Let the Republican food fight continue!

The Democratic candidates have generally avoided attacking each other up this point. Even during the debate, they refrained from exploiting too much the media’s perceived weaknesses of each candidate. Not so on the Republican side where the infighting is getting quite nasty. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, after starting out professing their friendship and admiration for one another, have now started attacking each other. Donald Trump said some time ago that their friendship was a façade and that they really hated each other and it turns out that he was right.
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Film review: The Imposter (2012)

Nicholas Barclay was a 13-year old boy living in a small town outside San Antonio, Texas who suddenly disappeared in June 1994. Three years later, after having pretty much given up hope of ever seeing him again, the family gets a call from Spain saying that authorities have found him. His sister goes to Spain and brings him back where he begins his life again as a high school student.
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Liberals win Canadian elections on anti-austerity platform

I was following the Canadian election returns last night and it soon became clear that the Liberal party led by Justin Trudeau was on its way to being able to form a government on its own, ending ten years of the awful Stephen Harper conservative government. The Liberals got 184 seats (‘ridings’) in the 338-seat parliament, Conservatives 99, NDP 44, Bloc Quebecois 10, and Greens 1. The vote totals were Liberals 39.5%, Conservatives 31.9%, NDP 19.7%, BQ 4.7%, and Greens 3.5%. Pre-election polls had suggested that the Liberals would not get the necessary 170 seats to form a government on its own.
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Beetle Bailey surprises me

Beetle Bailey is a long running comic strip that began in 1950 about an army base where the soldiers are never actually called upon to fight in any wars. Its title character is a private who is a total slacker and tries to shirk his duties whenever he can. The rest of his troop also consists of misfits who have no interest in fighting and for whom the army seems to be a sinecure. The camp is overseen by an alcoholic general whose main interest is playing golf.
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Chris Hedges on why the surveillance state is a threat

In the October 2015 issue of Z Magazine (paywall) John Malkin interviews veteran journalist Chris Hedges and there is one answer that the latter gave that I think is worth reproducing in full because of its importance to our times.

Malkin: How do you respond to people who say, “I don’t mind being watched. I don’t do anything wrong.”
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John Oliver risks jail in Canada for a good cause

Today is election day in Canada where voters have the chance to throw prime minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party out of office. The NDP started out the unusually long campaign (all of 78 days!) favored to win, reaching its high point in late August but then faded steadily and is now in third place. Currently the Liberal Party is in the lead, though it is not clear that it will get enough seats (170) to form the government by itself. The latest polling is here. First results are due around 9:30 tonight.
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Possible motive emerges for the US bombing of the MSF Kunduz hospital

The picture on the bombing On October 3 of the Kunduz hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is becoming clearer and it looks increasingly like the US committed a war crime and is now trying to cover it up. To recapitulate the events, a US AC-130 gunship repeatedly fired upon the main hospital building over a period of 75 minutes, killing 22 people (medical people and patients alike) with some people in the ICU burned in their beds. This was despite the fact that the hospital compound is spread over two football fields and is away from other sites, the MSF hospital is a well known landmark, they had informed the US-led coalition of their GPS coordinates, and that the bombing continued for at least 30 minutes after desperate hospital officials told the US that they were bombing the hospital.
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Five great tries in Rugby World Cup

The 2015 Rugby World Cup is currently underway in England. Of the sixteen original teams that qualified, Australia, Wales, South Africa, Scotland, New Zealand, Argentina, Ireland and France made it to the knockout rounds. Host nation England was eliminated and Japan, despite a sensational upset win over South Africa in their opening pool game, just barely failed to make the next round despite having the same won-loss record as South Africa and Scotland.
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Westboro Baptist Church goes after meteorologists and Kim Davis

The Westboro Baptist Church needs no introduction. Their over-the-top anti-gay rhetoric and tactics are the stuff of legend and have raised their visibility far, far beyond what its tiny membership (largely consisting of one family) could reasonably expect. So much so that one wonders if the church is not practicing some kind of performance art. But they face the same problem as the extremists in the Republican party and Playboy magazine in that they have to keep raising the level of outrageousness in order to compete with the alternatives now easily available on the internet. But like the Republican party and unlike Playboy, they have not thrown in the towel. They keep persevering.
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Was George W. Bush president on 9/11?

The most extraordinary kerfuffle has broken out between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. You may recall that during the second Republican debate, when Trump said that the poor record of George W. Bush helped lead to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and was a reason to be wary of his brother, Jeb Bush made the assertion to loud applause that his brother had ‘kept us safe’.
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