He is delighted with her re-entrance to the political limelight and points out that like all revival acts, she hauled out her greatest hits in her endorsement of Donald Trump. He then does a dead-on impression of her speaking style.
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The famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow advised lawyers that they should not pick jurors who had strong Calvinist religious beliefs about right and wrong because they have a harsh and unforgiving attitude. It should not come as a real surprise that new research supports his view.
A new study backs up Darrow’s advice, finding that belief in a vengeful God will lead a person to oppose programs that help prisoners re-enter society, while a person who believes in a loving and forgiving God is more likely to support those programs.
“Stronger feelings of religious forgiveness led to greater support for assisting offenders,” says the study of 386 random Missourians. “The people who had the stronger punitive picture of God were less likely to support transitional programs, things like substance abuse programs,” says Brett Garland, a professor at Missouri State University and an author of the study.
Past research echoes the Missouri findings. “Fundamentalists tend to be more punitive. They do believe in ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’” Monica Miller, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, tells Newsweek. Miller’s research found stronger support for the death penalty among those who take the Bible literally and among fundamentalists, who place more weight on the Old Testament than the New.
In Darrow’s time one did not have the option of picking non-religious people since they were unlikely to publicly declare their unbelief so Darrow advised defense lawyers as to which denominations were preferable.
In his 1936 essay for Esquire, Darrow predicted the views toward criminals and defendants that Guyton, the Methodist, and Moore, the Southern Baptist, would hold almost 80 years later. The guidance he gave defense attorneys for picking sympathetic jurors seems to remain solid.
“The Methodists are worth considering; they are nearer the soil. Their religious emotions can be transmuted into love and charity,” Darrow wrote. “If chance sets you down between a Methodist and a Baptist, you will move toward the Methodist to keep warm.”
Given that we now have telescopes that can probe far into the most distant regions of the universe, and are even able to detect the existence of what are known as exoplanets (i.e., planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun), you would think that we would pretty much know everything that exists in our own neighborhood of the solar system.
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The ghastly story of what happened in Flint, MI should strike fear into the entire nation because it is not just a local story affecting one impoverished town. For those unfamiliar with the case, the people of that city have been found to have dangerously high levels of lead in their blood due to the contamination of their drinking water. This has been going on for two years. As a result, the residents of that city have been forced to purchase bottled water until the mess is cleared up and president Obama has issued an emergency declaration, enabling federal government resources to be used to address the emergency.
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According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015 easily broke the previous record for the warmest year that had been set just the previous year.
During 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.62 Fahrenheit (0.90 Celsius) above the 20th century average,” said the NOAA report.
“This was the highest among all years in the 1880-2015 record.”
Compared to 2014, last year was 0.29 Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius) warmer, the “largest margin by which the annual global temperature record has been broken.”
A new poll shows Sanders with a whopping 60%-33% lead over Clinton in New Hampshire.
Former secretary of labor Robert Reich offers comebacks to six of the most common criticisms expressed by skeptics of Bernie Sanders such as:
1. He’d never beat Trump or Cruz in a general election.
2. He couldn’t get any of his ideas implemented because Congress would reject them.
3. America would never elect a socialist.
4. His single-payer healthcare proposal would cost so much it would require raising taxes on the middle class.
5. His plan for paying for college with a tax on Wall Street trades would mean colleges would run by government rules.
6. He’s too old.
Australians have a reputation for loving their beer. I had no idea of the depth of their passion until I recently acquired a few CDs that features Australian drinking songs. These are not songs like Waltzing Matilda that are easy to sing and thus popular at parties and in pubs. They are songs that directly and fulsomely praise beer and the act of drinking to the point of venerating both and the Monty Python troupe added to the narrative of the Aussie passion for beer (and their supposed preference for the name Bruce) in these sketches here and here.
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Yesterday Donald Trump introduced with much pleasure Sarah Palin who endorsed his run for the Republican nomination. Her 20-minute speech was the usual blend of run-on-sentences, digressions, folksy language, jingoism, and appeals to people’s sense of grievance that ‘their’ country is being taken away from them. I find it truly painful to listen to her for more than a few minutes but soldiered on to the end.
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Seth Myers points out yet another example of what is well known. There is absolutely nothing that president Obama can do, short of eliminating all government regulations and all taxes for those earning over $250,000, that will not be childishly criticized by the Republicans.
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Glenn Greenwald paints a portrait of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the awful head of the Democratic National Committee, that explains why, as long as people like her dominate the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, it can never embrace a truly progressive agenda.
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