Counteracting the billionaires in US politics

The US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United has opened the floodgates to money in US politics, since it ruled against limiting the amount of money that private groups can spend on elections. There are estimates that the 2016 election will see about $10 billion spent, an obscene amount. The influence of money has always been large but now it is so massive and the Federal Election Commission is so dysfunctional that the head of the FEC has pretty much thrown her hands up in the air and said that she cannot control the abuses anymore.
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Whistleblower of APA complicity in torture vindicated

Jean Maria Arrigo is a 71-year old psychologist who for nearly a decade tried to expose the complicity of the American Psychological Association in the Bush administration’s torture program and for her pains was subjected to a campaign of harassment by leading officials of the APA, often done behind closed doors, and had her warnings treated with indifference by the bulk of the membership.
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Jerry Seinfeld and Stephen Colbert talk over coffee

Jerry Seinfeld has a comedy series where he invites a fellow comedian to have coffee with him and they drive to a coffee shop, have breakfast, and drive back, just talking all the while. The series is called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (naturally) and is a nice chance to see comedians have an unscripted conversation, though the footage is edited.

His latest guest was Stephen Colbert.
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The difficulty of teaching tolerance

Omar Currie is a 25-year old second-year third-grade elementary school teacher in Charlotte, NC. He noticed that one of the children in his class was being bullied and called ‘gay’ in a derogatory way by fellow students. In order to make the child feel that he was not alone and to teach children tolerance and acceptance, he recalled that he had heard in his teacher-education program about a book called King & King by Linda De Haan and Stern Nijland that is a fable that tells the story of two princes who fall in love and get married. Since the class was reading fairy stories, he thought that book would make for a timely inclusion. The book was not available in his school library but his assistant principal had a copy and he borrowed it and read it to the class.
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What happened to the death panel hysteria?

You may recall that when Obamacare was first introduced, one of the features that critics seized on was the fact that doctors would be reimbursed for counseling Medicare patients on end-of-life care. This was taken as proof that the government was seeking to cut costs by condemning grandma to death by cutting off life-saving treatment for those who were no longer able to live productive lives. As a result of the furor over what were called ‘death panels’, that feature was removed.
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The radicalization of Max Blumenthal

I have followed the work of journalist Max Blumenthal for a long time. He was a correspondent for the magazine The Nation among other publications and his forte was to document the follies of right wing politics in the US. He would often go with a camera crew to the functions hosted by various right wing political and religious groups and interview the ordinary attendees and any dignitaries he could collar and then post videos of what they said on the internet. Since the people at these events said the most ridiculous and extreme things, his videos were both amusing and disturbing.
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