Where people like and don’t like to be touched

In our social interactions with others, there is often some touching involved, such as handshakes, hugs, pats, kisses, and so on. Clearly the limits are also influenced by the relationship of the two people and some things that are acceptable with friends may not be so with acquaintances. Complicating matters are gender and culture, with some societies seeking to eliminate contact entirely between strangers or acquaintances. This whole area is full of pitfalls that accompany inappropriate touching and I tend to take the cowardly way out and let the other person initiate the level of touch.
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The auctioning of the presidency

Election observers will long remember the night of the 2012 election when Republican strategist Karl Rove on Fox News went completely off the rails and challenged the results from Ohio. The Republican propaganda TV channel Fox News had called the state for Obama and this pretty much sealed the election and Mitt Romney’s defeat. Rove’s insistence that something must be wrong resulted in the infamous walk by Megyn Kelly through the halls of the studio and down to the room where the statisticians were to ask them whether they were sure of their call, to which they replied that they were 99% sure and refused to budge.
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The once and future jerk

Have you been wondering what Bobby Jindal has been doing since his run for the Republican nomination fizzled out? Me neither. I was about to write that his campaign had gone up in flames but that would be inaccurate since it never even got off the ground and the words ‘fizzled out’ seemed more appropriate. But I came across this editorial from the state’s largest newspaper that shows that as his last days as governor of Louisiana approach, he remains a true jerk.
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Let the backroom deals commence!

A group of about 50 religious conservatives led by the odious Family Research Council and its equally odious leader Tony Perkins met in secret to see who they would collectively throw their support behind in the Republican race. They felt that Republicans lost in previous elections because the party’s establishment put forward candidates who were not conservative enough
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Other reactions to the debate

When I review things, I try to make a point of not reading other reviews before I write, to avoid getting swayed by others’ opinions. Of course this means that I often miss things that more knowledgeable or discerning observers pick up on, but that is fine because different people are attuned to different things. But now I have had time to read around the topic and here are some interesting reactions.
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The Republican debate sounded like an ISIS recruitment event

The fifth Republican debate last night was on the topic of national security and this is exactly the kind of topic that Republicans love, because it enables you to talk tough and freely advance the most preposterous suggestions knowing full well that such fact-free speculations carry no costs. But in order to make their case that the US needed tough new leadership, they had to start with a baseline where things are really bad so all the candidates praised the abilities of ISIS to the skies, describing it as this immensely powerful and sophisticated force that was expanding its territory by leaps and bounds and threatening the entire world. ISIS could take clips of the debate and make it into a recruitment video, to impress young people around the world that the US was quaking in its boots in fear of their power.
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