Sri Lanka wins T20 World Cup

Sri Lanka played an excellent final game and managed to defeat the favored India quite comfortably. After winning the 50-over World Cup in 1996, Sri Lanka had reached the final in world championships four times before (twice in the 50-over format in 2007 and 2011 and twice in the 20-over format in 2009 and 2012) and lost in all of them, twice to India. So although they have been consistently strong over the last decade, they needed to overcome the feeling that they had lost the ability to win the big game.
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McConnelling goes mainstream

While using money to influence politicians is becoming increasingly blatant following the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United and McCutcheon rulings, there are still a few fig leaves that exist. One is that there should be no coordination between political campaigns and the SuperPACs that support them. Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Colbert’s lawyer Trevor Potter had a brilliant series during the 2012 elections showing how easy it was, using nods and winks, for politicians get around SuperPAC restrictions.
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Colbert on McCutcheon

Stephen Colbert had two segments that explained clearly how the US Supreme Court decision last week in McCutcheon v. FEC has pushed the US further along the road to where just a handful of people will be able to purchase the government. This ruling said that while a contributor was still limited to donating $5,200 to individual candidates, there should be no limit to the total amount they can give to all candidates in an election cycle, which used to be $123,200 before this ruling. Only about 600 people bumped up against this cap in the past.
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Significant victory for same-sex couples in Ohio

US District Court judge Timothy Black of Cincinnati, Ohio said yesterday that he intends to issue a ruling by April 14 that will strike down Ohio’s ban on recognizing same-sex marriages that are legally performed in other states. The reason that he announced his intentions in advance is to allow the state to prepare to file an appeal, which Ohio’s Attorney General has promised he will do.
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How getting money from the government can be injurious

In order to bring suit against someone in court, the plaintiff has to show that they have ‘standing’, which means that they have suffered a fairly direct injury of some sort that the court can redress. In response to my post on the cases bought against Obamacare because of its use of federal subsidies in the form of tax credits to make health insurance affordable to low income people, reader Mark Dowd posed the good question of how the people who were suing could have standing to do so. How can getting money from the government to purchase health insurance be considered to cause an injury?
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Vote ‘No’ on Issue 7

The Cleveland area is going through another round of wealthy sports owners putting the squeeze on residents to enrich themselves. To recap, a couple of decades ago the county passed taxes to pay for building three major sports stadiums downtown for baseball, basketball, and football. Of course, while people paid for the stadiums with their taxes, team owners were the ones who reaped the benefits.
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The super-wealthy’s rise

The Occupy movement did us the valuable service of focusing attention of income inequality and giving rise to the meme of the 1% vs. the 99%. While that is catchy, the reality is that it is what is going on with the top 0.1% that is really telling. The class struggle that is intensifying is no longer between the wealthy and the rest of us, but between the super-wealthy and the rest.
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