1. One benefit of the carnage in Gaza is that it has given people who’ve never said a word about the carnage in Syria an impetus to say a word about the carnage in Syria.

The things that are pushed me leftward began with the experience of closely watching our national security establishment for decades. But they don’t end there. They are, in roughly chronological order:

Is it any surprise that we turn away refugee children? We can't even kill someone humanely.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!    WTF??!!  

Is it time for everyone who is not a Republican to start screaming and running through the streets carrying torches so we can root out, and do serious harm to, any and all Republican politicians and GOP appointees?   I say, Yes it is.   In fact, it is way past time.  

Yeah. Hahahahaha.

I have to assume that the marketing director at the casino is non-native, otherwise there wouldn't have been a booking of him in the first place.

The Coeur d'Alene Tribe released an official statement from casino marketing director Laura Stensgar, alluding to a backlash among the tribal community

"...Following reports about attempts to use victims' credit cards, Dutch banks said that they were taking "preventive measures" and that any losses suffered by relatives of the dead would be paid back. The DeTelegraaf newspaper said: "The government must make clear to the world that we are beside ourselves with rage."...

Demographics in the deep South is rapidly changing and the growth has been in minorities.  This is going to change the future of the control of Republicans in Southern states.  We see this change happening in Florida.

This is a very good read which has the history of how the South became the stronghold of the Republican Party. 

In South Carolina, registering 40 percent of that state’s unregistered minority voters would mean enough new voters to upset the balance of power, according to Jealous’s report. Up the road in North Carolina, registering just 10 percent could put Democrats in power. Georgia, Tennessee and Texas would turn blue if 60 percent of the unregistered minorities voted. “The future is really up for grabs,” Kromm said.

Earlier this year, Abrams started the New Georgia Project with the goal of registering the 800,000 unregistered minority voters. (GOP governors have won their last three races in Georgia with an average of just 260,000 votes.) The group’s core staff of less than 10 registered 25,000 voters in the first three months., and the will try to register as many as possible before this November’s crucial contest for the open U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Saxby Chambliss.

Democrats seem to be waking up to this reality. Their committee responsible for protecting the party’s Senate majority plans to spend $60 million this year on registration and turnout efforts in 10 states with close Senate races, including Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Louisiana. “Yes, we have to be on TV,” the committee’s executive director, Guy Cecil, told The New York Times in February, “but we’re not willing to sacrifice the turnout operation or the field operation to do that.”

This last paragraph explains why in some races that the Democrats are now just getting on the air with adds.  Crist in Florida just got on the air earlier this month because he has spent time working retail politics and setting up a ground game. Florida has benefited in the last 8 years of voter registration campaigns by Progressive Groups.  

The Crosswhite Incident, Michigan and the Power of the grassroots.

Netroots Nation

Escaped slaves

Republicans

Democrats

Who could ask for anything more?

The regime has repeatedly carried out artillery and air attacks on city centers, creating a humanitarian catastrophe—which is all but ignored by the US political-media establishment.

Those who BURNED A RANDOM 16 YEAR OLD PALESTINIAN ALIVE enjoy our protection and live under our military umbrella.  The very least we can do is boycott, divest, and sanction.  May we not, now, in the fullness of this horror which is enabled and abetted by an illegal occupation, say without quallification, Israel is a Nazi State? (Apartheid is too polite a word.) 

By Khaled Diab, New York Times guest op-ed, July 2/3, 2014

[....] The Abbasid caliphate, for example, which ruled from 750 to 1258, was an impressively dynamic and diverse empire. Centered in Baghdad, just down the road from where ISIS is occupying large areas of Iraq, the Abbasid caliphate was centuries ahead of Mr. Baghdadi’s backward-looking cohorts. Abbasid society during its heyday thrived on multiculturalism, science, innovation, learning and culture — in sharp contrast to ISIS’ violent puritanism. The irreverent court poet of the legendary Caliph Harun al-Rashid (circa 763-809), Abu Nuwas, not only penned odes to wine, but also wrote erotic gay verse that would make a modern imam blush [....]

It is this tolerance of free thought, not to mention the supposed decadence of the caliph’s court, that causes Islamist radicals to hark back to an earlier era, that of Muhammad and his first “successors.” But even these early Rashidun (“rightly guided”) caliphs bear little resemblance to jihadist mythology. Muhammad, the most “rightly guided” of all, composed a strikingly secular document in the Constitution of Medina. It stipulated that Muslims, Jews, Christians and even pagans had equal political and cultural rights — a far cry from ISIS’ punitive attitude toward even fellow Sunnis who do not practice its brand of Islam, let alone Shiites, Christians or other minorities.

How did this ideological fallacy of the Islamist caliphate come about? [....]

Hobby Lobby may find it hard to find a insurance provider next season.  According to this report because insurers are being stuck with the bill on the religious affiliates that are exempt from the original ACA compromise.

While free birth-control coverage is required under the Affordable Care Act, the insurance administrators providing it for workers at religious-affiliated groups say the current solution has left them stuck with the bill.

Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare, insurers and employers offering health benefits are required to cover all U.S.-approved forms of birth control with no out-of-pocket costs. President Barack Obama's administration carved out an exemption for religious organizations that object. To make sure women got the coverage, outside companies that administer health plans for religious groups were required to pay for it, with government reimbursement to follow.

It's a complex solution that hasn't worked in the real world, said the third-party administrators, or TPAs, providing the birth-control benefit, because the government hasn't figured out how to pay them back.

Without a solution, the benefits administrators may ultimately choose to drop clients with religious objections to covering birth control, Ferguson said. Nonprofits and businesses with religious owners that refuse to cover the benefit would have to change the way they provide health benefits as a result, adding to disruptions from the health-care law.