Looking for Republican unicorns

The administration of Donald Trump careens all over the place and his behavior continues to be erratic, leading to an explosion of palace intrigue and gossip. Take this story:

With the White House struggling to gain its footing almost two months into Donald Trump’s presidency, administration officials are increasingly putting the blame on one person: Reince Priebus.

In interviews, over a dozen Trump aides, allies, and others close to the White House said that Priebus, the 44-year-old chief of staff, was becoming a singular target of criticism within the White House.

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The latest Trump squirrel

So now Donald Trump is charging that last year his phones were illegally tapped by Barack Obama. It is now clear, thanks to the Edward Snowden revelations, that the Obama administration presided over a vast intelligence gathering operation that vacuumed up the communications of pretty much everyone, and it is undoubtedly the case that Trump’s communications are somewhere in the NSA computers storage facilities.
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Deep-rooted causes of opiod addiction

Within the last few years, the full scale of the addition to prescription pain killers has burst into public consciousness and it is being referred to as an epidemic. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist focused on addiction care and author of the book Drug Dealer, MD, agrees that “the commonly cited causes of the epidemic — doctors hoping to treat previously untreated pain conditions, pain patients demanding better treatments, and big pharma pushing opioids on the market — contributed to the vast overprescription of opioids. That let the pills flow not just to patients’ hands but to their family, their friends, and the black market.”
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Apartheid in Israel? It’s been there for ages

It was not that long ago that using the word ‘apartheid’ to describe the conditions of Palestinians in the Israeli occupied territories would arouse indignant responses and charges of anti-Semitism would be leveled against the speaker. But those days are long gone as the state of affairs has become more widely known and the realization has sunk in that the label accurately captures it. Even people like former president Jimmy Carter and South African archbishop Desmond Tutu and many others use the term.
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‘Sealioning’: a neologism I can get behind

It was only recently that I learned the metaphorical use of the term ‘gaslight’, that arose from the 1944 film Gaslight where the plot involved a husband tricking his wife into thinking that she was going insane. The term ‘gaslighting’ is now used more generally to describe a form of psychological abuse that seeks to undermine a person’s confidence in their own memory or perception or even sanity.
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Winning elections at the local and state levels

Amy Howe explains the significance of an opinion handed down on Wednesday by the US Supreme Court concerning the way that electoral districts were drawn in Virginia.

This morning the Supreme Court handed a partial victory to a group of Virginia voters who argued that the 12 state legislative districts in which they live were the result of racial gerrymandering. The justices agreed with the challengers that a lower court had applied the wrong legal standard when it upheld all 12 districts, and the court ordered the lower court to take another look at 11 of those districts. This means that the battle over the redistricting maps that were drawn for Virginia’s state elections after the 2010 census will continue on well into this year, even as the state prepares to hold new elections in November.
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Who actually reads political memoirs?

Reports have emerged that the bidding war for the rights to publish memoirs by both Barack and Michelle Obama have reached the stratospheric level of $65 million for the two-book contract. While this is particularly high, book publishers seem to be willing to shell out big bucks advances for books written (usually ghost written) by prominent politicians. This raises once again in my mind a question that I had been idly pondering for a long while, and that is who actually reads such books? After all, the publishers are obviously hoping to recover the costs in sales. At (say) a discounted price of $10 per book, we are talking about millions of books sold.
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Why flights actually take longer now than 50 years ago

We like to think that long distance travel times are getting shorter as modern technology enables planes to travel faster. But via Andrea James I came cross this fascinating video explanation put together by someone who looked at old flight schedules from fifty years ago and found that travel times are actually longer now than they were back then. Why is this? Part of the reason is that the increased congestion in the air and at airports means that there is longer time spent waiting for clearance and taxiing on the runways than was the case before.
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How the US almost went to war with Iran last month

In all the chasing after squirrels during the tumultuous first days of the Trump administration, Mehdi Hasan writes that one big story that has been largely ignored is how the US almost went to with Iran at the start of February by planning to board an Iranian vessel that was in international waters, a move that was averted at the last minute when news of the impending operation was leaked.
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The mainstream media is hopeless

Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations. The media’s obsession with Donald Trump’s ‘tone’ is ridiculous, and just because he was not as unhinged as usual when he spoke to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, they drooled over his speech as being ‘presidential’, even though he did not say anything that was concrete or praiseworthy, simply repeating empty promises of good times ahead and lying about the things he has supposedly achieved so far. Plus he added a truly nasty proposal to create an office to serve the victims of ‘immigrant crime’, even though the data shows that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than others. It was blatant pandering to his racist base and part of their push to demonize immigrants and make America white again.
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