brief notes
better short than never...
in today's papers, slate points out a couple things that have me scratching my head, even before 10am:
1. "The Journal notes that 52 senators endorsed a (failed) move to increase the federal minimum wage. Sixty votes were needed to move it forward. But the 52 votes were, as the WSJ puts it, a "high-water mark in labor's pay-raise campaign and one certain to boost pressure on Republican leaders to permit a House vote on the issue." The minimum—$5.15—isn't indexed to inflation and hasn't changed a penny since 1997."
i thought 50 was a majority in the senate, and 60 votes were needed to break a filibuster. does that mean the republicans filibustered the minimum wage hike? i'd love to see a comparison between dem and rep filibusters since 2000, especially NOT including judicial nominations.
2. An Israeli missile strike in Gaza missed its target and killed a pregnant woman. Fourteen civilians have been killed in Israeli strikes over the past week, including three children Tuesday.
it's a MISSILE! how accurate are those things? and anyway, they're firing missiles into civilian areas, and they're surprised when they miss their targets? when you're firing at a car that's 60 feet away from, say, a children's hospital, and you miss even only 1% of the time, how is that acceptable? just walk up to the folks and shoot 'em like civilized people.
2 Comments:
The only problem with walking up to someone in the Gaza strip and shooting them like a "civilized [person]" is that you end up getting killed by the suicide bomber and/or car bomb standing right next to them.
I'm not about to get into a debate here on the Israel-Palestine conflict--certainly not using THAT example. My point was more that there should be an acknowledgement - at least in the news media - that MISSILES aren't going to be as accurate as, say, gunshots at close range--that as long as missiles are used, they're inevitably going to miss their targets and the results are going to be civilian casualties. It's irresponsible of anyone to say (or even imply) that civilian casualties are NOT a predictable, regular, inevitable result of using missile strikes in populated urban areas. Maybe the Israeli government isn't making those statements (or implications), but by presenting the story the way they did, TP sure was. Plus, TP only mentioned the pregnant woman who died, even though her brother died too, and 15 people were injured. It was just a weird citation overall, which is why I commented on it.
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