Most people seeking a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict have clung to the hope of some form of a two-state solution, where each group has its own viable independent state. But Robert Wright writes in The Atlantic that it is rapidly disappearing as a realistic option. [Read more…]
The recently concluded summit of 31 Western Hemispheric nations ended without a final declaration because of protests over the exclusion of Cuba.
The issue of Cuba’s absence from any diplomatic forums in the hemisphere where the U.S. is present has galvanized leftist leaders in Latin America for decades. An eight-member leftist bloc founded by Cuba and Venezuelan firebrand leader Hugo Chávez has said it will skip any future summits if Cuba was not invited.
But this weekend even some of the region’s more conservative presidents, like Mexico’s Felipe Calderón and Colombia’s Santos, joined the chorus of public demands for the communist island to be included in new summits.
All the countries except the US and Canada protested the exclusion of Cuba from these gatherings and warned that future summits may not happen unless Cuba is included.
Bill Maher says that Castro phobia makes no sense.
US foreign policy continues to be increasingly isolated because of being held hostage by the aging Cuban population in Miami.
I am a little late to this story about how in the US extreme sensitivity to religious people’s beliefs can result in the most bizarre policies being implemented. For example, the New York City department of education has banned certain words in citywide tests because they may upset students. What words? ‘Dinosaur’ for one. [Read more…]
The deadline for filing taxes is April 17 and so I mailed in my tax returns over the weekend. Yes, I still send in paper returns via snail mail. It is not that I am a Luddite, not entirely anyway. In fact, I wrote my own spreadsheet for taxes many years ago that I update each year to accommodate any changes. All I have to do is input the data and it calculates my federal, state, and local taxes in exactly the same format as the tax forms. I then download the fillable pdf forms from the various government websites and copy the figures from my spreadsheet onto the forms. [Read more…]
Mike Huckabee has launched a new national radio talk show that is aimed at the same conservative audience as Rush Limbaugh, except that he promises that it will be more civil. He may be sensing an opening to attract those who are getting tired of Limbaugh’s ugly bombast. [Read more…]
Robert Caro is the famed biographer of legendary New York planner Robert Moses and is currently working his way through a multi-volume epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. What connects the two is that both Moses and Johnson were skillful accumulators and wielders of power and this topic fascinates Caro. [Read more…]
The US government is now relying more and more on private security contractors like Blackwater (which changed its name to Xe and then later again to Academi) to do things that the military used to do.
A series of videos have surfaced that show these contractors acting like they were in the old west, shooting indiscriminately at people as they careened dangerously through the streets of Iraq and not bothering to even stop and help when their vehicles knock down pedestrians.
Now that the Republican primary race seems to be effectively over as far as the pundits are concerned, they will have to fill airtime and newsprint with other sources of endless and mindless speculation. Brace yourselves because from this point onwards, you can be sure that nothing substantive will be discussed and the media will lurch from one ginned-up ‘controversy’ to the next, often about the most trivial things, with each one being framed in terms of its impact on the election. [Read more…]