Torture

John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight has another excellent report, this time discussing the Senate torture report and the gruesome details it describes of what was done and how it shows that torture does not work. Even Helen Mirren reading the report cannot hide the disgusting brutality of the practices that the US government carried out.

Mind you, this was just from the summary of the report. The government refuses to release the full report and you can be sure that it contains far worse material.
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Are you poor?

We talk about the poor and rich and middle class and can even classify people into those categories based on metrics such as income and wealth. But if we ask people directly to describe themselves, my guess is that fewer than we expect will describe themselves as currently being poor. This is because the subjective and objective interpretations of the word are quite different.
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Ben Carson’s evasions on discrimination against gays

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson was asked a straightforward question as to whether he thought that the LGBT community was discriminated against. But the party’s candidates are in the tough position of opposing same-sex marriage without wanting to be seen as anti-gay bigots. They seem to think that even conceding a simple fact like the existence of discrimination would make them seem to be too ‘soft’ on gays by their rabid base.
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A fundamental and shameful principle of western journalism

Glenn Greenwald gives yet another example of how journalists in establishment western media collude with their governments to spread propaganda against those whom the government perceives as its enemies, using as its favorite tactic information given to the media by officials who hide behind anonymity so that when their lies are exposed, they escape accountability.
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A ‘free market’ solution to college debt?

In order to address the problem of many students graduating from college with huge debts, Bernie Sanders has proposed that all state universities provide free education as an investment in the nation’s future by enabling the creation of a more educated work force. The idea is that freed from such debt, graduates will be able to choose worthwhile careers rather than ones that pay a lot so that they can retire their debt. Sanders points out that many developed countries provide free higher education to their students. Even some developing countries do so. For example, my own university education in Sri Lanka was completely free.
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Republicans repeating errors of 2012

In early 2013, following their convincing defeat in the presidential elections in 2012, the Republican party commissioned a study to do some serious soul-searching as to what the problem was and what they needed to do to make their party more appealing, especially to the young, women, and Latinos. The result was a 97-page report (quickly dubbed an ‘autopsy’) that criticized the the party’s attitude towards those major demographic groups and recommended wholesale changes.
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