The rise in incidence of preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough due to people not getting their children vaccinated has resulted in some states trying to tighten up the loose standard for getting exemptions. But that effort has stalled due to fierce opposition from the anti-vaxxers.
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We see that yet another Middle Eastern country that the US has been meddling in is slipping into anarchy and chaos. Yemen, where the US has been doing it drone bombing in pursuit of the al Qaeda affiliate group AQAP (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) is now on the verge of becoming a failed state like Libya. In Yemen we see that what was a local power struggle turning into a major regional conflict.
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While black people get killed by the police for the slightest challenge to authority, rancher Cliven Bundy is celebrating his one year anniversary of defying the government and grazing his cattle on federal land without paying fees and threatening to shoot any law enforcement officers that might come to arrest him.
I wonder why he is allowed to get away with throwing a big party for openly defying the authorities while so many people are gunned down by the police for little or no reason. It is a real puzzler, no?
Riche Benaud died yesterday of skin cancer. His contributions to cricket were immense, starting with his superb leg spin bowling and aggressive lower batting but most importantly as one of the shrewdest captains in the game and the architect of many victories under whose leadership Australia did not lose a test series. Well-deserved tributes to him are pouring in from all over. Daniel Brettig gives us an overview of his life and here is video summary..
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Russell Berman describes yet another example of the old sleight of hand practiced by supply-side politicians, this time in the state of Kansas, where the governor Sam Brownback came into office promising that tax cuts would boost the economy of that state so much that it would more than compensate for the loss of revenue.
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Watching the Republicans in Congress and their leader Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu bad-mouth the negotiated framework for a deal between the P5+1 nations and Iran shows how insane politics has become in the US. These people don’t want negotiations being conducted by their own country’s president to succeed. Instead they take their cues from a foreign leader who wants nothing other than the complete capitulation of Iran, and who threaten war if that is not attained. Since Iran will never agree to such humiliating terms, they clearly want war.
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After being on the defensive for some time and trying to prevent the long-held dream of the oligarchy to either cut spending on Social Security benefits (so that they can provide more tax cuts for themselves) or to privatize the funds (so that they can loot it directly) coming true, some Democrats led by senator Elizabeth Warren have gone on the offensive by arguing, correctly, that the benefits actually need to be increased for low-income retirees, with the extra money for it coming from eliminating the cap on earned income subject to the payroll tax that currently stands at $118,500.
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A Cleveland police officer named Michael Brelo is on trial for the killing of two unarmed people at the end of a crazy and dangerous chase through the city with 62 police cars and 100 officers in pursuit that ended with the victims and their car having 137 bullets pumped into them, 49 of them by Brelo, the last 15 after he jumped on the top of the car and fired straight down, as if he was the star in some action film. It later turned out that the insane chase and deaths may have been triggered by the victims’ car backfiring that some police thought was a gunshot.
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John Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden about the abuses by the US government has been viewed over 4.3 million times and so of course the apologists for the national security state in the media and politics have come out of the woodwork to smear him yet again because they fear that his exposure of widespread government surveillance in pursuance of ways to control the population and suppress dissent will enable those seeking to curb those excesses to gain traction. These people may say they fear terrorism but what they really fear is transparency and democracy.
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