The violinist Itzhak Perlman is the latest musician to cancel a scheduled performance in North Carolina to protest its abhorrent bathroom laws that discriminate against the transgender community.
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The violinist Itzhak Perlman is the latest musician to cancel a scheduled performance in North Carolina to protest its abhorrent bathroom laws that discriminate against the transgender community.
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Bernie Sanders won an easy primary victory 54.5% to 45.5% over Hillary Clinton in Oregon while the result in Kentucky is still too close to call although Clinton has a small lead 46.8% to 46.3%. Both these primaries were closed, meaning that only registered Democrats could vote in them and the conventional wisdom has been that such primaries favor Clinton since Sanders is supposedly more popular with independents. Hence his strong showing yesterday must be a source of concern to the Clinton camp.
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Samantha Bee walks us through the process by which evangelical Christians in the US in the 1950s shed their deep disdain for engaging in politics to becoming a powerful political force by the 1980s especially within the Republican party, to then subsequently declining in influence. The Republican choice of Donald Trump this year over the many more religious alternatives such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson who all explicitly highlighted their religiosity shows the extent of the decline, though they are by no means reduced to insignificance.
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A news report in my local newspaper had a headline that must have sent joy through Christians always on the lookout for signs that god exists. It said “Religious painting stops bullet from ripping through home on Cleveland’s East Side.”
The story that followed was a familiar one about someone claiming that their life was saved by a religious icon.
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The problem with running a general election campaign against Donald Trump is that he is all over the place on the issues. He has made it a practice, whether by design or inadvertently I don’t know, of either speaking in broad generalities that could mean anything or reversing his previous stands and then reversing them yet again or suggesting that nothing is fixed and everything is open to negotiation. The only thing he seems to be consistent on is his claim that he can deliver on his promises, even as the promises themselves keep changing or are unclear.
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On Last Week Tonight John Oliver talks about this emergency service that we take for granted and highlights some of the problems that it has and the improvements that are needed. He says that many states and localities do not fund and support it to the extent that is necessary, another example of how far down the road we have gone to cutting into services that serve the public good.
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The Intercept announced today that they are releasing new information from the documents that were obtained by Edward Snowden. They are beginning with the 166 internal NSA newsletters called SIDtoday that were published for more than a decade beginning in 2003.
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Thanks to reader Norm, I was made aware of this short (73-minute) documentary that consists essentially of Noam Chomsky giving a tutorial explaining the roots of the rapidly growing inequality in the US and the world, with a backdrop of newsreel footage and animation illustrating his points as he goes along. The way I describe it sounds boring but in reality it is intensely absorbing since Chomsky is as lucid as ever.
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According to NASA, , the record-breaking temperatures continue.
The latest NASA data reveals that April was the warmest month ever recorded on Earth. The new record marks the 12th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures, as the scientific consensus remains that human activity is contributing to detrimental climate change across the globe.
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References to political correctness became ubiquitous during the Republican primary race and has spread elsewhere. Recently some well-known comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Bill Maher complained that they were avoiding college campuses on their tours because colleges had become too ‘politically correct’, and audiences were sometimes booing them for jokes that were considered offensive and thus preventing them from offering up edgy humor. But John K. Wilson writes that rather than the audiences being too thin-skinned, it is these very wealthy comedians who are hypersensitive, thinking that they have a right to not have to experience a negative reaction to their humor.
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