When Bernie sanders was speaking at a rally in Portland, Oregon, a small bird came and rested on his podium, and the crowd went wild.
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When Bernie sanders was speaking at a rally in Portland, Oregon, a small bird came and rested on his podium, and the crowd went wild.
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This is an excellent film that deals with the true story of the Boston Globe‘s 2002 expose of the Catholic Church’s shameful role in covering up the repeated sexual abuse committed by its priests in the Boston diocese and that the cover-up went all the way up the chain to Archbishop Cardinal Law who orchestrated secret settlements with the victims.
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AIPAC (American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee) is one of the key components of the Israel lobby in the US and plays a powerful force in elections, similar to the role that the NRA plays. It advocates for very hardline Israeli policies against the Palestinians and also against any nation that it or the Israeli government deems to be opposed to Israel. Needless to say, it vigorously opposed the nuclear deal between the P5+1 nations and Iran.
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During the period when Marco Rubio and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz were slinging crude insults at each other, observers hoped that the Republican primary race had finally hit bottom and could not descend any further into the muck. We now know that that is not true. The campaign has got sleazier by the day.
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Some states, including Ohio, like to give tax breaks and other forms of subsidies to film companies to make their films there. The case that is made is that making the film in the state brings jobs and revenue that more than compensates for the giveaways, and in addition the state gets lots of free publicity and visibility. At one time, states seemed to be in a bidding war for film companies, much to the latter’s delight.
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The comedian died today at the age of 66. He was a very funny guy, playing a neurotic personality. I used to watch his early TV show It’s Garry Shandling’s Show where he frequently broke the fourth wall. His opening theme prepared you for a zany experience.
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The Daily Show correspondent Adam Lovitt looks at the rise of anti-Semitic events at the rallies for Donald Trump. One has to wonder at the rapidly decreasing number of groups that have not been disparaged at Trump and GOP events.
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Mississippi is a poor state combined with a strong religious tradition and is usually at the bottom of the list when it comes to most measures of social well-being. But there is one area where it excels and that is in the vaccination rate where the rates are the highest in the nation. 99.7% of its kindergartners are fully vaccinated, compared with 94.5% nationwide. I discussed the reasons for this anomaly in a post last year. They achieved it by limiting exemptions from vaccination only under very strict conditions, unlike the much looser exemptions in other states.
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The field of psychology has been reeling because of problems with replicability, in that studies that claim to see certain effects have later had doubts cast upon them when efforts to replicate them failed to do so. Part of the problem is of course dealing with human subjects. But one of the theories that seemed to be pretty robust was based on a study by Roy Baumenister and Dianne Tice that suggested that people have a finite reservoir of will power and that when that is depleted by using it on some tasks, then we have reduced ability to overcome new challenges until that reservoir is replenished.
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The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a very important case involving Obamacare, religion, and contraception. This case does not challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare itself, although the religious groups bringing the suit and its conservative backers had hoped it would. After the Supreme Court twice ruled earlier upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare, it turned down efforts to turn this into a third attempt.
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