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…]
After talking tough like the Hulk about how you don’t want to make him angry because he is dangerous when he is angry, senator Lindsey Graham is now pleading with his opponents not to hurt him, something that The Hulk would never do. [Read more…]
So Congress passed, and president Obama signed into law, the bill that extended government funding until January 15, 2014 and raised the debt ceiling to last until February 7, 2014. So after all the political grandstanding and posturing and interminable news conferences, we seem to have returned to the status quo, set to repeat the process in three months. And to what end? There was no repeal, defunding, delay, or anything other than the most trivial modification made in the Affordable Care Act, the supposed reason for the whole drama. [Read more…]
If the debt ceiling is raised and the government is opened, get ready for more talk of the need for a ‘Grand Bargain’ to cut spending on earned benefits (I refuse to call them by the common but misleading name of entitlements) and other programs that benefit the less well-off in order to rescue the country from the pending disaster caused by runaway debt.
But all that talk is a fraud. [Read more…]
It turns out that devout French Catholics may have been committing blasphemy for the last half-century when saying the Lord’s Prayer. It appears that the official French translation of the line “Lead us not into temptation” was translated into French in 1966 in a way that could be wrongly interpreted. [Read more…]
News reports are emerging that Glenn Greenwald is leaving The Guardian to join a new media venture that is reportedly being funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and possibly others. The parting has been friendly with both Greenwald and Guardian spokespeople expressing mutual respect and gratitude for what they have been able to accomplish together, especially on the blockbuster Edward Snowden revelations. [Read more…]
So it is the morning of the 16th day of the shut down and the stalemate over that and the debt ceiling continues. As is almost universally accepted, this is entirely due to the efforts of a minority of members within the Republican party who seem to be driven by a fervor that has seized on the Affordable Care Act as some kind of demon possessing the body politic that must be exorcised or the nation will plunge over the cliff like the pigs in the Bible. They say they will not accept anything less than a major undermining of the ACA. [Read more…]
Oprah Winfrey apparently has a segment on her network’s program Super Soul Sunday called Soul to Soul. In one episode she talks with swimmer Diana Nyad. It was an interesting conversation in that Nyad flatly says she is an atheist but uses the words god, soul, and spirit to describe various emotional states relating to the awe that she feels about the wonders of the world. [Read more…]