Recall that the events of the Arab spring were triggered by a 26-year old man in Tunisia setting himself on fire in an act of protest and despair at the conditions in that country.
Now an elderly pensioner in Greece has shot and killed himself near the parliament, reportedly leaving a suicide note accusing the government of reducing his pension to nothing. This has sparked violent demonstrations and clashes with the police. [Read more…]
In a previous post, the issue came up of how same-sex couples whose marriage is recognized in other countries do not have immigration rights for the spouse in the US if one of them happens to be a US citizen. This is a consequence of the infamous Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 that was signed into law by Bill Clinton. [Read more…]
[Update: David Cay Johnston emailed me to clarify some points in my post. He said:
Also, it is not necessarily a subsidy to provide rural service at the same price as other service. Calling it a subsidy depends, partly, on making a value judgement about the network. If you cannot reach a relative or business in a rural place the utility of the network is reduced, making it less valuable to you and everyone else. So urban callers get a benefit, too, from rural service.
And as my column carefully points out, people in URBAN areas could end up without phones or with only high-cost phones under the rules the phone companies are writing and getting enacted, in four states so far, into law.]
I must admit that this is not a question that had occurred to a city dweller like me who takes such access for granted. But David Cay Johnston says that there is a nearly century-old obligation for phone companies that provided landline service to also be providers of last resort to all at the same price, so that people in remote areas are not disadvantaged. [Read more…]
As people start getting bored with the Republican primary, inevitably the political conversation has turned to whom Mitt Romney will pick as his running mate. These discussions involve calculations about who can best ‘balance’ the ticket to appeal to specific constituencies and assuage doubts about the nominee’s qualities. [Read more…]
One of the key sources of false information that was fed to the US government about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction program was from an Iraqi defector codenamed ‘Curveball’. He now proudly admits that he made it all up.
Of course, the reason he was believed uncritically was because he told the Bush-Cheney administration and its neoconservative warmongers exactly what they wanted to hear, and the government embellished his stories even further to sell that war to the public.
The Pakistani journalist tries to explain to Jon Stewart the convoluted relationship between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US, complicated by the differences between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban. Short version: The situation in Afghanistan became a mess as soon as the US shifted its attention to Iraq without first building decent infrastructure in Afghanistan, and it is now time to leave. [Read more…]
Andy Borowitz reveals the solution to a puzzle that has baffled everyone.
Via The Digital Cuttlefish I found a video that Bill O’Reilly’s show shot of the Reason Rally. It is a bit disjointed with some weird cross-cutting but not too bad. The people they interviewed were pretty articulate and gave a good account of themselves. This means that either O’Reilly’s team did not go too far out of its way to selectively edit the footage to make the rallyers look bad or that they simply were not able to get video to allow them to portray atheists as crazy people.