He looks at the charges and countercharges that are being made against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Pope Francis has just taken the final step making Mother Theresa a saint. Her record is at best mixed. On the positive side she did take in the sick and dying from the streets of Calcutta and provided them with some minimal care. On the negative side, in order to raise money for her work, she hobnobbed with some of the worst people in the world like the Duvaliers in Haiti and praised them, thus providing them with cover for their misdeeds. She also was an implacable foe of contraception and abortion and seemed to have this bizarre love for suffering for its own sake, seeing it as somehow ennobling and bringing you closer to god. As one critic said, she was not a friend of the poor so much as a friend of poverty.
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This election has posed a serious problem for many voters in that the two major party candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have historically high disapproval ratings. What are those voters, especially on the progressive side, who are not tied rigidly to party loyalties supposed to do?
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I know that there are a lot of George Carlin fans out there and I think they will enjoy this clip of him being interviewed by Jon Stewart in 1997 that has him look back on his 40 years in comedy. (Via Andrea James)
The New York Times has an interesting article about the two weeks that Edward Snowden went missing, after he left his luxury hotel in Hong Kong and before he showed up in Moscow, when he was in hiding from the US government and the hordes of media reporters who were seeking him after him bombshell revelations about US spying. It turns out that his lawyers in Hong Kong had placed him in the homes of other clients who were refugees seeking asylum, people who lived in tiny apartments in some of the city’s poorest districts, and some of them were Sri Lankans.
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There seem to be two standard rules of political reporting when it comes to US presidential elections. One is that the media has a vested interest in a close race because that generates more interest in the news and thus more readers and viewers. Hence there is always more breathless reporting generated by positive news and polls favoring the candidate who is behind and negative news about the one who is ahead. So in the current race, where Donald Trump is behind, any poll that shows him close to or tied with Hillary Clinton gets wide coverage. But statistically, when two candidates are within three or four points of each other, there will always be some polls that show them to be tied or the one who is behind on average to be even ahead slightly, and the number of polls that show this in this race are what one might predict purely on statistics.
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I disapprove of anti-bacterial soaps but the selection of regular liquid soaps was getting smaller and smaller in stores. So I was encouraged by the decision of the FDA to ban them because not only were their benefits unproven but they may even do more harm than good.
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I have been doing a lot of long-distance driving recently and once again encountered an issue that I have ranted about in the past and that is those drivers who camp out in the left lane permanently. And the people doing this cross all ages and both genders. So I was glad to see NPR doing a story on it with the title Don’t Be A Slowpoke: Why Left Lane Driving Causes Traffic.
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There has been considerable hyperventilating in the US media and political circles about Russia supposedly trying to influence the outcome of the US election, though the government is careful to avoid going on the record with the allegations. This news report is full of such speculations based on anonymous sources.
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