Let’s figure this out. My raw material is Time magazine’s June 24, 2024, cover story (here). It’s mostly about foreign policy; I can only quote short excerpts, for space and fair use reasons, and encourage you to read the entire article linked above. It begins, “During his 40[...]
Archive for June, 2024
June 25th, 2024 - 6:53 pm § in America, Biden, China, Donald Trump, Europe, Foreign Affairs, Israel/Palestine, Politics, Republicans, Russia, Saudi Arabia
Is Biden senile?
Politician evicted, library cat stays
The video below is from 2016. That’s when the city council of a Fort Worth suburb voted 2-1 to evict a cat that had been living in the public library for 6 years. Well, that didn’t go over well. The cat, named “Browser,” has his own Wikipedia page (here); the councilman who w[...]
June 25th, 2024 - 12:37 am § in Business, News Media
Everett Herald’s new owners greet staffers with pink slips
The Everett Herald was sold with its parent company to a Mississippi news conglomerate in March 2024. That company, Carpenter Media Group, promptly laid off over half of the paper’s newsroom staff (read story here and watch video below). Herald news staff formed a union in 2022 and had been tr[...]
Who’s to blame for the housing crisis?
Capitalism is. I’m not saying there’s a better system for supplying homes, owned or rented, to everyone who needs them. Nobody in America wants to live in Soviet housing. Rather, I’m reacting to an NPR article (here) which, like many journalistic endeavors, begins with an anecdote:[...]
June 24th, 2024 - 3:16 pm § in Politics, Republicans
Losing candidate isn’t entitled to “confidence” in election
Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), who is trailing his primary opponent by 373 votes, plans to challenge the outcome and hopes to block certification of Lynchburg’s votes “due to his ‘lack of confidence’ in the results” (read story here). “We’re going to be making the legal chal[...]
Michigan legislator arrested for chasing stripper with a gun
Neil Friske, a first-term GOP state representative in Michigan who resembles J. Edgar Hoover (photo, left), stands out in many ways. He’s the son of a World War 2 Luftwaffe pilot. That’s right, his dad fought for Hitler, and after moving to the U.S. joined the anti-communist John Birch S[...]
GOPer demands Biden take drug test before debate
This is political theater, nothing more. It’s in the category of “believing something makes it true.” For example, “if Republicans believe elections are unfair, that makes them unfair.” The polite term for this is “logical fallacy;” the impolite term starts [...]
June 23rd, 2024 - 6:23 pm § in Humor, Law and Courts
Never too old for prison
A federal judge sentenced Steven Whitecloud (photo, left), 88, of Billing, Montana, to prison last week for bank robbery, NBC News reported on Sunday, June 23, 2024 (read story here). Whitecloud put his grandson up to robbing banks and was the getaway driver. They pulled off two bank robberies in Au[...]
Florida’s gunning for “Cocaine Bear”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “signed a bill on Friday that makes it legal for people to kill ‘crack bears’ in self-defense,” News Nation reported on Sunday, June 23, 2024 (read story here). The story continues, “The bill was dubbed ‘the cocaine bear bill’ on so[...]
June 23rd, 2024 - 2:25 pm § in Law and Courts
Texas criminal justice screwed up again
I’ve never been to Texas, so I only have impressions of the place, mostly unfavorable. There’s the politics, of course, and a criminal justice system that’s downright frightening. Texas is the state most likely to execute an innocent person. There have been close calls, and at leas[...]