Israel

I truly wish that I had something original and thoughtful to say about the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. There are no right answers. Gaza is in flames. I believe that any reasonable, rational individual would look at all of the aspects of this conflict and throw his hands up in frustration. Hamas, a terrorist group, is lobbing rockets into Israel. This is a fact. The rockets are currently ineffectual, but they are rockets nonetheless. Israel has tried to take out these rockets with selective precision bombing (isn’t precision bombing an oxymoron?). There were high civilian casualty rates. The rockets kept coming. Israel has launched a ground offensive in order to destroy these rockets and also destroy a number of tunnels which have been dug into Israel. Again, the civilian casualties are high. Personally, I don’t see any reasonable short-term or long-term solution to this problem. A two state solution is basically apartheid for the Palestinians. A single state solution would be disastrous for the Israelis.

Impeach the president. We’ve heard this rallying cry from conservatives since the day that Barack Obama took office more than five years ago. The exact reason for impeachment has always been fuzzy. The bottom line has always been that they don’t like Obama and therefore we need to get rid of him. There is a reason that Barack Obama has not been impeached. He hasn’t done anything to be impeached for (at least not that I know of). By now, impeachment is a rallying cry from both conservatives and liberals. Both sides are able to rake in money to support Obama’s impeachment or to defend him from it. The whole thing is simply crazy. By the way, while both sides are raking in money, the average American is still struggling to make ends meet.

ESPN commentator Stephen A Smith has been suspended for saying uninformed, misogynistic and, frankly, wrong comments about domestic violence. Mr. Smith suggested that women do something to provoke their attackers. As I sit here in my office in 2014, I cannot think of anything that a woman can do to provoke the beating that Ray Rice inflicted on his then fiancée. Oh, and that brings me to the NFL, which has suspended Ray Rice for two games. I don’t understand how you get suspended for two games under a “zero-tolerance policy” for beating someone within an inch of their lives, but you get suspended for four games if you break the substance abuse policy. The priorities of the NFL continue to be screwed up. Ray Rice needs to be kicked out of the league and Stephen A. Smith needs to do a week-long segment on domestic violence sports.

Last member of the Enola Gay has died.

No signs of the inflation fairy. I know that conservatives were yelling that the injection of $800 billion would cause disastrous inflation. The good news is that they were really, really wrong.