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A Banner Year for Third Parties with Clinton and Trump’s Negatives?
“Conventional wisdom in this most unconventional year of all suggests that the Libertarian nominee will almost certainly be the most serious threat to two-party hegemony in November, but that role might actually be filled by Jill Stein, a Harvard-educated physician and pioneering environmental and health activist waging her second bid for the White House on…
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Orlando: FBI Only Releasing What Makes Government Look Good
“Predictably, the FBI censored details that should have led them to raise questions about Mateen’s invocation of ISIS. It made no mention of what [FBI Director James] Comey did: that Mateen also invoked al-Nusra and the Tsarnaev brothers (presumably in the calls to the crisis negotiation team), which doesn’t make sense. So rather than elucidating,…
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Post-Coup Brazil: Indigenous Killings, Land Grabbing, TIAA Profits
“Historically, Indigenous and peasant communities in Brazil have resisted against violence and displacement. Land concentration is a root cause of social and economic inequality, in a country where 1 percent of large landowners control over 90 percent of agricultural land. In the past 12 years,390 Guarani Kaiowa Indigenous people were assassinated in the state of…
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Before Orlando Massacre, FBI Tried To “Lure” Mateen in Terror Plot
“It looks like it’s pretty much standard operating procedure for preliminary inquiries to interview the subject or pitch the person to become an informant and/or plant an undercover or informant close by to see if the person bites on the suggestion. … In the case of Mateen, since he already worked for a security contractor…
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Obama Meets with Saudis, U.S. Armed and Attacking Yemen
The New York Times recently published his piece “Obama Shouldn’t Trade Cluster Bombs for Saudi Arabia’s Friendship,” which states: “He should avoid doing what he did at Camp David last May, the last time he met with [the Gulf Cooperation Council]: promise more arms sales. Since Mr. Obama hosted that meeting, the United States has…
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Is Clinton’s Campaign Controlling Haitian Policy?
“The U.S. State Department opposed the verification process and sought to finish Haiti’s elections before the U.S. general election campaign begins in earnest this summer. The department’s overriding — though unofficial — concern has been that undue attention to Haiti might negatively affect Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. It desperately wants to keep the results of…
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Attacks, Foreign Policy and Homophobia
“What’s interesting about this particular killer is that not only, of course, was he deeply disturbed in many ways, including … [being] a man with great homophobia. Not only do we know all this, but his views regarding, let’s say, what the Clinton and Trump campaigns call ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ seems rather incoherent. At some…
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LGBT Activists Against Militarization and Surveillance
“More surveillance would not have stopped this horrific attack on our LGBTQ community. That’s because mass government surveillance is not intended to keep us safe, it’s intended to keep us in line. The population of queer people of color, predominantly latinxs, who were targeted by this attack, are already disproportionately endangered by corporate and government…
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Orlando, Trump, Clinton, FBI & Connecting Dots to “War on Terror”
“The shooting in Orlando is tied to the ‘war on terror,’ but not in the way Trump has been arguing. Most Americans still do not connect the dots that the increasing violence occurring domestically: mass shootings, ‘active shooters,’ hate crimes and acts of terror (which frankly all blur together) are not only blowback from but…
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Orlando Shooting, Queer Thoughts
“The Orlando mass shooting is a tragic atrocity that is, at the very least, partially attributable to the multiple fundamentalisms spawned by the political maneuverings of Washington and its ‘moderate’ fundamentalist allies in the Muslim world, particularly Saudi Arabia. While it is still too soon to determine the veracity of the narratives around the shooter’s…
