Samantha Bee interviews a wealthy man who has thrown a ton of money at losing candidates over the various elections cycles and is now kind of depressed about it. Going well back to her stint at The Daily Show, Bee has shown herself to be brilliant at faking empathy when interviewing people whom she is not sympathetic to and she does not disappoint here with this hilarious segment from her show Full Frontal.
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Economist Jeffrey Sachs argues that while the release of the Panama Papers has brought welcome attention to the existence of these off-shore tax havens, we should not forget that the roots of the problem lie much closer to home.
The tentacles of corruption reach deep into the UK (and US) financial systems. Banks in the City of London and Wall Street have paid tens of billions of dollars of fines for insider trading, financial fraud, price rigging and other financial crimes in recent years. Yet almost no leading bankers have taken a hit for their organization’s malfeasance. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the major financial firms are part of a global network of organized financial crime.
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Immediately following the Indiana primary that saw a crushing defeat for Ted Cruz that led to him quitting the race and leaving Donald Trump as the Republican party nominee, the ever-readable Matt Taibbi looked at what this election says about the state of democracy in the US and the Republican party in particular. It is a long piece but well worth reading.
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As the chorus of voices from the Democratic party establishment calling on Bernie Sanders to drop out of the race reaches a crescendo, cartoonist Tom Tomorrow asked a very pertinent question a few months ago.
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The violinist Itzhak Perlman is the latest musician to cancel a scheduled performance in North Carolina to protest its abhorrent bathroom laws that discriminate against the transgender community.
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Bernie Sanders won an easy primary victory 54.5% to 45.5% over Hillary Clinton in Oregon while the result in Kentucky is still too close to call although Clinton has a small lead 46.8% to 46.3%. Both these primaries were closed, meaning that only registered Democrats could vote in them and the conventional wisdom has been that such primaries favor Clinton since Sanders is supposedly more popular with independents. Hence his strong showing yesterday must be a source of concern to the Clinton camp.
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Samantha Bee walks us through the process by which evangelical Christians in the US in the 1950s shed their deep disdain for engaging in politics to becoming a powerful political force by the 1980s especially within the Republican party, to then subsequently declining in influence. The Republican choice of Donald Trump this year over the many more religious alternatives such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson who all explicitly highlighted their religiosity shows the extent of the decline, though they are by no means reduced to insignificance.
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A news report in my local newspaper had a headline that must have sent joy through Christians always on the lookout for signs that god exists. It said “Religious painting stops bullet from ripping through home on Cleveland’s East Side.”
The story that followed was a familiar one about someone claiming that their life was saved by a religious icon.
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The problem with running a general election campaign against Donald Trump is that he is all over the place on the issues. He has made it a practice, whether by design or inadvertently I don’t know, of either speaking in broad generalities that could mean anything or reversing his previous stands and then reversing them yet again or suggesting that nothing is fixed and everything is open to negotiation. The only thing he seems to be consistent on is his claim that he can deliver on his promises, even as the promises themselves keep changing or are unclear.
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On Last Week Tonight John Oliver talks about this emergency service that we take for granted and highlights some of the problems that it has and the improvements that are needed. He says that many states and localities do not fund and support it to the extent that is necessary, another example of how far down the road we have gone to cutting into services that serve the public good.
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