Western hemispheric summit calls for Cuba to be included

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.

Why I don’t file my taxes electronically

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…]

The evil of private contractors like Blackwater/Xe

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.

Romney running mate speculation begins in earnest

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…]