When Joe talks ...
If the vice president of the United States can be believed, President Obama hasn't been telling Americans the exact truth about the nuclear weapon-making capabilities of the Iranians.
Where Obama and other administration officials have said any potential nuclear agreement with the Middle East country would leave it more than a year away from creating a nuclear weapon, Joe Biden said recently the terror-sponsoring country has "already paved a path to a bomb's worth of material" and "could get there now if they walked away in two or three months without a deal."
There was no word if the vice president received a call from his commander in chief saying, "You're not helping."
Biden wasn't through, though. He then attempted to explain how Obama still meant what he said when he claimed he would not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.
"President Obama decided for the first time -- people forget this -- to make it an explicit, declared policy of the United States of America -- no such policy existed before President Obama uttered it -- that all instruments of American power to prevent -- not contain, not contain -- to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran would be used to prevent that from happening," he said.
Got it?
What's in a name?
The word "socialist" may be, well, off-putting to some potential 2016 voters, so the left-wing New Republic is out with a piece called "Stop Calling Bernie Sanders a Socialist."
There's just one problem. That's what Sen. Sanders, I-Vt., who announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last week, calls himself. "I am a socialist and everyone knows that," he said as far back as 1990 when he won his first U.S. House election.
The article, written by freelance reporter Thor Benson, calls out three news outlets that identified Sanders as a socialist out of the hundreds that do. He says Sanders calls himself a "democratic socialist," which he does sometimes, but he even admits the senator sometimes self-identifies as a socialist.
Nevertheless, the takeaway from reading between the lines must be, "socialist" sounds bad, so stick to "democrat socialist." Maybe no one will notice.
Three's no crowd; it's a marriage
American liberals often cite the social democracy policies of Western Europe as examples this country should follow. One of those, in recent years, has been some Western European countries' embrace of same-sex marriage. But that was so yesterday. In a recent interview, United Kingdom Green Party leader Natalie Bennett said her party would consider allowing polygamous marriage and civil partnerships.
So for all those on the same-sex bandwagon in the U.S. who ridiculed those who said the next step would be marriages defined in a variety of ways, ridicule no longer.
"We have led the way on many issues related to the liberalization of legal status in adult consenting relationships," Bennett said in a question and answer session with PinkNews readers, "and we are open to further conversation and consultation."
Not so long ago, the debate on same-sex marriage -- as it did in the U.S. Supreme Court last week -- was taking place in the UK's House of Commons.
"Why is the government saying there should be same-sex marriages?" asked Matthew Offord of the Conservative Party. "Why should it not also be blood relatives? Why should it not also be polygamists? It seems they are rushing this forward, and they have not thought out what the consequences are going to be."
As it happened, that was 2013. Just two years later, he's been proven to be prophetic.
'Wage'-ing war on businesses
Most mom-and-pop restaurants don't have a very high profit margin. So when owners of those restaurants say that a mandatory jump in the minimum wage would deeply hurt them, they're not kidding.
Z Pizza of Seattle is the latest casualty of such a policy, according to KCPQ of Tacoma, Wash. Ritu Shah Burnham doesn't want to go out of business, but she said the city's recently implemented $15 minimum-wage law has seen to it.
"I've let one person go since April 1," she said. "I've cut hours since April 1, I've taken [the hours] myself because I don't pay myself. I've also raised my prices a little bit. There's no other way to do it."
The closing will put 11 workers out of a job. But they'll no doubt find work soon in all the other restaurants who have expanded their payrolls in the wake of the $15-an-hour wage increase. Those do exist, don't they? Don't they?