There is a big difference in the way that Test cricket is played compared to the limited over game. Test matches are time-limited (five days of play with six hours per day) with no guarantee of a result, while the limited-overs format (50 overs per inning for one-day games and 20 per inning for the roughly three-hour Twenty20 format) are designed to guarantee a result.
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The recent release of heavily edited videos purportedly showing officials of Planned Parenthood selling tissue from aborted fetuses tried to make out that they were engaging in a surreptitious, illegal, profit-making activity when in fact they were only doing what the law allows, and that is to recover the costs incurred in supplying tissue for medical research. Heather Digby Parton explains how the outfit that produced the videos was working closely with some Republican members of Congress to produce this coordinated attack.
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One of the enduring mysteries of American politics is why so many people are so supportive and admiring of wealthy people who in return have nothing but contempt for them and do everything they can to enrich themselves at their expense. Many people of ordinary means seem to think that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong and that the rich are like you and me.
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Howard Kurtz on his show on Fox News once again brings up the idea that by going to the White House twice, Jon Stewart has proved that he is a stooge for president Obama. Kurtz should have known better because there is nothing that seems to get Stewart’s energy up than taking Fox News hypocrisy and flinging it back in their faces and he has a grand old time here, showing Kurtz how a takedown should be done and in the process revealing Kurtz’s own hackery.
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Is it only me or is anyone else embarrassed by the antics of the various Republican candidates in their willingness to do things that make them look ridiculous? Have they learned nothing from the past of John Kerry dressed in a weird-looking biohazard suit and crawling through a tube, looking for all the world like one of the sperm in the Woody Allen film Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask?
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The origins story of the Mormon church, like all religion origins stories, is a real riot. Founder Joseph Smith claimed to have been led by the Angel Moroni to gold plates buried in a field containing strange writing that he called ‘reformed Egyptian’ but was able to interpret and translate into English by peering into a hat and using a magic stone that he called a ‘seer stone’. This document became what is called the Book of Mormon, their bible.
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It is clear that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pulling out all the stops to defeat the nuclear deal arrived at recently between the P5+1 nations and Iran. The Israeli lobby in the US is leading the charge on Netanyahu’s behalf by working on the members of the US Congress. Congress has sixty days to pass a vote of disapproval on the deal. Given Republican majorities in both houses and the desire of that party to defeat any significant act by president Obama, that vote seems to be a foregone conclusion and you can expect to hear every Republican candidate condemn the deal at tomorrow’s debate. It is also clear that Obama will then veto that vote. So the real question is whether Congress can muster the two-thirds majority to override the veto.
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So what happened at what is being called the Koch primary, where five of the Republican candidates went to an event hosted by the Koch brothers and tried their best to ingratiate themselves by groveling before them in the hope that they would be the beneficiaries of their largesse?
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The ACLU of Indiana has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a seven-year old boy identified only as A.B. who, when asked during recess by a classmate if he attended church, told her that he did not because he did not believe in a god.
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As regular readers know, I am originally from Sri Lanka and so my attention was caught by this report on NPR about a novel way of dealing with the problem of providing internet access to people in remote and hard to reach areas. The island is roughly the size of West Virginia and also mountainous and its long-running civil war that ended only in 2009 left about a third of the country devastated and with limited infrastructure. Although the main cities are highly developed, currently only about 16% of the population is connected to the internet.
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