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03
May
The U.S. economy added 165,000 jobs in April and overall unemployment dropped to 7.5 percent. The private sector added 176,000 jobs while spending cuts caused the public sector to lose 11,000 jobs. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow notes that February’s record setting growth came after January’s tax hikes, but before the sequester which is now limiting growth due to congressional inaction.
Pictured: Private Sector Job Growth 2008-Present
01
May
We have always emphasized that using chemical weapons, by anyone, is our red line… We oppose any type of production, stockpiling and use of weapons of mass destruction, and this stance is the clear message and consistent policy of Iran.
30
Apr
All of us should reflect on why exactly are we doing this? Why are we doing this?
President Obama on Guantanamo Bay (via squashed)
Right, cool, neat but that little piece of legislation Obama signed last year, called the NDAA of 2012, makes closing GITMO nearly impossible. Obama also wants the detainees to be force-fed to prevent them from dying, which, as we’ve discussed before, isn’t his decision to make and isn’t humane. His solution is to close Guantanamo and move the detainees deemed “too dangerous” to maximum security prisons within the continental U.S. and hold them without trial. That’s one of the unjust treatments the detainees are protesting with their hunger strike. There’s a list of 46 detainees who will never be tried or released from GITMO.
(via mohandasgandhi)
I don’t think the humanitarian aid or the non-lethal assistance plays much of a role at all… For Assad’s calculations to change, as Secretary Kerry keeps talking about, he has to believe that something fundamental is going to change in the military struggle. He has to believe that the United States is really going to take the side of the opposition whether that comes in the form of actual weapons training, intelligence, no-fly zone or a possible safe are in parts of Syria. This leader is only going to change his calculation if he thinks the U.S. and the Western world and perhaps Arab countries are going to actually intervene to affect the military balance.
(Source: MSN)
I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient, it hurts us in terms of our international standing, it lessens co-operation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts, it is a recruitment tool for extremists, it needs to be closed.
“What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria, but we don’t know how they were used, when they were used or who used them.”
— President Obama
28
Apr
It’s kind of like Americans are a bunch of people on a flight to Disneyland and there’s this guy flying the plane and all of a sudden he starts freaking out and we are going down and down and he’s like “I can’t handle this!” and we’re about the crash into the ground but then this other guy is like, “Hey, maybe I could try driving for a while” and then we don’t crash…
…but the guy lands us in like Kansas or something and all the people get off the plane and are like “Man, what the fuck!? I thought we were going to disneyland!”
If anyone wonders, for example, whether newspapers were a thing of the past all you need to do was to pick up or log on to papers like the Boston Globe. When their communities and the wider world needed them most, they were there making sense of events that might at first blush seem beyond our comprehension. And that’s what great journalism is and that’s what great journalists do.
27
Apr
via stfuconservatives
via andreagoldston