News
Breaking: Senate Votes to Overturn the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Military Gay Ban
MAJOR! This is amazing and long overdue (I’m not even gonna engage in any pause or no homo-related juvenilia for anything I write here – this is just the right thing to have done, period!)
More:
Senate votes to abolish ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy [San Francisco Chronicle]
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gives Lady Gaga the heads up on the repeal of #DADT via twitter. [MSNBC]
Read more via Politico.
Am I being too cynical if I say that, while this is great and shows the president and Democrats can still get progressive legislation passed, that maybe this was allowed to slide by the GOP because they knew it was inevitable that it was going to happen anyway eventually but now they can say something like, “Look the president and left are more concerned with ‘trivial’ issues like gays serving in the military than ‘real’ issues like turning around the economy and creating jobs to get people back to work”? Sorry, my mind often tends to that kind of glass half empty thinking….
Hit the jump for an ABC Action news report about President Obama signing the law ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy that prevented gay people from openly serving in the military.
Video: President Obama Speaks on the Annual Afghanistan-Pakistan Review
I’m reading Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory abut the f-ckery surrounding Pat Tillman’s death by US friendly fire and he goes into some decent detail about the modern (post-World War II) history of Afghanistan and how the Taliban came to power in the wake of their victory, as the Mujaheddin forces (with weaponry funded by the US’s CIA channeled via Pakistan’s ISI), over the Soviets in Afghanistan. Honestly based on what I’m reading, the US is f-cked. That country has about as much of a shot of becoming a functioning, self-governing democracy as I do of ever becoming say, a world-class rapper!
More:
Read an Overview of the Afghanistan and Pakistan Annual Review. [alt. link: NYT]
The Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson says: In Afghanistan, the US is on track to nowhere.
The New York Times: “For Americans, anxious about the war in Afghanistan, there is not a lot of comfort or clarity to be found in President Obama’s long-promised strategy review.”
[via the White House blog]
How Much Will Maintaining the Upper-Income Tax Cuts Reduce Unemployment??!
I spotted this one via The Colbert Report last night:
“In September, the The Congressional Budget Office found that those $100 billion in tax cuts on income above $250,000 would reduce unemployment in 2011 and 2012 by… somewhere between 0.1% and nothing at all.”
! :/
Read the full post at the ‘American Politics’ on The Economist
Related:
President Obama, GOP Tout Tax Cut Deal But Extension Comes at a Heavy Price – “Extending Bush-Era Tax Breaks Good For Short-Term Economy, But Would Add $900 Billion to Already High Deficit. [emphasis mine]” [ABC News]
Hit the jump for President Obama’s address announcing the deal on extending the tax cuts. (more…)
Riots Break out in Rome after Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi Survives No-Confidence Vote
The UK, Italy, where else?
Central Provision of Obama’s Health Care Bill Struck Down in Virginia Federal Court
Read more via The New York Times.
Update: The judge who ruled health care reform unconstitutional owns a piece of a GOP consulting firm that worked against health care reform! [Gawker]
:/