Bush Screwed up American Middle Class

There is a new pew poll that came out yesterday. Here are a few ways Mr Bush screwed Middle Class Americans:

• Fewer Americans now than at any time in the past half century believe they're moving forward in life.
• For decades, middle-income Americans had been making absolute progress while enduring relative decline. But since 1999, they have not made economic gains.
• For the past two decades middle-income Americans have been spending more and borrowing more. Housing has been the key driver of both trends.
• Most middle class adults agree with the old saw that the Republican Party favors the rich while the Democratic Party favors the middle class and the poor.

Iraq: Six Months At A Time

Instant Runoff Voting

This is how Voting should be done!
From Hendrik Hertzberg a primer:

Instant runoff voting, as you (being a reader of this blog) probably know, eliminates the “spoiler” effect in the one-winner elections standard in the United States; guarantees that the winner has at least grudging support, of a majority; and guarantees that a candidate whom most voters really, truly don’t want can’t get elected. The way it works is this: (a) You list your choices in order of preference. (b) If someone gets an outright majority of first choices, that’s it. (c) Otherwise, there’s an “instant runoff”—the biggest loser gets dropped from the counting and his or her voters’ second choices get counted along with everybody else’s first choices. (d) Repeat (c) till someone has a majority, though this is almost never necessary. I.R.V. is used in Australia and Ireland, where voters like it fine, and in several American cities—including Burlington, Vermont.

Ban and Un-Ban

India lifts a Ban:

A critically acclaimed Pakistani film on Islam has been released across cinemas in India.

It is the first Pakistani film to get a wide commercial release in India in over four decades.

Khuda Kay Liye (In the Name of God) focuses on the lives of Muslims after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States.

Officially, India and Pakistan have banned each other's films since going to war in 1965.

Afghanistan enforces a ban:

The Afghan government has told private television stations in the country to stop broadcasting Indian soap operas.
:
There are six Indian soap operas running in Afghanistan, providing vital revenue for TV stations, but they have been criticised for being un-Islamic.

A television show broadcast recently which showed Afghan men and women dancing together at a movie awards ceremony caused uproar in parliament

Drink Tandoori Chicken

Would you like to drink an entree which is also an exotic Indian Delicacy? eww!!

(From Amit)

What's Wrong with John McCain

• Phil Gramm (McCain’s economic guru)

• Where have I seen that before? Ah:

  His chief economic adviser is former Senator Phil Gramm, a fervent advocate of financial deregulation. In fact, I’d argue that aside from Alan Greenspan, nobody did as much as Mr. Gramm to make this crisis possible.

• Regulating Wall Street
• Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), who also endorsed McCain, “said he’d give McCain an ‘incomplete’ for saying that it’s ‘not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly whether they’re big banks or small borrowers.’”
• McCain supports the Federal Reserve's decision to extend a $30 billion line of credit to facilitate the acquisition of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan Chase. Asked if the Federal Reserve had acted improperly in doing so, McCain reportedly asserted, "It's a close call, but I don't think so."

Islam overtakes Catholicism in number of adherents

From IHT:

Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent.

"For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, saying the data referred to 2006.

He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox, Anglicans and Protestants, Christians made up 33 percent of the world's population, or about two billion people. The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated to be around 1.3 billion.

Update: This is my 200th post!! hurray!! :)