They need to look in the mirror

The Obama administration announced today that it will take Cuba off its list of states that sponsor terrorism. This will take effect in 45 days unless Congress votes to deny it, in which case the White House will certainly veto it. Iran, Sudan, and Syria remain on the list.

There is something deeply hypocritical about the US maintaining lists of countries that sponsor terrorism when it engages in acts of violence and subversion all over the world. It is lucky for the US that other nations don’t have such lists (at least none that they disclose publicly) because it would likely be on most lists. That would be embarrassing.

California ballot initiative to shoot gays

The state of California has a system whereby one can put proposed laws on the ballot for a statewide referendum, provided the petition garners a certain number of signatures that this year stands at 365,000. This year a lawyer Matt McLaughlin has petitioned to have on the ballot what he has called the Sodomite Suppression Act and filed it with the state’s attorney general along with the required $200 fee, the first step in getting permission to gather signatures.
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The invisibility of privilege

Once in a while, you get a revealing glimpse about the nature of privilege, especially the fact that those who are the biggest beneficiaries of it are also often the most oblivious. David Brooks, the kind of person who is seen as a serious thinker by The New York Times and NPR, has a column on the new recommendations requiring police to war bodycams that is very revealing of the mindset of the privileged.
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Raiding public pensions

I have written before about how public pensions are being looted by a combination of malpractice by elected officials and greed by investment banks and advisors. The way it works is like this. In order to for the pension funds to be solvent enough to pay out the promised benefits, the elected officials have to set aside a certain amount of money in highly rated securities that have lower returns. What some elected officials do is to divert some of that money to cover expenses since the tax-cutting mania has resulted in local governments not having enough money to meet their needs. Then when the pension funds run low, these elected officials turn to investment firms that promise high rates of return that they say will make up for the shortfall.
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And we’re off!

Hillary Clinton officially announced her candidacy for the presidency yesterday by releasing a two-minute video. This marks the beginning of the third phase of media coverage. The first dealt with mindless speculations about whether she would run, the second dealt with mindless speculations about when she would announce, and now there will mindless speculation about how good her candidacy will be, focusing on her age, her clothes, her looks, her gender, her laugh, her husband, Benghazi, and all the other things that have absolutely no relevance as to how she will be as a president, not to mention polls about those same things.
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Why so many in Latin America still don’t trust the US

For the first time in twenty years, Cuba attended the Summit of the Americas currently underway in Panama. The US had long opposed their participation but increasingly other nations in the region had said that they would not attend if Cuba were still barred. Rather than the Cuba being isolated, as the US intended, US policy against Cuba had resulted in the US becoming isolated.
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The voices we never hear

Our so-called objective media has been giving a lot of coverage to the framework of the deal agreed upon by the P5+1 nations and Iran. But as Glenn Greenwald points out, the people they get to explain and discuss the topics all share the same anti-Iran bias and seem to take their cues from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and they almost never have people who can provide a counterpoint.
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When ‘failure’ may really be a sign of success

We see that yet another Middle Eastern country that the US has been meddling in is slipping into anarchy and chaos. Yemen, where the US has been doing it drone bombing in pursuit of the al Qaeda affiliate group AQAP (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) is now on the verge of becoming a failed state like Libya. In Yemen we see that what was a local power struggle turning into a major regional conflict.
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