Behold, how the government works!

Nikki Haley has managed to parlay her two-year stint as the ambassador to the United Nations into a lucrative career. She has been invited to join the board of directors of Boeing. Most of us may think of Boeing as your friendly aircraft manufacturer but it is a huge defense contractor and Haley’s relentless warmongering while at the UN must have endeared her to the hearts of the company and they are repaying the favor. Critics have noted the shamelessness of her move and Glenn Greenwald tweeted out that this is a reminder of the mutually beneficial cronyism between government officials and the private sector, where government officials while in office grease the skids to jobs after they leave.
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The shocking defense of convicted child abuser cardinal George Pell

Australian cardinal George Pell, one of the most powerful men in the Vatican, was found guilty of child sexual abuse by a court in Melbourne. It was a unanimous decision. During his sentencing hearing, his lawyer made an astounding mitigating argument of his client’s actions.

Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Catholic cleric ever convicted of child sexual abuse, has been taken in custody following a sentencing hearing in which his lawyer described one of Pell’s offences as a “plain vanilla sexual penetration case where the child is not actively participating”.

After the hearing, with Pell’s lawyer, Robert Richter, having withdrawn his application for bail, the chief judge said: “Take him away, please.” Pell was taken to a maximum security facility where he will be kept in protective custody and remain alone for up to 23 hours a day.

He will be sentenced on 13 March after his conviction for sexually assaulting two 13-year-old boys.

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Reclaiming the word ‘centrist’ from the extremists

One of the most laughable claims made recently is that made by billionaire vanity presidential candidate Howard Schultz that he occupies the center of American politics. Mehdi Hasan writes that it is time to reclaim the label ‘centrist’ and assign it to the people to whom it rightly belongs, those who represent the views of the broad swathe of ordinary people. That means people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and decidedly not to the people that the media describes as such: Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, and Howard Schultz.
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Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act on student loan debt

In his latest show last night, he looked at the massive amounts of debt students accrue in the US when they go to college. He says that the government has given the task of recovering the loans to private agencies that do a terrible job by not providing students with advice that would help them and that the Trump administration and the education secretary Betsy De Vos have undermined efforts by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police their activities.

If you are a miracle worker, you should go big or go home

An evangelical pastor in South Africa clearly felt that the usual tricks to persuade people that their god was acting through them to perform miracles, such a healing them of various ailments, was too tame. So he decided to stage the big one, a resurrection of the dead, where a supposedly dead man suddenly sat up in his coffin in response to prayers.

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“Oh, isn’t that nice!”

Ivanka Trump was asked for her response to the Green New Deal. The poster child for being born with a silver spoon in her mouth and not having to work for anything because her rich daddy gave her everything, who himself was given everything by his own rich daddy, and whose husband was given everything by his own rich daddy, thinks that most Americans don’t want to have a guaranteed minimum wage or a guarantee of a job.

Bernie Sanders’s response to billionaire Howard Schultz’s comments is perfectly appropriate here too.

Warning: I am going to be using “Oh, isn’t that nice!” quite a lot.

Growing pressure in support of the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal is drawing more support as it becomes better known and is generating activism. Eoin Higgins writes that senator Diane Feinstein is not the only politician feeling the heat from young people who are taking up the cause because they feel that it is their lives that are being sacrificed by politicians who grovel before the fossil fuel industry. They are taking aim at the rationale being offered by timid Democratic politicians like Feinstein for not signing on.

The main rhetorical device that Democratic skeptics of the Green New Deal have been employing begins with a confident assertion that they believe in climate science and that the crisis must be taken seriously, and they admire the ambition of the Green New Deal. But, they add, the resolution just can’t pass a Republican Senate or be signed by President Donald Trump.
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By asserting their support of the broad principles undergirding the policies while rejecting the actual nuts and bolts of the legislation, Democrats are trying to have it both ways: keeping rhetorically in tune with the desires of the base but protecting the interests of the party’s powerful establishment donor class in their actions.

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John Oliver on psychics

Making fun of psychics is easy and fun but the non-amusing aspect is not only that four in ten Americans believe in them but that they are promoted by mainstream TV shows. These people are not harmless. They scam people out of money with their fakery and give false hopes and unnecessary grief. John Oliver has a good show about how they fool people and the harm that they and their TV accomplices cause.

We can only hope that he is right

Cliff Sims used to work in the White House for the Trump administration and like so many others, is trying to wash himself of the stench of association by writing a book about his experience and trashing others. He is currently making the rounds promoting his book and is apparently a religious person. He had this to say to the Christian Post about the spectacle of evangelical Christian leaders, including those on Trump’s evangelical advisory board, willing to overlook and excuse and even praise the actions of an amoral lying sociopath like Trump.

I found some of the board to be mainly interested in maintaining their proximity to power, even to the point of trashing “rival” faith leaders to keep them from threatening their own position close to the President. There are specific anecdotes in the book that illustrate that point.

I also write in the book that my greatest regret from my time in the White House is that I wasn’t a better picture of my faith to the President and my colleagues. I’m haunted by the late author Brennan Man¬ning’s quote, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Chris¬tians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

Many of us in the atheist camp have long felt that the biggest recruiters in our favor are the hypocritical religious leaders who are turning away young people especially with their words and actions. It is nice to see that even some religious people share that view, even if they fear it while we welcome it.