When the rich cry poor

For someone who has been in politics for so long and who seems to want to carefully craft her image, Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be surprisingly maladroit. She recently said that “the Bible was and remains the biggest influence on my thinking”. Does anyone really believe that bit of shameless pandering to the religious? Then after the silliness about she and her husband being ‘dead broke’ when they left the White House, she later acknowledged that they had made a lot of money since then but claimed that it was by ‘dint of hard work’.
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Sexual assault on college campuses

Jessica Williams and Jordan Klepper from The Daily Show give advice to both men and women about appropriate behavior on college campuses and how to avoid trouble. The clip highlights all the extra precautions that women have to take to protect themselves from becoming the victims of sexual assault on campus and thus acquiring, as George Will would have you believe, the “coveted status of victimhood that confers privileges”.
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How will they woo evangelicals this time?

Apparently the Republican party is going to try and energize the evangelical vote again for the 2014 elections. Apparently the problem is that the old groups like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition have either disappeared or have diminished clout and as a result the numbers of evangelicals who vote has declined, with only a third of the estimated 89 million turning out in 2012.
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Addicted to torture

The US government captured Abu Khattala, a suspect in the Benghazi attacks, and has brought him to the US. He has been charged as a criminal and will be tried in the regular US justice system. But it was not long before politicians started clamoring that he should be sent to Guantanamo and face a military tribunal. And in a survey conducted by Fox News (interpret that as you will), 63% said that he should be treated as an “enemy combatant who should be tried in a military tribunal” while only 29% said that he should go through the regular courts system.
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US Supreme Court upholds Hobby Lobby’s decision to not provide contraception

It looks like Hobby Lobby has won its case. In a 5-4 decision along the usual lines (Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Alito, and Kennedy, all of whom are Catholics by the way), the court said that ‘closely held corporations’ (a specific type of for-profit corporation) each owned and controlled by members of a single family cannot be forced to provide contraception coverage for its employees and should be given the same accommodations as the government gave nonprofit organizations.
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Abuse of government power

Woe to anyone who happens to get on the vindictive side of the US justice system. While there is nothing wrong with the government using its resources to capture criminals and prosecute them, the danger is when it decides to persecute ordinary people using the vast resources at its disposal. We have seen how they are very solicitous of the big financial banks and their executives but they can be tireless and ruthless when ordinary people appear in their sights.
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Ole Costa Rica!

My team for the tournament Costa Rica is through to the quarter finals with a close victory over Greece. After leading 1-0 for most of the game, Greece equalized during injury time but then Costa Rica pulled it through 5-3 on penalty kicks.

This coming Saturday they face the 2010 World Cup losing finalist the Netherlands who beat Mexico 2-1. That is going to be a very tough game for them to win.

The Republican war on the poor continues

I have been harshly critical of those elements in the Democratic party who are sleazy, beholden to corporate interests, and anti-progressive, and the current governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe is a prime example. But it is good to always remember that the two parties are not completely equivalent and that in some areas the differences can have significance.
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Exciting Test cricket

With the advent of the shorter forms of cricket such as the 50-over One Day Internationals and the even shorter 20 over Twenty20 format that almost certainly produce a definite outcome, there has been concern that the traditional five-day Test matches may not be able to match them for excitement. These fears were allayed by the two Test matches just completed between England and Sri Lanka. In both those matches, games that seemed to be drifting to foregone conclusions suddenly experienced dramatic reversals of fortune that led to nail-biting finishes where the outcomes were in doubt right up to the very end. These are the kinds of games that cricket aficionados remember for decades and to have them back-to-back was highly unusual.
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