Economics writer David Cay Johnson is a long-time Donald Trump watcher and in an interview on Democracy Now! says that there are a whole lot of unsavory elements in the way that he has done business, using undocumented labor, kickbacks, union-busting, tax-avoidance, corporate welfare, and others. Johnson lists 21 questions that should be asked of him.
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The people at Bad Lip Reading have figured it out and released the video.
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Donald Trump has raised the stakes in the Republican party’s discussion about immigration by calling for the end of so-called ‘birthright citizenship’ that automatically confers US citizenship to anyone born within US jurisdiction irrespective of the status of their families. This move by him, coupled with his idea of forcible removal of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, has raised the nativist stance of the party to a whole new level.
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Lost in the news shuffle has been another revelation from the Edward Snowden archive about the close collusion between AT&T and the NSA, where the telecommunications company has been having a decade-long partnership with the spy agency and handing over metadata on billions of emails. Kim Zetter explains the arrangement
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Evangelical Christians are a major part of the Republican voting base and I was curious about how they felt about Donald Trump, since he does not seem to be particularly religious. At least, he does not talk about god at every opportunity. Sarah Posner writes that Trump has split the evangelicals along unusual lines, with so-called ‘born again’ Christians being less favorable to him, and those evangelicals who do like him being those who care more about projections of American machismo than they do about religion.
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The deliberate killing of innocent people in the middle of war zones is reprehensible. There may be no rational reason why some deaths arouse stronger feelings of anger and sadness than others since all such deaths are equally tragic to their loved ones. The killing of children is one case where one can hazard a guess as to why it strikes even strangers more deeply. There is something about a life pointlessly snuffed out before it has fully experienced life that makes it especially sad.
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From Funny or Die, we have a video where people recount their experiences with going to Planned Parenthood and what they went through when they sought their services.
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There are many things wrong with Guantanamo, the most basic one being that it exists at all. It is a place where human rights, and humans too, go to die. People have been tortured there, rectally force-fed, and subjected to all manner of indignities and kept in prison without being brought to trial because the government has felt that it could not win a legal case against them.
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In the wake of the Louisiana theater shooting on July 23, that state’s governor Bobby Jindal announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign. This came as a shock to many people who had (a) never heard of Bobby Jindal before and if they had (b) had no idea that he was even running for president. He must have resumed his campaign again since he participated in the Republican candidates forum on August 6 but nobody noticed that either.
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Immigration has become a major topic in the Republican race and has placed the party in a quandary. In order to win the presidential election, their eventual nominee will need to attract Hispanic votes and a moderate stance on the issue of undocumented immigrants would help. But in order to win the nomination, they have to adopt the hardline stance that their primary voters seem to want. Any suggestion of giving the undocumented some legal status, even short of citizenship, has been denounced as an ‘amnesty’ and is seen as political poison. Marco Rubio tried to venture there and had to beat a hasty retreat from his earlier co-authorship of a plan to provide citizenship for at least some of them, because of the flak he received.
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