Last night, the American House of Representatives passed legislation to raise the debt ceiling and heavily cut public spending – a historic move if you take into account the first has never been conditional on the latter. Today, the Senate unsurprisingly passed it. This trimming of the budget was inevitable considering the normalisation of neoliberal policies. [...]
The rise of the Tea Party in America has presented lefties and liberals with more than two brain cells to rub together on both sides of the Atlantic with a problem. Picking a facepalm of the week just got a whole lot harder. Following the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, Republican senator Jon Kyl [...]
This has been a goodish week for liberal America. A judge has halted the enforcement of the ”Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” laws, under which thousands of soldiers have been discharged after the military discovered they were gay. I have always been a little queasy about fighting for people to have the right to join one [...]
Massachusetts was not won by the Republicans, it was lost by Obama Yesterday’s big news from the far side of the Atlantic was the loss of one of the safest Democratic seats to Scott Brown, a man who represents possibly everything that should make us very worried about the Republicans. In Ted Kennedy’s former seat, [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman “You know, you already sent 21,000 troops. You might send 65,000 troops. That’s not a Peace Prize-acting activity.” That’s what the lifelong civil rights activist and cautious Obama supporter, Dr Cornel West, had to say about the president’s surprise reception of the Nobel Peace Prize whilst promoting his new memoir [...]
Guest post by Christos Loutradis Hands up, who knew there’s an election in Greece tomorrow? The snap election triggered by unpopular conservative Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis seeking a new mandate for his ailing New Democracy party to tackle the economy has received little coverage in the UK. But is the all but certain victory of [...]
America will not prove its openness through hosting the Olympics, but by engaging in diplomacy It must be difficult for Barack Obama to hear the words ‘no you can’t’, but that was exactly what he had to face today as the IOC chose Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Olympics over his hometown of [...]
Guest post by Chris Girffiths It’s not been an easy summer for Barack Obama. This month has seen yet more shrieking from the right-wings as he attempts to introduce a ‘radical’ scheme to offer US Government-backed health insurance scheme so the poorest people can get medical treatment. Hardly trying to append “SR” to the “US”, [...]
I’m a Guardian reader. Middle-class, well educated, long-haired and liberal, I don’t exactly dispel the stereotypes associated with the paper whose readers think they ought to run the country. Nor, as one of those lefty, anti-war, environmentalist types who grew up worrying about the state of the world, should it come as any surprise that [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman 102 Minutes That Changed America, the brave documentary that aired on Channel 4 yesterday, made for very tough viewing. The camera was very intrusive, and actually seemed to infuriate people, but it did what was best in documenting some very sombre and terrifying moments. People, covered in dust and debris, [...]
