Category Archives: Government

Not only does the US government never pay back what it has borrowed, somehow the emergency stimulus spending always becomes the new normal.

It just took a couple of weeks for the world to go from business-as-usual to dark-even-for-a-scifi-movie. It wasn’t long ago that people worried about things like doing their jobs, taking classes, and planning summer vacations. Now we all wonder how long we can stay in our homes before losing our sanity, how we can make a living and pay the bills, and even where we can find toilet paper. And everywhere we turn, it’s all coronavirus all the time.   

It feels for all the world that it’s the end of the world.

And while things are bad, maybe even grim for some, it’s not the end of the world. Supply lines are coming back online, cities have not descended into violence or madness, and people are genuinely helping their neighbors and trying to make the best of a bad situation. But that message gets lost when the talking heads start talking

Nowhere was it lost as completely as when the initial jobless claims number rolled in following the country’s shuttering of most of its doors. That number, which is routinely in the neighborhood of 225,000, came in at a whopping 3.3 million in the first week after the government-mandated economic shutdown, and another 6.6 million in the second week. As bad as that is—and it is bad—it is not as bad as it might seem. A little historical perspective goes a long way here.  

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Complete text linked here.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

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Complete text linked here.

We have reached the point in history where our government is dictating the truth of Islam. The state of Washington is supporting Islam by dictating the interpretation of Islamic scriptures. It also declares Islam to be a superior faith. Tragically, as a people we have lost the ability to be outraged at the loss of our civil rights, including the freedom from religious establishment by our government.