After taking a week off from blogging, I am now back.
My daughter’s wedding on Saturday went off without any hitch and everyone seemed to have a good time. Weddings are a good time to meet with family and old friends and to meet and make new friends from among the in-laws. We had a lot of houseguests and the last of them left yesterday. I come from a close-knit extended family and many relatives came from all over the world and we had a wonderful time together.
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To avoid any confusion, maybe people should wear shirts saying whether they are good guys or bad guys .
This is a tragedy waiting to happen.
My younger daughter is getting married later this week and I am having a lot of friends and relatives visit over the next week, some as houseguests, so this blog will be on hiatus for a while.
I will of course be monitoring the blog from time to time. If something really compelling comes up and I have a few minutes of time alone I may blog about it. Otherwise, I will return towards the end of next week once all festivities are over and all the houseguests have left.
For all the talk about family values in the US, it is appalling how badly children can be treated in this country, either by parents thinking that children are their possessions and subjecting them to abuse or by employers taking advantage of the laws to exploit them for their labor. Samantha Bee turns in another fine report on the scandalous way that children are made to work is appalling conditions. I had not realized that child labor laws were so lax in this country that you can make them work under such harsh and even dangerous conditions.
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There was another important 5-4 ruling yesterday in the case of Harris v. Quinn, where the US Supreme Court dealt a blow to unions by saying that public employees cannot routinely be required to join labor unions or to support them by paying dues. (You can read more on that case here and here and here.)
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President Obama announced that he was sending an additional 200 troops to Iraq to add to the 275 troops that were sent in earlier and the 300 advisors. Although these people are called advisors, they are not accountants and lawyers and economists and academics in suits. They are usually Special Forces and other armed military personnel who could well end up in a shooting war. So the number of armed personnel sent back is now actually 775 and there is a real risk of some incident where they kill or otherwise injure Iraqi civilians.
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(Thanks to Sarah Baker)
The whole issue with restricting access to safe, affordable birth control shows that if there is one thing that conservatives in the US hate, it is the thought that women should have the freedom to decide when and where they have sex and with whom. Denying them contraception is a means of restricting their choices by threatening them with the possibility of a pregnancy.
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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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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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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