The November election puzzle

The Republican party has done a bang up job of pursuing policies that alienate wide swathes of the public, such as women, minorities, LGBT, poor, and young to name the major groups. The only parts of the electorate that has escaped unscathed from are rich (and middle class and poor people who think that the rich are on their side), older, white, male, xenophobic, and racist voters.
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How the government creates compliant journalists

Dan Froomkin said in an ealier post that “the elite press gets tighter and tighter with those to whom it should be adversarial”. This failing seems to be most pronounced within the community of ‘national security’ reporters who seem to be particularly prone to try and be friends with the people they cover and act as mouthpieces for them. One of the most notorious is Dina Temple-Raston of NPR whose failings I have chronicled many times. In his book Goliath, Max Blumenthal gives case after case of how Israeli reporters report as facts what the Israeli national security establishment tells them and essentially become part of the propaganda system.
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The threat posed by immigrant children

Michael Che of The Daily Show speaks to some of the people who are convinced that the influx of refugee children from Central America is all part of some grand covert plan to destroy America, that they are Trojan horses. At the same time, he finds encouraging signs that a lot of people see the issue not as some kind of existential threat to the US but simply as children fleeing persecution.
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