Now that the shut down has ended, we can expect to see focus shift (at least until the next doomsday on January 15, 2014) to the question of immigration. Because of the rising numbers of Hispanics in the US partly fueled by immigration, there will be greater focus on the views of Hispanics are on various issues. [Read more…]
I have been trying to understand some of the arcane issues surrounding the way the US government is run and what follows is what I have been able to learn. Take it with a grain of salt since I am neither an economist nor an accountant.
The current debt limit, the maximum amount that the government is allowed to borrow, was raised on May 19, 2013 to $16.70 trillion, which is projected to be reached on October 17, 2013. When the government’s expenditures exceed the amount it has in its checking account, the government is authorized to sell US Treasury notes to raise cash make up the difference provided the total amount does not exceed that limit. [Read more…]
It is no secret that the leadership of the Republican party would like to re-open the government by passing a clean continuing resolution without any other provisions and also to raise the debt-ceiling limit. It is also clear that there are more than enough Republican votes in the House of Representatives to join up with the Democrats to do so. The number of Republicans who refuse to do is lies anywhere from 30 to 80, not small but nowhere near enough to stop this from happening, if the Republican leadership were to bring it to the floor. [Read more…]
There was an interesting table giving the percentages of religious affiliations of members of Congress and comparing them with the population at large. It turns out that it is slowly becoming more diverse over time. [Read more…]
Lawrence E. Rafferty writes about the appalling line of questioning that a woman received at a military judicial proceeding over allegations of rape. He quotes from a report in the New York Times:
For roughly 30 hours over several days, defense lawyers for three former United States Naval Academy football players grilled a female midshipman about her sexual habits. In a public hearing, they asked the woman, who has accused the three athletes of raping her, whether she wore a bra, how wide she opened her mouth during oral sex and whether she had apologized to another midshipman with whom she had intercourse “for being a ho.”
Regular readers of this blog likely have noticed that I have not been covering beauty contests with sufficient due diligence so here are some items to make up for that deficiency. [Read more…]
I have been hard on NPR for sometimes seeming like a propaganda outlet for the Pentagon but I have to credit Scott Simon and the Weekend Edition Saturday team for airing an interview with a Syrian that ran counter to the usual narrative. The interviewee was Nada Keuttnen, someone who acts a ‘fixer’ for NPR and other western journalists in Damascus to help them navigate the area and meet people. This is just one person’s view, of course, but it was a change from what we normally hear in the western media. [Read more…]
I have been gratified that this blog seems to attract a sophisticated and knowledgeable commentariat, people who add greatly to the information and quality of the discourse. I have learned a lot from them. Hence it is surprising and a little jarring to once in a way find comments that seem to display a level of argument that is well below the norm. I usually treat them as momentary aberrations and ignore them but there has been one recurring theme that perhaps needs to be addressed. [Read more…]
Clare Daly calls him a war criminal and a hypocrite in parliament and accuses the Irish government of ‘pimping’ and ‘prostituting’ their country in service to the Americans. [Read more…]