sights.
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I have been harshly critical of those elements in the Democratic party who are sleazy, beholden to corporate interests, and anti-progressive, and the current governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe is a prime example. But it is good to always remember that the two parties are not completely equivalent and that in some areas the differences can have significance.
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