It is fun to see so many well-known actors do a cameo on Saturday Night Live. But ultimately it is the quality of the writing the matters because otherwise it just becomes a game of ‘identify the star’. On the writing scale, this was middling.
Tony Frank is the president of Colorado State University. Recently the university was in the news because two potential Native American students visiting the campus had the police called on them by the parent of another potential student who felt that they did not ‘belong’. Humiliated and embarrassed, the two students left. Here’s a video of the incident.
Today marks the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth (1818-1883). I recently watched this film that covers the period when the young Marx became friends with Friedrich Engels, a relationship that lasted a lifetime. It deals with the period from 1843-1849, a time as Marx, his wife Jenny, and his young daughter moved from Paris to Brussels before ending up in London. The film ends with Marx and Engels publishing the Communist Manifesto.
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Former NBC news anchor and current commentator is the latest big name to be charged with sexual harassment. An article in the Washington Post last week reported the claims made by two women.
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… is this Speed Bump cartoon by Dan Coverly.
Rudy Giuliani happened to be mayor of New York when the attacks of 9/11 happened and that put him at the center of events and he has since milked his fame to the last drop, speaking of that event whenever he gets the chance. I was never impressed with him, seeing him as someone who was not very smart, a loudmouth who just blusters and attacks the weaker elements of society. So it baffled me that Donald Trump would hire him as his personal lawyer at a critical time.
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The Customs and Border Protection is an agency whose members were ardent supporters of Donald Trump in the last election. So it should be no surprise that it too plays fast and loose with the facts to advance Trump’s and their agenda by trying to portray undocumented immigrants in the worst possible light in order to deflect attention from their harsh treatment of them. Debbie Nathan exposes the latest CBP attempt to further the Trump agenda of hyping hatred against undocumented immigrants by inflating statistics about the number of border patrol agents assaulted by them.
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She says that it does not mean that you cannot call White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders a liar because she is. And that was even before yesterday’s revelation about her lies on behalf of Donald Trump about the payments made to Stephanie Clifford.
I know that ‘listicles’ (articles that are lists of things, often ranked in order of preference) are often purely clickbait. They consist of preferences of the writers of the article and have no deeper meaning. However, I am a sucker for lists of books and films and so often follow up the links just to see how my tastes compare with that of the author. This list consists of 21 books that the editors of GQ magazine think are highly over-rated and for each book they provide lesser-known alternatives in the same genre that they think would be time better spent reading.
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There have been a huge number of books devoted to Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazis, trying to understand what drove his thinking and how he was able to win the allegiance of the nation in his monstrous plans and almost succeed. In the April 30, 2018 issue of The New Yorker Alex Ross reviews a series of books and focuses on the American sources of inspiration that Hitler drew upon to justify his policies and to believe that the world would overlook his actions. In particular he felt that American racism, with its extermination of Native Americans, subjugation of the black population, and exclusion of non-white immigrants, was pursuing the same policies of trying to create racial purity that he sought to implement. Furthermore, he was impressed with American insouciance, the ability to practice utterly racist policies while acting like it was a deeply religious nation and a beacon of freedom and equality. He felt that he too could ride out any opprobrium by simply asserting that what he was doing was actually virtuous.
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