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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I mentioned before that US government officials have the practice when visiting countries that it does not consider allies to give them public lectures on what they must do to improve. While this sounds condescending, it is only so if done selectively. I think it is a practice that should be expanded and every time there is a state visit, the visiting dignitary should take the opportunity to point out all the faults of the host country. Unfortunately, many countries do not seem to want to risk angering the world’s only superpower and thus the US has got used to being the only one giving such lectures.
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I wrote earlier that even the mighty propaganda juggernaut that is Fox News led by Roger Ailes had to abruptly reverse course and take Donald Trump back into its bosom after the furious reaction they got from their own viewers at their obvious attempt to sandbag him at the first debate.
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One of the inexplicable things is the relative popularity of Ben Carson among the Republican presidential candidates. He says the most outrageous things in a calm voice and then when he is questioned about it, he takes on a hurt tone and implies that it is so unfair to focus on his words when you should be admiring him for his surgical skills.
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The always-entertaining journalist for Rolling Stone has a long and hilarious piece where he visits many of the Republican candidates’ campaign events in Iowa and provides thumbnail sketches on their attempts to survive the Donald Trump tornado that has hit the Republican party by trying to outdo him in making outrageous comments in order to get any kind of attention.
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Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year prison term for essentially being a whistleblower and revealing US atrocities in its war in Iraq. She can be excused for feeling that it is grossly unfair that she has received such a stiff punishment while those who authorized this shameful war that has caused such immense death and misery, using lies and other deceptions to persuade the public to support them, are walking around free.
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As I have noted before, Republican voters are a remarkably loyal bunch. Once they have picked someone to support for whatever reason, pretty much everything else is shrugged off. This loyalty manifested itself with Sarah Palin and now we see it again with Donald Trump. It seems like his derogatory comments about Mexicans, John McCain, and women have done nothing to shake the loyalty of his fans. It is, I suppose, possible that each of those comments alienated a considerable segment of his people but at the same time attracted new supporters so that the net number of supporters remained stable while the people changed. But that series of coincidences seems unlikely. It seems more plausible to assume that the same supporters are sticking with Trump whatever the party and media establishment say about him.

That raises the question: Who the hell are these people?
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Just a few weeks ago, there was a jocular comment that was circulating along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be funny if the 2016 presidential race ended up being between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders? Yuk! Yuk!” The reason it was so funny of course was because the very idea was absurd. On the one hand you had someone widely seen as a buffoon (a very rich buffoon but a buffoon nonetheless) and on the other someone who called himself a democratic socialist, seen as the kiss of death in a political climate where even the label of liberal was seen as an epithet. It was felt that the Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton machines would easily crush these upstarts once the going got serious.
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