I was recently reminded of an iconic Olympic photograph, of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who made the black power salute protesting conditions in the US after winning the 200m gold and bronze medals respectively at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Both Smith and Carlos were vilified for their action.
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In order to deal with the problem of people voting against a candidate rather than for him or her, as seems to be the case with the Clinton/Trump match up where majorities say that their vote is driven by their dislike for the opponent, in a segment he adopts an idea that I suggested back in 2014, but which I don’t claim to be original. He had also apparently resurrected his old Comedy Central persona during the conventions and ran into some trouble with the corporate lawyers
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The revelations that emerged from the WikiLeaks release of DNC emails merely confirmed what many of us already strongly suspected, and that was that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic National Committee were lying when they said that they were staying neutral during the primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. They were actively tilting the playing field in her favor.
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A group of African Americans had an enjoyable meal at a restaurant in Murfeesboro, Tennessee and were treated well by the waitress. Or at least they thought so. But later a friend told one of them Chelsea Mayes that their waitress had posted a photo of the group on Snapchat and used a racist slur to describe the group. The management was alerted to this and after an investigation, fired the waitress.
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ProPublica has closely examined the record of Tim Kaine over the years. It is a mixed bag with some serious concerns, especially on trade deals, big banks, and labor issues, folded in with some good views on social issues, such as abortion rights (though he is a Catholic) and opposition to the death penalty. Kaine’s main claim to fame is that he has no skeletons in his closet and is a proven successful political campaigner and is thus unlikely to say or do anything ridiculous and thus harm the ticket.
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There has been a lot of praise for the way Cleveland handled the Republican National Convention. Everything seemed to go smoothly and many of the visitors, either first timers to the city or people whose last visit was decades ago, seemed surprised to find that it was not the gritty, crime-filled scene that they anticipated to see but was instead a pleasant place with friendly and helpful people and many things for visitors to do and see. There have been long-standing plans to improve the downtown and all those efforts were pushed to completion because of the convention. The city had put its best face forward and it showed.
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She says that Donald Trump is going for the Richard Nixon vibe of 1968 of instilling fear in the hearts of white America and promising to bring law and order back again, except that Nixon, for all his faults, was not a buffoon. Karl Marx was remarkably prescient when he said that, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
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Tim LaHaye, author of the best-selling Left Behind series of novels, died yesterday at the age of 90. For those of you unfamiliar with his oeuvre, it deals with the Rapture.
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The first day of the Democratic convention got off to a rousing start. As I am still away from home and have had to do a lot of other stuff, I could not watch the speeches but did find time to read about them online. It looked like the proceedings had a somewhat rough early start with some of the Sanders supporters booing Hillary Clinton’s name and some even picking up the Republican chant of “lock her up”.
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John Oliver reviewed the Republican convention and was astounded, as many of us were, at how the party has entered into a fact-free world. It recalls how a member of the Bush administration (suspected to be Karl Rove) derided those of us he described as being part of the “reality-based community”, saying “That’s not the way the world really works anymore, We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”. Of course that was rubbish then and this belief that raw power could achieve anything led to hubris on an enormous scale and has got the nation stuck in one unwinnable war after another,
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