The announcement by uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan in a long and rambling ‘note to my readers’ that he was giving it up soon has caused a lot of reflection by other bloggers as to the future of blogging. Alyssa Rosenberg says that blogging has changed since the early days when Sullivan started, and that the short form of it, an ongoing conversation mostly of links to other blogs with some connecting language, to is no longer viable.
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As I said before, the Republican party seems to have suddenly discovered that inequality is something that people are concerned and angry about and have decided that they need to address the issue. The Daily Show looks at what they are proposing to do about it.
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Mitt Romney has said that he has decided to withdraw from the race for the Republican nomination for president in the 2016 election. His withdrawal seems to have surprised observers just as much as his previous announcement that he was thinking of entering the race. His latest statement was a little equivocal, suggesting that he still thought he was the best candidate and could win, and hinted that he was open to being drafted as the party nominee if no suitable candidate emerged from the large scrum of current hopefuls and the party is deadlocked at the convention.
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There has been an unusual development in US-Israel relations. The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been invited by the speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner to give a speech to a joint session of Congress on February 11. This by itself is not too unusual. It is an honor given to foreign leaders and Israeli leaders have done so many times and the routine is that they are given multiple standing ovations by members who are eager to demonstrate to the Israel lobby how supportive they are of Israel.
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The massive storm predicted earlier this week for the northeast corridor of the US and caused New York City to pretty much shut down, resulted in a mixed outcome. The storm did hit hard many regions of Massachusetts and the upper regions of New England, though friends of mine who live in Maine said that it was pretty much the kind of bad storm that hits them every winter and not an unprecedented one.
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I have been warming up for the cricket World Cup to be held from February 14 to March 29 by watching more games, so as to get up to speed on what the teams are like and what changes have occurred in the game since my youthful days of addiction to the game, and one thing that struck me was the increased use of technology, much of it for the better.
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I came across this article about the inability of the Republican party leadership to pass a piece of legislation further restricting abortion rights on the occasion of the annual rally in Washington on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. When there was some dissension within their ranks, especially from women members of their caucus, they pulled the bill from the floor before the vote. As you can imagine, this abrupt change did not go down well with those who felt that they had been betrayed and one abortion foe was so furious that she complained angrily, saying, “What in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks just happened?”
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The US government lets torturers, people who lie to get the public to support illegal wars, and the top executives of big banks whose greed, deception, and recklessness led to a global recession that hurt so many people go scot free. What the government really cares about and prosecutes vigorously are those who expose its wrongdoings by leaking information.
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In an earlier post that had a clip from The Daily Show that made fun of Sarah Palin’s incoherent speech at the Iowa audition of possible presidential candidate, a parody of an advertisement for the Lincoln Continental car that featured actor Matthew McConaughey was shown. Curious, I went online to see the ad and it is truly weird.
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