Jeremy Scahill is one of the best journalists around and on a recent appearance on Bill Maher’s show, he talked about what he sees as extremely dangerous trends in recent US politics and that all of the current candidates Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders share culpability in varying degrees in creating them.
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Anyone in the US who is concerned about human rights would likely be familiar with the name Michael Ratner who died of cancer on May 11. He was a lawyer who served as long-time president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and took an all manner of unpopular causes, such as fighting on behalf of Julian Assange and for the rights of Guantanamo detainees, where he won an important victory when the US Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in 2008 that detainees had the right to the writ of habeas corpus. There have been many obituaries about his life and work and I will quote from just two.
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The demographic trends are clear that the percentage of white Americans is slowly declining. After the presidential 2012 election, Republicans blamed their defeat on the wide margins they lost among Hispanics and African-Americans and vowed to improve relations with those communities.
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The next storyline is the will he/won’t he courtship between speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who is the one who is the chair of the party convention, and the presumptive nominee Donald Trump. Although Ryan has been playing coy and hard to get, we know how this will end of course. The person who wins the nomination gets to call the shots and so Paul Ryan will capitulate, the only question being when and how.
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Bernie Sanders won a convincing victory 51.4% to 36.0% over Hillary Clinton in the West Virginia primary. The 15-point margin of victory was well above what the poll averages predicted. This follows his victory in Indiana last week.
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It looks like every late night comedian wants the chance to say a not-so-fond farewell to him and who can blame then? There is something about his smug expression that just begs to be ridiculed. Bee also got Michelle Branch to sing farewell to a montage of the greatest visual hits.
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Later today, the Philippines will officially declare the winner of its presidential elections. There are five candidates running and since there is no run-off, the winner needs only a plurality to become president. I had not been aware until today that the candidate currently leading in the vote count and expected to win, Rodrigo Duterte, has a horrific record and platform and has made no secret for his disdain for democratic checks and balances if they stand in the way of his agenda.
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Right wing commentator Charles Krauthammer is no fan of Donald Trump and in his latest column tries to understand why Republicans voters have chosen him as their standard bearer.
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It is clear that under the guise of religious liberty, opponents of same-sex marriage are determined to wage a kind of long-term guerrilla warfare against it, even if it seems futile to the rest of us since not only has the US Supreme Court struck down any bans on it, public sentiment is also shifting in favor of it.
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When Donald Trump was threatening to win the Republican nomination for president, it spawned the response of some people saying that if he won, they would leave America, and the usual destination mentioned is Canada. Now that he has won the nomination, the threats to leave if he wins the presidency can be expected to increase.
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