The Republican National Committee has selected Cleveland to host the 2016 party nominating convention. This was not an obvious choice. For one thing, while Ohio is a swing state and somewhat conservative in general, the Cleveland area is one that is a liberal Democratic stronghold in which minorities dominate. The only competitive elections here are those in the Democratic primaries.
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Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain have published an article that identifies five individuals whose emails were intercepted by the NSA, out of 7,485 listed on a spreadsheet. This is the first time that the targets of the NSA spying have been identified by name. All of them were people who, as far as anyone can tell, had led lives that were free from any suspicion of being involved in wrongdoing. Their main ‘crime’ seems to have been that they are all Muslims.
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Some of you may recall the absurd situation that arose in 2010 when basketball player LeBron James’s contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers expired and there was speculation as to whether he would re-sign with the team or go elsewhere. James made himself a laughing stock by arranging a 75-minute TV special on ESPN grandiosely titled The Decision where he was interviewed, during which he announced that he was ‘taking his talents’ to Miami.
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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.