Punishing Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year prison term for essentially being a whistleblower and revealing US atrocities in its war in Iraq. She can be excused for feeling that it is grossly unfair that she has received such a stiff punishment while those who authorized this shameful war that has caused such immense death and misery, using lies and other deceptions to persuade the public to support them, are walking around free.
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Barbarians at the gate

As I have noted before, Republican voters are a remarkably loyal bunch. Once they have picked someone to support for whatever reason, pretty much everything else is shrugged off. This loyalty manifested itself with Sarah Palin and now we see it again with Donald Trump. It seems like his derogatory comments about Mexicans, John McCain, and women have done nothing to shake the loyalty of his fans. It is, I suppose, possible that each of those comments alienated a considerable segment of his people but at the same time attracted new supporters so that the net number of supporters remained stable while the people changed. But that series of coincidences seems unlikely. It seems more plausible to assume that the same supporters are sticking with Trump whatever the party and media establishment say about him.

That raises the question: Who the hell are these people?
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Denis Leary

Comedian Denis Leary is a frequent guest on The Daily Show. It is clear that he and Stewart have a long friendship dating back to before they were famous and their exchanges have the teasing quality of good friends relaxing together, though Leary’s humor has always had a slightly edgier quality. I quite often skip the celebrity interviews but enjoy Leary’s appearances.
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Federal judge rules that Kentucky clerk must issue same-sex marriage licenses

You may recall Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky, whom I have been writing about because she refused to let her office issue all marriage licenses because she objected to doing so for same-sex couples since, of course, Jesus told her she would be a bad girl if she did so. Naturally she was taken to court and just today, US District Judge David Bunning, who is described as a “conservative judge who was appointed by President George W. Bush”, ruled that she had to comply. Despite that, a couple said that they had been turned away again this morning.
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Africa becomes polio free?

Maryn McKenna shares the excellent news that midnight August 11 marked one full year with no cases of polio reported in the whole of Africa. It takes three consecutive years of absence for a region to be designated as polio-free but this step is significant nonetheless, given the opposition by Muslim imams in a few countries that nullified the World Health Organization’s goals of making the entire globe polio-free by the year 2000,
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Thinking the unthinkable

Just a few weeks ago, there was a jocular comment that was circulating along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be funny if the 2016 presidential race ended up being between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders? Yuk! Yuk!” The reason it was so funny of course was because the very idea was absurd. On the one hand you had someone widely seen as a buffoon (a very rich buffoon but a buffoon nonetheless) and on the other someone who called himself a democratic socialist, seen as the kiss of death in a political climate where even the label of liberal was seen as an epithet. It was felt that the Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton machines would easily crush these upstarts once the going got serious.
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