Most reasonable people know that the so-called war on Christmas treat is a joke and make fun on it. But Joshua Holland writes about the history of this idea, that it has dark roots in the early twentieth century that then went dormant until Fox News reintroduced it and mainstreamed it.
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Politics can be a dirty business and while I am not a fan of either Carly Fiorina or Hillary Clinton, there is no excuse for the gender-based insults that have been directed at them. A day or so ago Fiorina accused an Iowa radio host who acts as a surrogate for Ted Cruz of calling her, as Fiorina said, a ‘V-word’.
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2014 had the record for the warmest year ever but its hold on that title will be short-lived since it looks like 2015 is going to eclipse it quite easily. In the UK, the British gambling firm Ladbrokes has for the first time ever stopped offering bets on a white Christmas, instead offering bets on record temperatures instead.
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Forrest M. Mims III is an award-winning inventor who attends conferences all over the world. This requires him to travel with all manner of gadgetry that contains exposed circuits and the like. Naturally this results in airline security becoming alarmed and he writes about his experiences, including one that ended up with him being put in a chokehold by the pilot of his plane.
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Donald Trump is a strange man, hard to pigeonhole into a simple ideological box.
All of us tend to be more kindly disposed to those who are nice to us and less so to those we think are being unkind. What makes Trump different is that, like in most things, he carries this to extremes. He seems to place great value on what people say to him and about him and as long as those things are complimentary, he responds in kind, sometimes with even effusive praise. But attack him or insult him, and he lashes back angrily. He does not do half-measures.
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Martin Shkreli is the former hedge fund money manager whom everyone loves to hate because his strategy is to buy up the licenses for out-of-patent drugs and immediately hikes their prices. The one that brought him the most infamy was when he abruptly raised the price per pill of the drug Darapim from $13.50 to $700. He was arrested recently by the federal authorities on charges of securities fraud. And there was much cheering in the land because, yea verily, Shkreli is an abominable excuse for a human being.
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Whatever one might think about the merits of beauty competitions like Miss Universe, many, many people take them seriously, not least the contestants from each participating nation. The format is one of round-by-round elimination, leaving just three finalists, which this year were Miss Colombia, Miss Philippines, and Miss USA.
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After the fiasco of the Muslim student in Texas who was arrested for bringing his clock in to school, we now have the case of a 12-year old Sikh boy again from Texas who was handcuffed, suspended from school, and spent three days in a juvenile detention center because of fears that his backpack that contained a built in battery pack that enables one to recharge a cell phone was really a bomb.
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He joins Rick Perry, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal in realizing that his campaign was going nowhere. Most public figures who abandon a race say they want to spend more time with his families but since he has no partner or children, he probably wants to devote all his time to his favorite pursuits such as creating more fear in this country, sending more troops to fight in all the existing wars that he helped start, and starting new wars.
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I have described Ted Cruz as a flat-out sophist and creepy and it is undoubtedly true that he is unlikable except to his ardent fans. But Carly Fiorina gives Cruz a good run for his money on both deception and unlikability. Her campaign team must have realized this because they have tried to soften her hard, grating image by filming a commercial of her with a whole bunch of dogs
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