Problem watching Comedy Central videos

I got the complaint below from a regular reader of my blog about his inability to view the Comedy Central videos that I embed. He has submitted the problem to the tech gurus here by clicking on the ‘Tech Issues’ link at the top left but I thought that tech savvy readers may also be able to help him out. Has anyone had had a similar problem or any advice for what he should do? I should note that he lives in the US, so this is not one of those cases where streaming is being deliberately blocked.
[Read more…]

Suggestion to reduce police abuse: Raise income taxes

As the nationwide unrest over the harassment and killing of people, especially poor and black, by police continues, Jack Hitt at Mother Jones notes that many of these violent confrontations began with what appear to be really trivial offenses and that this can be traced back to local governments using the fines generated by minor offenses as a way of plugging budget shortfalls.
[Read more…]

Good luck with the equal time thing

One of the problems with the coming Republican debate on Thursday is that with 10 candidates in a two-hour format, and allowing for the time taken by the moderators for their questions, that averages out to at most 10 minutes per person. But the stage will contain people who are anxious to make a big impression and want to make sure they are noticed. Furthermore, they are not used to just waiting silently and this can pose a problem for the moderators if people start interrupting each other.
[Read more…]

Bloom County is back!

Older readers may remember the excellent comic strip Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed that featured a bunch of zany adults, children, and animals and touched on all manner of topics and political commentary in the manner of Doonesbury. It ran from 1980 until 1989 when he retired the strip. He continued with a spin-off, a Sunday only strip called Outland that ran until 1995. After that ended, he started a new Sunday only strip Opus in 2003 featuring the beloved penguin of that name. That ended in 2008.

But apparently the opportunity for satire presented by the current Republican presidential race and Donald Trump was too much for Breathed to resist and on July 13, he announced that he was starting a new strip called Bloom County 2015 and bringing back most of the original cast of characters.

You can see a recent strip where Opus, who has been asleep for 25 years, tries to come to terms with the world today.

Bloom County 2015

To follow the new strip, you can go Breathed’s Facebook page where the first of the new strips starts on July 13.

Bernie Sanders gains on Hillary Clinton

While Donald Trump has riveted people’s attention to the Republican race for the nomination, let us not forget that the Democrats also have a race. It has not drawn much attention since the pundits initially assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to win in a walk but recent events have suggested that Bernie Sanders is not merely a sideshow. He has succeeded to some extent in beating back the fringe candidate label and is thus getting some of the valuable free publicity that comes with reporters for national publications covering his campaign.
[Read more…]

Once again, Fox News takes on Jon Stewart and it does not end well

This time it was about the two sinister, secret meetings between Jon Stewart and president Obama where it was insinuated that they had coordinated a policy agenda. It never seems to dawn on Fox News that trying to attack Stewart and The Daily Show never fails to boomerang on them. They seem to be really slow learners. And as Stewart says, just because you don’t know something does not mean it is a secret.
[Read more…]

Why evangelicals and neoconservatives are trying to stop the Iran deal

It is a cliché that politics makes for strange bedfellows but surely one of the strangest is that between the hardline pro-Israel evangelicals in the US on the one hand and the extreme right-wing politicians in Israel and their neoconservative allies and the Israel lobby in the US on the other. The strong bonds between them are not based on any fondness for each other but purely due to each side seeing the other as serving its own interests.
[Read more…]