Monday Afternoon News Roundup

It seems to me that there’s more going on with Hamas in the Gaza Strip the meets the eye. I don’t understand the strategy of lobbing missiles into Israel. What were they hoping to accomplish? Were they thinking that they had improved relationships within the Arab world? Will their Arab neighbors like Egypt come to the rescue? That simply doesn’t make any sense to me. None of this makes any sense, unless Hamas was trying to lower Israel into a ground war. Maybe Hamas has obtained chemical or biological weapons from Iran. Maybe Hamas wants to sucker the Israelis into making some major error which would cause an enormous number of Israeli casualties. I don’t know. It simply doesn’t make any sense.

There are several things that need to be reformed in our government. In no particular order – we don’t need a debt ceiling. It has become a political hot potato in which Republicans can rail on about how much money the government is spending. Election reform is mandatory. We need some sort of national standards for elections. It doesn’t make sense that it took me seven minutes to vote (including time chatting with the folks working at the polling station) and other Americans spent more than seven hours in line waiting to exercise this basic civic duty. The filibuster in the Senate also needs to be rethought and revised. As of now, simply threatening to filibuster causes legislation to be derailed; therefore, almost everything requires sixty votes in order to pass.

British Petroleum is not a criminal. British Petroleum is a company. BP is nothing but a pile of papers and agreements. Criminal behavior can only be done by people; people like the executives of British Petroleum.

Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren should be placed on the banking committee! No one in the Senate is more qualified. In my mind, she should be Senate majority leader, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Look for the financial industry to fight hard to try to keep Elizabeth Warren off of the banking committee.