Data? We don’t need no stinkin’ data! Skin color is enough!

CPAC (The Conservative Political Action Conference) is an annual gathering of nutty and hate-filled right-wingers, aka the Republican party faithful, and it is currently going on. This is where speakers throw red meat to the attendees, the redder the better, attacking all their favorite targets with hyperbolic rhetoric. Alice Ollstein reports on one session on immigration that quickly went off the rails when a speaker tried to buck that trend and persuade the audience, using actual data, that immigrants are actually good for the US.
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The ugly face of Billy Graham

The famous evangelist died last week at the age of 99 and we are now going through an orgy of official mourning that would have delighted the adulation-seeking Graham. I have been sickened by the fawning praise that has been rolling in from all quarters for the so-called ‘America’s pastor’, ignoring the many bad things he said and did. So it was a relief to read this article by Bob Moser that paints a very different picture of the man.
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Stephen Colbert nails it

As we know, Florida senator Marco Rubio got an earful from a stadium full of people outraged by his abject subservience to the NRA. Stephen Colbert has a telling segment about one moment during the event and how many in the media commented on the fact of his showing up for it.

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The Lawrence Krauss affair

The BuzzFeedNews article that appeared yesterday about Lawrence Krauss has brought out into the open things that had been just whispered about over the years. As we have seen with so many cases in these past few weeks, the pattern is distressingly familiar. A star-struck young person (usually but not always a woman) is flattered by the attention paid to them by a celebrity or powerful person (usually but not always a man) who proceeds to try and take sexual advantage of their admiration. The behavior described is at best gross and demeaning to the young person and at worst criminal.
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The failed attempt to smear Jeremy Corbyn

A sign of the growing fear among the British elites about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s increasing popularity are the attempts to smear him. Robert Mackey writes about one such attempt by the right-wing British tabloid press led by Rupert Murdoch to accuse Jeremy Corbyn of having been a spy for the Czechoslovakian secret service during the Cold War. This was taken up by Conservative prime minister Theresa May and some of her cabinet members but the attempt failed miserably.
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The importance of hope and the danger of cynicism and pessimism in politics

I am usually optimistic about politics, that however bleak things look at the moment for the causes of equality and justice (and boy are they bleak right now) over time things will improve. But there is one issue where I felt where things would not improve and that is with gun control. My pessimism on that particular issue was sealed with the murders of twenty first grade children in Newton, an event that did not lead to any movement to limit the easy availability of high-powered weapons that pretty much anyone could get with no difficulty. It seemed like the political class was not going to interfere with the ability of any individual to buy unlimited numbers of weapons and ammunition to kill as many people as they can.
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