As was to be expected, the Hobby Lobby case was just the beginning. The infamous verdict by the US Supreme Court in that case that for-profit companies need not comply with the Obamacare provisions that their health insurance companies cover birth control if they have religious objections laid the groundwork for further conservative assaults on women’s health and reproductive rights.
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The recent killing by drones of two Americans held hostage has opened up the debate once again about this policy. President Obama has felt obliged to apologize for their deaths. Of course Americans have been killed by drones before and there have been many, many innocent civilians killed also but since they were Muslims, they did not count and president Obama, who seems to love the drone assassination program, never felt obliged to apologize for any of those many deaths except in an oblique way.
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Many of the stories in the Bible are simply appalling, recounting awful behavior by god against people and people against people. But because of a successful whitewashing effort by the church and its followers, people have managed to hide or sugarcoat the worst elements of the stories.
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As bystanders increasingly start recording police interactions with the public using their ubiquitous smartphones, the police have responded by sometimes ordering them to stop (though courts have held that people have a right to record as long as they are not interfering with the police actions), confiscating the cameras and destroying the videos, or sometimes even destroying the cameras by smashing them on the ground.
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The biggest issue that the US faces is the attempt by the oligarchy to take over complete control of all aspects of the country. What is clear is that they want to go all the way and remove anything that stands between them and unbridled profits. This means dismantling regulations that protect the public interest, underfunding regulatory agencies so that they cannot even enforce what regulations are left, removing any oversight under the guise of cutting down the bureaucracy, changing the tax structure to benefit the wealthy even more, and divert to themselves all the funding that goes to the mass of people in the form of public education, public services, and social welfare programs, under the guise of making government more efficient or preventing ‘moochers and looters from exploiting the system.
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One of the developments that I welcomed was that boxing seemed to have declined in popularity and esteem as more and more people realized that it was barbaric to watch two people try to beat each other senseless and turned way from it. I was hoping that American football would witness a similar drop for the same reason.
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The last week has seen the deaths of singers Ben E. King who used to sing with The Drifters and died at the age of 76, and Jack Ely, lead singer of The Kingsmen, who died at the age of 71.
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It has been amusing to see how police unions have reacted to the recent actions by prosecutors to charge police officers with crimes. They whine that the prosecutors are rushing to judgment because of public protests, that police are not being given the benefit of the doubt or the presumption of innocence, and that accused officers are not getting their due process rights.
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Here is the video of Bernie Sanders announcing his candidacy for president. It is a short and powerful speech that hits hard on the key issue that we have become an oligarchy and have to take back control from the wealthy if democracy is to have any hope of surviving.
Jon Stewart had a lot of fun pointing out the absurdity of the hypotheticals that some justices raised as possible objections to allowing marriage to include same-sex couples. As Jon Stewart pointed out, these objections reeked of desperation since they could be easily countered. He seemed to think that this signified that June would bring in a verdict in favor of same-sex marriage. I hope he is right though I am not as hopeful that it will be a clear-cut one.
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