John Oliver on the Kavanaugh hearings

Although the Brett Kavanaugh hearings have been analyzed extensively, John Oliver manages to find some aspects that were largely ignored and sheds some new light on why Kavanaugh is a poor choice. He wonders why Republicans have chosen him as the hill they wish to fight and die on, when there are any number of highly conservative judges who do not have the same baggage and would be as eager as Kavanaugh to restrict abortion rights, which seemingly has become the issue they care most about.
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John Oliver on the menace of Facebook

I have posted before about how Facebook has dominated access to the internet is countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka and this has led to the rapid spread of wild and false rumors that have been exploited by Buddhist extremists in those two countries to launch attacks on their Muslim minorities.

In last Sunday’s segment, John Oliver discusses in detail, using Myanmar as an example, how bad Facebook is and how they let things get way out of hand before they started doing anything. He ends the segment with a far more accurate ad for what Facebook really represents.

The mystery of the purloined letters

One of the strange stories to come out of the new Bob Woodward book about the Donald Trump administration is the story of how advisors to Trump would swipe documents from his desk that they thought he should not see or sign. A specific case that was cited was former economic advisor Gary Cohn seeing a letter on Trump’s desk that was awaiting his signature calling for an end to a long standing trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn took the letter away and apparently that was the end of the story. Cohn apparently did something similar with a letter about NAFTA.
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