It is hard to imagine how the timing could have created a more poignant juxtaposition. At the same time as the Obama administration triumphantly withdraws from Iraq, Congress is set to institute the legal codification of the largest expansion in the War on Terror yet, up to and including the
Continue readingTag: US politics
Dead Wild Roses: Crazy Sauce – Is Newt Gingrich a felon?
Hey, if that is a question you have to ask about a potential candidate do you think that he/she should be in the race? Nominating Gingrich would require any last vestiges of ethical conduct possessed by the Republican Party to be taken quietly into the nearest closet and strangled to
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Rick Perry and The Vagina Bill
Is it just me or does every republican politician preach racism, sexism and bigotry to appeal to the wack-a-loon conservative “value voters” ( *sproing* my irony meter just imploded) and once their votes are secured by promising to disenfranchise demonized minority X (women, homosexuals, PoC, etc) they promptly ignore said
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: A note on Mitt Romney’s Mormonism
GOP front runner Mitt Romney In the GOP presidential nomination contest, the long standing front-runner, Mitt Romney, has never managed to really break out of the low to mid twenties in national polls, and now faces considerable competition for the nomination from a surging Newt Gingrich. One problem for him
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: The Cain identity
Yesterday’s decision by Herman Cain to drop out of the GOP Presidential stakes (technically, suspending, a legal loophole that allows him to reallocate donations made to him to another candidate or a PAC) really wasn’t surprising nor was the timing. But it was inevitable. If it was just one woman
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: GOP Leadership Contest: The Likeability Factor
Pundits seem to love to profess multitudes of differing explanations for the see-sawing GOP leadership contest that has seen, respectively, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and now Newt Gingrich surge to the front of the pack in challenging Mitt Romney. These alternative explanations range from the simple to the complex,
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: Harper’s "Office for Relgious Freedom": Another Newspeak front?
Dubya got into a lot of hot water in many circles with his so-called “faith based initiative” (which President Obama has actually continued and broadened to include people of faith who are LGBT) and now Harper appears to want to go down the same path with something called the “Office
Continue readingRed Tory v.3.0.3: Congress in Action!
While the U.S. economy is verging on the brink of another recession, unemployment is mired at 9% (the actual rate being much higher), multiple wars are still being waged around the world costing billions of dollars per day, and with a national debt of $14 trillion looming ever more forebodingly
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: Who’s protecting YOUR water?
This should really make us all wake up: Someone from Russia (it could have been the government or a private interest, we don’t know yet) was able to remotely shut off then back on a second later a pump in Springfield, the capital of the state of Illinois — and
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Herman Cain, Save Your Campaign. Shut Up!
Like Rick Perry, Herman Cain’s worst political enemy is his mouth. Once he opens that, gibberish pours out, decidedly unpresidential gibberish. Herman has told the world that China is a threat because it is actively seeking nuclear weapons, oblivious to the fact China has had a nuclear arsenal for
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: GOP Foreign Policy Debate: Iran, Covert Ops, and Sanctions
While most of the CBS GOP Presidential Nomination debate on foreign policy in South Carolina was predictably following the standard script, there was one issue that somewhat surprised me. That is, the extent to which multiple candidates were very empha…
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: If you can’t track the guns, you can’t track the criminals
The Brady Law in the States, which is supposed to ensure felons don’t have access to guns (they are supposed to be flagged by a background check), has proven to be a joke, the NYT reports today. In just one state — the State of Washington — nearly 3300 convicts have had their "right to bear arms" that they forfeited, restored. In one case, a man out of jail for just two months shot dead his
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: Keystone XL delayed; and how many Wal-Marts does Hamilton need?
It was a big surprise but also a delight to hear that Hillary Clinton’s State Department has ordered Trans Canada Pipelines to reconsider the proposed route of the Keystone XL project, in particular the section that would have gone through Nebraska’s S…
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: Perry’s brain freeze
Last night, Rick Perry, the most bloodthirsty governor in American history (he has permitted 234 legal murders and counting) had a major big time brain freeze when asked what three agencies he would try to cut from the US government (presuming of cours…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: The tone deaf Christmas tree tax
The US Department of Agriculture has announced it is imposing a fifteen cent tax on all live Christmas trees. The 2 million raised from this tax will be spent to create a board that promotes and advertises buying live Christmas trees. This is…
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: Dems kick back at Tea Party
The Tea Party in the States got a huge slap in the face in yesterday’s off-year elections in the States. Among the biggest ones:
Voters in Ohio rejected by a huge margin a law that effectively placed public servants in a "right to work state" situation.
Maine voters approved same day voting registration, making it a "normal" democracy like Canada (this principle is opposed by Tea Partiers
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: Berlusconi out, not because of "bunga bunga" but bonda bonda
After sticking around what seemed like forever, and beating off one sleaze scandal after another, the world’s most powerful womanizer, Silvio Berlusconi, has finally said he’s going to resign after bond markets pushed up the yield of Italy’s 10 year bo…
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: Immigrants and "states’ rights"
Among the most commonly held misconceptions about immigrants: They don’t pay taxes, they steal jobs, they are criminals, they’re a burden on our social safety net. All four are demonstrably false — they do pay taxes at the same rates as the …
Continue readingBlast Furnace Canada Blog: Greece and the game of chicken
It is truly unbelievable the game of chicken we’ve seen played this week in Europe. Just one week ago, Greece’s PM George Papandreou, was handed the deal of the millennium – a write off of 50% of his country’s debts — and he caused havoc when he w…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: US, Israel and Canada’s response to Palestine’s UNESCO membership
When Palestine overwhelmingly got approved to be a member state in UNESCO, a long standing congressional trigger was activated which entirely defunds the US contribution to UNESCO (about a fifth of its total contributions). This comes on the back of f…
Continue reading