Credit: Chicago Tribune
After the Illinois legislative session ended with relatively few gains, Governor Pat Quinn quickly called a special session which is set to meet on Wednesday. At the top of the agenda is the public pension reform that failed.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) // Credit: skepticmoney.com
If you’ve seen Leonidas and his Spartans in the movie 300, then you have a pretty decent idea of how the ancient Greek phalanx worked. Line after line of men holding up their shields and pointing their spears forward to form a shield wall bristling with spear points.
I hate, in Rome, a Grecian town to find;
To see the scum of Greece transplanted here,Received like gods, is what I cannot bear.Nor Greeks alone, but Syrians here abound;Obscene Orontes, diving under ground,Conveys his wealth to Tiber's hungry shores,And fattens Italy with foreign whores:--Juvenal, Third Satire, 118 A.D.
By laying down a “red line,” Pres. Obama probably set himself up to be pushed into taking the first steps to get the U.S. “involved” in what amounts to a civil war in Syria. United States military support for Syrian rebels, we are told, will include small arms, ammunition and possibly anti-tank weapons. The Senate’s uber war-hawks, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have been pressing this issue for a while, and I predict they will view the President’s action as a necessary, but insufficient, response. Mark me down as a skeptic in the face of this decision.
The Obama administration has finally caved to the Syria hawks in arming the rebels and is now considering implementing a no-fly zone:
from the FBI page on improvised explosive devices
I saw a lot of accusations of racism in the incident where Kiera Wilmot got in trouble - appropriately so - for exploding a dangerous bottle bomb, containing ingredients that combine to create a thermite explosion.
From the FBI web site:
South Carolina's open primary electoral system (not to be confused with the nonpartisan top-two primary in California and Washington) is looking much safer following the withdrawal of the State Republican Party from an anti-open primary lawsuit. They have been challenging South Carolina's nonpartisan open primary election process since 2010 and have been unsuccessful in numerous attempts.
The political landscape in California has drastically shifted in recent years, with independent voters now the fastest growing group in the state. While there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure their inclusion in the political process, the passage of the nonpartisan top-two primary in 2010 has already paved the way to fairer elections in the state, as discussed in Public Policy Institute of California Improving California's Elections
In this Minute MBA video from OnlineMBA.com the narrator lays out three reasons why governments are different from businesses. Many have argued that inefficiency in government can be solved if they were run more like a Fortune 500 company like Apple or Microsoft. However, this approach leaves out some very important realities about governing and civil society.
Reason 1: The profit motive doesn't make sense.
On Monday night, the state Legislature and Governor Brown came to a conclusion on the future of California education funding. They compromised on a local control funding formula that looks much different from the Senate proposal in SB 69 and Brown's May revise.