Paul Waldman at the Washington Post asks why the "liberal" media seems so bent on making Hillary Clinton into the "corrupt" candidate, when Donald Trump's corruption is more palpable. I don't think Mrs. Clinton isn't corrupt -- I'm more inclined to think she's just very good at hiding her corruption -- but covering Mr. Trump's bizarre/bigoted/stupid utterings ad nauseam does seem to be a way of not covering business dealings for which, frankly, we have a lot more evidence of corruption than we have for anything Mrs. Clinton has done. You have to wonder if that's the whole idea -- certainly it is for Mr. Trump. (And while the "liberal" media doesn't look very hard at the Clinton Foundation, since the "liberal" media are frequently Foundation donors, they sure did look awful hard at Benghazi and her emails, which an alien visitor to this planet would find quite bizarre.)
The incomparable David Dayen tells us about "The Big Problem With The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Super Court That We’re Not Talking About" -- namely, that banksters have already begun to turn "investor-state dispute settlement" into a giant casino, where corporations can buy, say, solar power facilities in Spain just as Spain is cutting solar power plants and pretend they've been "wronged." And because ISDS has so little transparency built-in, there's no telling if someone funding an investor's suit today becomes an "aggrieved" investor tomorrow. Read to the end, so you can learn why we never even needed a mechanism for foreign investors to get justice from other nations: "very rich investors...have the power to purchase insurance against these kind of political risks. There’s no reason why it should be the taxpayer [who] pays."
Adam Johnson at FAIR catches The Guardian publishing a fairly positive, Gates Foundation-sponsored piece about Bridge Academies International-sponsored education privatization initiatives in Liberia -- without noting that Bill Gates himself is a major investor in Bridge Academies International. Synergy! Possibly The Guardian thinks noting the article is itself sponsored by the Gates Foundation lets them off the hook, but not very many people know Bill Gates has invested in (not donated to!) Bridge Academies, so that would be lazy thinking on their part. I don't think privatizing public schools is the answer in Liberia, either -- I think the answer there is the same as it is everywhere: making public officials accountable to their government's owners, the people.
Various right-wingers would like to prevent Congress from reconvening for a lame-duck session at all, using the argument that representatives who've been kicked out of office shouldn't get to make big policy decisions. I find the spirit of that argument sympathetic, I suppose, and not necessarily because this lame-duck could include ramming through a "free" trade deal the American people don't want, but not every lawmaker is going to get kicked out of office on Election Day, and everyone knows new Congressfolk get inaugurated in January, so moving the inauguration date to, say, the day after Election Day would be a better solution to that problem, if it's a problem worth solving. I also think Rep. Dent's assessment -- that folks who support ending the lame-duck are "just looking for an excuse to do nothing" -- is fairly accurate.
Finally, you may have heard about Maine Gov. Paul LePage's assertion that blacks and Hispanics account for "90-plus percent" of all heroin trafficking-related arrests in his state, but it's nice to know, I guess, that the story told by actual crime statistics doesn't even vaguely resemble that assessment. The FBI doesn't keep such statistics for Hispanics, but a mere 7% of total drug arrests in Maine were black folks in 2014; even if the black population of Maine is only around 1%, you still have to account for racial profiling in arrests -- and, ah, 7% is nowhere near "90-plus percent". Word on the street is that Mr. LePage gets his "90-plus percent" figure from his vast collection of newspaper clippings of drug arrests; setting aside the possibility that he just "forgets" to clip reports of white arrests, you'd think he'd have more important things to do on his work time than scrapbooking. I long for the day when we never have to speak of Paul LePage again.
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