Here is a campaign ad that Marco Rubio is running in Iowa that is clearly inspired by the reputation that the state’s Republican caucus voters have for being strongly evangelical. To me it seems way over the top in its blatant pandering.
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Donald Trump continues to maintain his large lead nationally and in New Hampshire while trailing Ted Cruz slightly in Iowa. Trump’s sustained success since July, despite all the pundits’ repeated predictions that he would soon fade, has created a minor cottage industry of attempts to understand how he does it. One factor is undoubtedly the massive media coverage he continues to generate even as the major media begin to wonder if they are responsible for his success and have been complicit in creating a monster.
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Stephen Colbert did a pretty good impression of Bernie Sanders. If you close your eyes, it would be hard not to think that it was Sanders talking. It seems like Colbert has a soft spot for Sanders and I hope he keeps mentioning him on his show and increasing his visibility.
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Hindu temples in the south Indian state of Madras have been authorized starting January 1 to turn away people who are deemed to be not appropriately dressed. But in this case, it is not just the usual problem of revealing attire (especially on women) that has been targeted but western dress in general.
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The armed group led by the sons of Cliven Bundy that came all the way from Nevada and other distant places and has taken over a remote wildlife refuge in rural Oregon near the small town of Burns in the hopes of starting some kind of uprising against the federal government seem to be running into opposition from the very people whom they claim to be protecting from tyranny, the local population. Those people are fed up.
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Two days ago, president Obama laid out a new set of orders that he has issued on gun control. Here are the details of the measures. Since Congress is largely the captive of the NRA and refuses to countenance imposing even the slightest restrictions on gun availability, he has decided to implement them using executive orders. Although the measures are modest and reasonable, as could have been predicted, Republicans, the gun lobby, and others who think that there should be no restrictions at all are having a fit and denouncing Obama’s executive orders as more signs of his dictatorial tendencies and the first step in a plan to strip all Americans of their guns.
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Last night Sanders appeared on the Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show to loud and prolonged applause and they had an extended discussion on the issue of ISIS, climate change, income and wealth inequality, and police brutality.
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Although Tony Blair is mercifully gone from the British parliament, his toxic legacy still remains, both in terms of the mess that he helped create in the Middle East by his enthusiastic and dishonest support of the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq and because many of the Members of Parliament that he brought in still remain and are undermining current leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attempts to forge a more progressive agenda for the Labour Party.
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Is there anything that Ben Carson cannot do? He has already told us of some of his exploits, how he confronted a gunman at a Popeyes restaurant and his attempt to stab a friend (or maybe it was a relative) in his wild youth, though some of his peers from those days seem to recall that he was the same kind of nerdy person then that he is now.
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On the surface, it looks like Ted Cruz has cornered the market on endorsements by big name evangelical leaders, edging out Marco Rubio in getting the collective endorsement in early December at a secret meeting of fifty religious conservatives led by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Then after Christmas, about 300 evangelical leaders met at a Texas ranch owned by Farris Wilks, a billionaire who has made his money in fracking, and is supporting Cruz with a Super PAC.
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