Random Politics & Religion #00

They also lost their 2nd in command and future leader, current financial chief, as well as a bunch of guys in France.

Do you ever have fun in your life?

A swipe like this would have gotten Altima temp banned.

omg guyz a bird landed on bernie's podium, hes so qualified for president!

Pakistan will launch a paramilitary crackdown on Islamist militants in Punjab, the country's richest and most populous province, after an Easter Day bombing killed 70 people in the provincial capital Lahore, officials said on Monday.

Sunday's suicide bombing on a public park was claimed by the Pakistani Taliban's Jamaat-ur-Ahrar faction, which once declared loyalty to Islamic State. The group said it was targeting Christians.

The brutality of the attack, Jamaat-ur-Ahrar's fifth bombing since December, reflects the movement's attempts to raise its profile among Pakistan's increasingly fractured Islamist militants.

At least 29 children enjoying an Easter weekend outing were among those killed when the suicide bomber struck in a busy park in the eastern city of Lahore, the power base of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Pakistan is a majority-Muslim state but has a Christian population of more than two million.

At the Vatican in Rome, Pope Francis condemned the attack as "hideous" and demanded that Pakistani authorities protect religious minorities.

It was Pakistan's deadliest attack since the December 2014 massacre of 134 school children at a military-run academy in the city of Peshawar that prompted a government crackdown on Islamist militancy.

Security and government officials told Reuters that the decision had been made to launch a full-scale paramilitary Rangers operation, giving them powers to conduct raids and interrogate suspects in the same way as they have been in the southern city of Karachi for more than two years.

The move, which has not yet been formally announced, represents the civilian government once again granting special powers to the military in order to fight Islamist militants.

"The technicalities are yet to be worked out. There are some legal issues also with bringing in Rangers, but the military and government are on the same page," said one senior security official, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to share details of the plan.

One other military official and two government officials confirmed the decision on condition of anonymity.

SOFT TARGETS

Military spokesman Gen. Asim Bajwa said intelligence agencies, the army and Rangers had already launched several raids around Punjab following the attack, arresting an unspecified number of suspects and recovering arms caches.

Prime Minister Sharif toured hospitals full of victims, promising to bring justice.

"Our resolve as a nation and as a government is getting stronger and (the) coward enemy is trying for soft targets," Sharif said, according to a statement from his office.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar claimed responsibility for the attack late on Sunday night and issued a direct challenge to the government.

"The target was Christians," a faction spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said. "We want to send this message to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that we have entered Lahore."

Rescue services spokeswoman Deeba Shahnaz said at least 29 children, seven women and 34 men were killed and about 340 were wounded, with 25 in serious condition.

Jamaat-ur-Ahrar has claimed responsibility for several big attacks since it split from the main Pakistani Taliban in 2014.

While it mostly focuses attacks in its base of the northwestern Mohmand tribal area, it has previously carried out at least two major attacks in Lahore: one in 2015 that targeted two Christian churches and another at the Wagah border between India and Pakistan in late 2014.

Pakistan has been plagued by militant violence since it joined a U.S.-led campaign against Islamist militancy after the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on the United States.

While the army, police, government and Western interests have been the prime targets of the Pakistani Taliban and their allies, Christians and other religious minorities have also been attacked.

Security forces have killed and arrested hundreds of suspected militants under an earlier crackdown launched after the 2014 Peshawar school massacre. Militant violence eased, but groups retain the ability to launch devastating attacks.

Most militants, like the Pakistani Taliban, are fighting to topple the government and introduce a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Georgia Governor to veto discrimination bill

Well that didn't take long, I guess having no positives and a mountain of negatives made it easy for him.

And being conservative in your fiscal matters means knowing what to spend your money on. Even if it sometimes goes over budget. (which is why there should be a separate contingency budget that goes outside your usual budget)

With your $100 a week analogy. Some times you won't spend all 100 a week, sometimes you'll only spend 70 dollars. Any excess from that week should go into your contingency budget - This is something I was taught in my math class when we studied household budgets and banking. Again, this line of thinking is mostly for household budgeting, and doesn't really reflect on municipal, state, or federal budgeting, though I suppose in simplest theory they kind of do.

So, I suppose I should ask, for your analogy, is your 100 dollars a week budget only for luxuries, or does it include necessities? (Another thing I was taught was to separate the two, as necessities were considered money already spent from any income you had, and what was left over was the actual budget)

But in that post, spending all of their money before the end of the fiscal period is counter-productive to anything that may be considered fiscally conservative.

Which also depletes any federal budget savings, just to give these agencies a higher fiscal budget, which ultimately leads to the same, or "close enough" to the same poor results every year.

Which is why I questioned if Pau Ryan was really as fiscally conservative as he makes himself out to be.

So, until his budgets are actually put into practice, and the department heads actually heed and use them, he's probably the only "fiscally conservative" politician you can think of, at least on paper and in theory.

Now, the trick that would stun the masses, is making sure there is as little wasteful spending as possible from these department heads. Which, in part, should be covered by Ryan's proposed budget plans, correct?

I guess it's more of a matter of "is the money currently being allocated to these agencies being spent wisely", and to a fiscally responsible person, the answer would be "no". Unfortunately, I really doubt there is any room in the budget as it is, to investigate these issues. Which will lead to more of the same that I pointed out in the trump talk thread.

And I guess we're back at square 1.

This is government we are talking about. Agencies make it a policy to spend all of their money before the end of the fiscal period so they can get a budget increase, even if they don't need it.

It feels like removing that policy might solve a lot of problems. The natural reaction is to, say, offer incentives for not using all the budget, but that will probably lead to corner cutting in some unfortunate ways.

Budgets have to be approved by the President also. Until we have a President who doesn't treat budgets like toilet paper, his budgets will always be considered "in theory."

They are, at least partially. In his last budget, he called for the GAO to issue accountability reports on the usage of the budget. That, of course, did not go through.

Which requires a Congress and President to actually work together in this case. Which we don't have, and haven't had since this whole overspending issue first started.

Anyways, overspending has been a thing since what, the end of WWII? (I may be wrong, correct me if I am)