So Long Joan.


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53 comments (Latest Comment: 09/05/2014 21:14:36 by Raine)

Last week, I wrote a blog indicating how blowback has been a big factor in the mushrooming problems in the Middle East. When President Dubya cut loose all those trained professional Sunni army soldiers in Iraq, it was only a matter of time before it bit us in the ass. Add to that providing financial and military hardware aid to insurgents in Syria, and we created a perfect storm for ISIS to evolve from the mess like some monster surging forth from a toxic waste dump in a bad science fiction movie. Except in this case - the monster is real.
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29 comments (Latest Comment: 09/03/2014 21:05:01 by livingonli)

Labor Day is here again. A day that is meant to honor workers often becomes a day to celebrate the end of summer. So, I thought it would be wise to take a look at the state of Labor in the U.S. as well as how we got here
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4 comments (Latest Comment: 09/01/2014 17:30:33 by Will in Chicago)

Good Morning.

I've been pondering the Constitution of late, particularly how the GOP and Congress have been completely shirking their responsibility to it in recent years.

Let's visit with an Amendment I bet no one thinks much of, that being #3:



Reading it some 227 years later, it seems like a quaint throwback to the Colonial Era. Surely nobody is going to be sticking soldiers in anybody's houses in the 21st century?
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1 comments (Latest Comment: 08/30/2014 16:00:27 by Will in Chicago)

The recent murder of an American journalist in Iraq is not unprecedented, as a visit to the Newseum in DC will show. Journalists have paid the ultimate price for many years while exercising an American 1st Amendment right here - but mostly abroad. More troubling is the news that an American died fighting alongside his ISIS compadres. There has been criticism of President Obama's handling of the Middle East, but the die was cast years ago.

To the casual observer, ISIS - the Islamic terrorist group - is just another flavor of al-Qaeda. They are - in fact - enemies. ISIS is a Sunni group; al-Qaeda is Wahhabi. The current government of Iraq is mostly Shiite, the same as Iran. If you think of The Troubles in Ireland as Protestant battled Catholic, you'll get a better understanding of what's going in in the Middle East.

One of the big questions is where did ISIS come from, and how did they get so powerful so fast? To answer that, we need to look back to 2003.
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29 comments (Latest Comment: 08/28/2014 20:30:28 by Mondobubba)