Who are these creepy old senators?

Roy Moore, the controversial former chief justice of Alabama’s supreme court who seems to have had a life-long penchant for very young girls, news of which contributed to his loss to Democrat Doug Jones for the senate seat in 2018, has said that he will run again, much to the consternation of Donald Trump and the Republican party leadership who had thought that this was a senate seat that they would easily recapture in 2020 with any extreme Republican candidate who was not tainted by suspected pedophilia. That seems to be the only line that they draw.

They have vowed to try and stop him from winning the Republican nomination in the primary but I was struck by a comment from one of the current Republican senators who was appalled by the prospect of having Moore as a colleague. Sen. Martha McSally (R-Arizona) was quoted as saying, “Give me a break. This place has enough creepy old men,”

Who are these creepy old senators? Inquiring minds want names, Martha!

Trump’s disappointing re-election rally crowd

We know that Donald Trump is an insecure narcissist and wants desperately to project the image that he is massively loved by everyone. We also know that he is an inveterate liar. These things come together when he lies about the crowds at his rallies and at his inauguration. On Wednesday he kicked off his 2020 re-election campaign at a rally in Florida. Suspiciously, he held it in an arena that only seats 25,000 people, a decent size but not huge and that was likely because he loves to boast that he gets sellout crowds at his rallies and that there is massive overflow. And sure enough, the Trump people claimed that they had issued over 100,000 tickets and had to arrange for a screen outside so that the huge overflow crowd could see their hero.
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Stunning upset in cricket World Cup

Against all odds Sri Lanka, whose performance in the tournament so far can only be described as utterly pathetic, today beat England, a team strongly tipped to win the tournament, in an exciting match. This was the first real upset so far in the tournament where the favorites have tended to win easily, the closest contender being the victory by Bangladesh over the West Indies though in that case it was an upset when viewed as a relative newcomer to Test cricket beating a Team that has been around for a long time. But Bangladesh has been surging recently while West Indies has been uneven and so the result was not really stunning.
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This is where you end up when defending Trump administration policies

If you work in the Donald Trump administration, you will find yourself steadily violating any ethical principles you might have started with until at some point, you end up not having even a shred of decency. That point was reached on Tuesday for Sarah Fabian, the justice department lawyer arguing before a US Appeals Court that the appalling conditions under which detained migrant children taken into custody at the US-Mexico border were being treated, such as keeping them in freezing cages where they had to sleep on the floor, were justified.

Fabian claimed that these children are not entitled to what most people would consider the most basic sanitary necessities. This was in a court case where the administration was sued that they were not complying with the requirements laid down under the earlier Flores guidelines for how children should be treated. (Incidentally, cases are always referred to by the names of the party or parties involved though Donald Trump, genius that he is, thought that Flores was the name of the judge who made the ruling and because it was a Hispanic name, concluded that it meant he was a biased judge.)
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What women clergy hear from male clergy and congregants

In their college course evaluations, female faculty get a lot more comments about their appearance (some highly sexual) than male faculty members. It appears that the situation is the same for female clergy. In this video, male clergy were asked to read the comments made to their female colleagues. They had not been told the comments ahead of time.
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The case against war with Iran

On the public radio program 1A this morning Vali Nasr, Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, discussed what the shooting down of a US surveillance drone by Iran might lead to and it is well worth listening to. He made the point that Iran might just be fed up with the US essentially trying to strangle that nation’s economy with its sanctions policy. He argues that the deal that was signed between Iran on one hand and the US, Russia, China, France, UK, and Germany on the other required that the earlier sanctions should be eased in return for commitments made by Iran regarding its nuclear program. He said that while Iran has kept its end of the bargain, the other nations have not and the promised sanctions relief has not come about.
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Supreme Court rules that the Bladensburg cross can remain

The large cross that was on public land in a busy intersection in Bladensburg, Maryland and is maintained at taxpayer expense has been the target of litigation for some time. Its continued presence had been challenged by the American Humanist Association, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the Center for Inquiry. A US District Court judge had initially ruled that the cross did not violate the Establishment Clause but the First Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 ruling overturned that ruling and said it had to come down.

But today the US Supreme Court reversed that decision yet again so the cross can stay. You can read the 7-2 majority opinion by justice Samuel Alito and the dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor here.
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