For pretty much all of us, our first reaction when he hear a car alarm go off is to think “Oh, hell, I hope someone shuts it off soon”. Almost no one thinks about calling the police to tell them that a car is being stolen. I had thought that these were a new invention, within the last two decades or so, but Zachary Crockett writes that they were first developed as far back as 1913.
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Former Texas senator Phil Gramm and one-time Republican candidate for president says that there is only one form of bigotry that is still tolerated in America. Can you guess what it might be? Your first guess might be that it is the bigotry against transsexuals. Or against Mexicans. But that is because you are a bleeding heart liberal. Since Gramm is a conservative Republican, you might think that he is referring to Christians because they never stop claiming victimhood.
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The efforts to fight polio vaccination in some Muslim-majority countries has been a scandal, fueled by a mixture of wrong-headed beliefs by some Muslim clerics about the effect of vaccines and by fears that it is part of some kind of plot by the CIA and other western spy agencies. The latter charge gained credibility because of the shameful use by the US of a fake vaccination scheme to try and find Osama bin Laden but even then there is absolutely no excuse for harassing or murdering workers administering vaccines or preventing children from receiving one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that has eradicated a deadly disease from almost the entire world.
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The issue of undocumented immigrants is turning into a big issue in the Republican primary race and you can be certain that it will feature in a big way in the debates and that any crime committed by such a person is going to get huge amounts of attention and be promoted by Fox News and other conservative media as proof positive that these people are a serious menace and will kill us all in our beds if we don’t immediately round them up and throw them out.
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President Obama is visiting Kenya and Ethiopia and as is usual when an American president visits a non-European country, he uses the occasion to point out flaws in those countries’ policies and gives them advice on what they should do to improve. In Kenya he highlighted the way women are treated as second-class citizens and later called for the relaxing of curbs on free speech in Ethiopia, among other things.
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On Monday, the Oklahoma Supreme Court rejected an attempt by Mary Fallin, the Republican governor of the state, to reconsider its earlier ruling that the presence of the Ten Commandments monument on the capital grounds violated the state constitution and had to be removed, with the chief justice John Reif writing, “We carefully consider the arguments of the commission and find no merit warranting a grant of rehearing.”
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The Republican party, concerned about the outsize presence of Donald trump in their presidential primary race, is reduced to seizing on every gaffe that he or his campaign makes in the hope that it will sink his candidacy. The latest is a news report where Trump’s lawyer blasts a report that claims that ex-wife Ivana accused Trump of raping her during their period of acrimonious splitting up. In the process, the lawyer claims (wrongly) that a man cannot be accused of raping his wife.
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Before Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the conservative media outrage machine was led by abrasive talk show host Morton Downey, Jr., whose programs were a combination of Limbaugh politics and Jerry Springer format, where he would have on political guests who would be goaded to attack each other and create shouting matches, with Downey attacking the liberals and liberal views in the harshest terms. The studio audience would be raucous and conservative audiences loved it.
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With just a week to go before the first Republican primary debate on August 6, the time is drawing near for Fox News to name the ten people who will make it onto the stage. ABC News has done some number crunching and they say that there are eight people who seem likely to make the cut: Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson
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USA Today had an article and video (below) that gives more information on what happened in Cleveland on Sunday where a transit police officer pepper-sprayed a crowd that was in town to attend the national Movement for Black Lives conference. The crowd was protesting the detention of a 14-year old boy the police said had been drunk on a bus.
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