For the first time in 17 years, Congress failed to provide the funding to keep the entire government running. So now you have two classes of government service and two classes of employees: “essential” and “non-essential.” If you run a national park, you aren’t essential. If you work in a government lab, you might […]

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(Source: Tate) On the BBC a couple for weekends ago, I heard an expert on the Middle East describing how the civil war in Syria was worsening by the day. He said something like, “Some of the opposition are not nice middle class liberals, you know.” The clear implication was that working-class rebels were the […]

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(Source: Haaretz) Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu gave a major speech the other day at Bar Ilan University. Most of it was saber rattling at Iran, but enough of it was about the Palestinians to steel my belief that negotiating with Netanyahu is a waste of time and that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s […]

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  Source: Yellowhammer News The U.S. Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments in a case that could end up giving America’s wealthy a perpetual green light to contribute as much as they want directly to politicians and political parties. Credit Shaun McCutcheon, a electrical company CEO from Alabama, for starting the ball on this […]

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Now is the time to lance the boil of Republican extremism once and for all. Since Barack Obama became president, the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party have escalated their demands every time he’s caved, using the entire government of the United States as their bargaining chip.   The question is how thoroughly […]

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