At a recent event in support of his wife’s campaign, Bill Clinton was confronted by Black Lives Matter protestors about how hard his 1994 crime bill affected the black community by putting so many in jail. Kevin Alexander Gray looks at how the myth arose that Clinton was a good friend to the black community and says that the reality is quite different.
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Morten Just has created a text editor called Cleartext (for Macs only) that autocorrects your writing so that your text contains only the 1,000 most common words in the English language. Just says that the goal is to make writing easier to be understood.
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British prime minister David Cameron has been under fire for the revelations in the Panama Papers that his father used that tax shelter and that he benefited from it. He did not help matters by providing many different responses over the first few days, only grudgingly revealing the facts.
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There has been much speculation about a possible contested Republican convention in July if Donald Trump does not arrive there with the 1,237 pledged delegates he needs to give him a majority on the first ballot. It is clear that the main effort right now in the Republican party and even in the mainstream media establishment is to try and prevent that from happening. We have seen an astonishing coordinated attack by the party and media establishments to coalesce against him and now a group of billionaires has joined in the effort. The Stop Trump alliance seems to be increasingly confident that they will be successful though whether this is largely wishful thinking is unclear.
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In the latest investigative segment on his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looks at how poorly the credit reporting agencies function, despite their immense impact on people’s lives.
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The sordid details have emerged about why Dennis Hastert the former speaker of the House of Representatives agreed to pay $3.5 million to someone. It turns out that he had molested students while he was a high school wrestling coach before he went into politics and that this was hush money when they threatened to reveal it.
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Most of you would have seen images of the front page of the Boston Globe newspaper yesterday suggesting what it might look like a year from now in the event that Donald Trump becomes president. You can see it here. It is accompanied by a scathing editorial titled The GOP must stop Trump.
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This is an excellent documentary that deals with a complicated and troubled period in American history and the role in it of an organization that is still shrouded in controversy. The documentary covers the six-year period from 1967 to 1973 that saw the rise and fall of the original Black Panthers. It uses archival footage, mixed with current interviews of former members who look back on those events and provide perspective.
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Bernie Sanders had difficult moment yesterday at the end of a town hall event at the landmark Apollo Theater in Harlem, when a questioner raised some ugly stereotypes about Jews. I thought Sanders handled it as best as he could by addressing the Israel-Palestinian question. The crowd became pretty raucous, largely in support of Sanders and against the questioner. You can see Harry Belafonte sitting on the stage.
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have been invited to take part in an ‘interfaith’ panel to be held at the Cuyahoga Community College’s Western Campus, as part of their Diversity Day Program. The program is open to the public and is titled Voices – A Spiritual Mosaic of Humanity. It will be held on Thursday, April 14, 2016 at noon in the Galleria (Student Services building—center of campus). 11000 Pleasant Valley Road in Parma, OH.
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