Marco Rubio bowed the the inevitable and accepted that the voters really don’t like him that much, withdrawing from the Republican primary race after finishing a distant second to Donald Trump in his home state of Florida and coming in dead last in the other four states of Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina, and Missouri, getting less than 10% in each of those contests.
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On her show Full Frontal, Samantha Bee talks with a diverse group of supporters of Donald Trump as to why they support him despite his xenophobia, racism, and advocacy of violence.
I have got to hand it to Bee. Listening to the rationalizations of this group would have driven me up the wall and I would have started yelling. But she manages to keep it all together. That’s professionalism.
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In the opening match of the World T20 tournament that began today, New Zealand pulled off a great win against hosts India. New Zealand batted first and managed to score just 126/7 in their allotted 20 overs, a poor score in a format where you need to score about 160 runs if you bat first. But India suffered a spectacular batting collapse and were all out for a mere 79, giving the Kiwis a big victory.
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An hour or so ago, I voted for Bernie Sanders in the Ohio Democratic primary. I went to my usual polling place near my home and there was no line at all though people were there voting. It is hard for me to compare the turnout based on my own experience since normally I voted early in the day before going to work. This time, taking advantage of my retired status, I went in the middle of the day.
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The tale of Marco Rubio is in some ways a sad but familiar one of a man whose vaulting ambition leads him to try and grab the crown before it is his time and fails. We have the spectacle of a young man, gifted with good looks, fluency of speech, and the ability to win elections at the state and local level, who then decides that he could become president even before he has built up a record of concrete achievements. In order to do that he takes careful stock of whose support he needs and carefully cultivates everyone who can help him on his way, such as the party establishment and big money backers.
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On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discusses the fight between Apple and the FBI about the latter’s demand that Apple weaken its encryption sufficiently to let law enforcement gain access to the data in phones. Meanwhile, other technology companies such as Facebook, Google, and Snapchat are also increasing the security of their products.
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Pretty much everyone knows that Hillary Clinton put her foot in it when she praised Nancy Reagan after her death, listing as one of her accomplishments that she helped start a national conversation over AIDS. This created a serious backlash by those well aware that the Reagans, while in the White House, not only did not do anything about it until his final year in office, but that White House press briefings, when responding to questions about the issue, became chuckle-fests with innuendo and snide references to the ‘gay plague’.
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Tomorrow is the day that Ohio holds its primary election. Needless to say, I will be voting for Bernie Sanders and hope he does well. The ACLU of Ohio has put out a three-step guide to voting.
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Today March 14 is so-called ‘pi day’ where in the month/day format in the US for the date gives 3/14. The number pi (the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle) is a source of endless fascination because it is so basic and yet so ubiquitous in all areas of science and mathematics and everyday life. Here is a fascinating article by Xiaojing Ye on the search for obtaining increasingly precise values of pi. It contained many nuggets of information that were quite new to me.
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As she frets that Bernie Sanders has much greater success in appealing to younger voters than she has, Saturday Night Live reveals that Clinton has put out a new ad that tries to get them to like her.
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