Trevor Noah of The Daily Show points out how, because he is the leading candidate of one of the two major political parties, Donald Trump has given permission for people to say things that they may have formerly felt obliged to either suppress or only share with those they were sure shared their views. Now, pretty much anything goes.
When speaking to reporters at the recent global conference in Paris on climate change, president Obama responded to a reporter’s question about Russian involvement in Syria with the following statement.
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I am a big fan of the children’s TV show Sesame Street. I don’t watch it anymore but I used to watch it every day with my children when they were young and I got very fond of the characters on the show, particularly the Muppets, because the program was clever and funny. My children are all grown up now but I still watch some of the clips online where they parody popular culture
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Donald Trump’s increasingly outrageous statements that seem aimed at deliberately alienating, Mexicans, Hispanics, women, the disabled, Jews, Muslims, Asians, and god knows who else (it is hard to keep score), is now leading Republicans to increasingly distance themselves from him. The chorus of Republican condemnations of Trump is steadily increasing in volume. Mike Fernandez, a wealthy Miami patron of the Republican party and Jeb Bush supporter, has said that he would vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump and is running ads against him. Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania and secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, has said that there is not a chance that he will support Trump if he is the party’s nominee.
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He returns to plug one of the issues that he is passionate about and that is to obtain appropriate health care for those 9/11 emergency first responders who got sick breathing in all the dust from the collapsed building as they went about trying to rescue people. He is trying to shame senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and other legislators into doing the right thing.
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Almost the entire political establishment, including almost all his Republican rivals for the nomination and even war criminal Dick Cheney, has attacked Donald Trump’s most recent statement that no Muslims should be allowed to enter the US for the foreseeable future, with Jeb Bush going so far as to call it “unhinged”. Trump, predictably, has brushed off the criticisms.
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There has been so much absurd over-reaction to the San Bernadino shooting that it is hard to know where to begin cataloguing the follies. On his show Late Night with Seth Myers, Myers had an excellent commentary on the ridiculous way the story was covered, the absurdity reaching its peak when the media got access to the shooters’ home.
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There are so many offensive things that people say and do that are reported in the news that I often do not bother to comment on them because to respond to each and every one would become pretty much a full time job. For example, this time of year brings out those who feel that anything other than overtly Christian messages and symbols are an affront and the attempts to make the holidays more inclusive are a sign of discrimination against Christians. This faux war on the nonexistent war on Christmas has reached such a meta-level that it threatens to create a black hole of phoniness.
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An Ohio man who set up a nativity scene featuring zombie versions of Mary, Joseph, the infant Jesus, wise men (and possibly zombie versions of the livestock assuming one can have zombie animals of which I am not sure, since I am not fully abreast of zombiana) has been told by the local authorities to take it down, saying it violates zoning laws.
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The foes of the right to abortions have used the heavily and misleadingly edited videos produced by a group called the Center for Medical Progress to fuel anger at Planned Parenthood and other women’s health groups that conduct abortions as part of their services. Carly Fiorina was one of those who further embellished what she had purportedly seen on the videos, claiming to have seen things that were not there. These actions have led to a spike in threats of violent actions against abortion providers.
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