A balanced budget? Not in election year

“We don’t begrudge success in America,” Mr. Obama said. But, he added, “We do expect everybody to do their fair share, so that everybody has opportunity, not just some.”

Hardly controversial stuff; or so you’d think. On Monday President Obama announced his budget for the 2013 fiscal year and along with it large swathes of his manifesto for re-election. In a campaign that is likely to be defined by economic issues, this budget was always destined to be political in nature. Yet, opponents have still found it within them to express commendable faux-outrage.

The words of leading anti-tax campaigner Grover Norquist were indicative of the criticisms Obama faced. He claimed “this is not an economic document, it’s not a policy document, it’s a political document”.  Of course, it goes without saying that a budget is, at least in the most literal sense, an economic document. Yet the measures announced by Obama are in some parts so lacking in excitement and originality that they will do little to change the economic course already set, and in others so flagrantly partisan that they have no chance of being passed. So in truth, the budget will have a minimal economic impact at best.

Mitt Romney: who the American Right really stand for, not who they’d have the people believe

While British politics is currently preoccupied with the debate over Scottish independence, across the Atlantic they have bigger fish to, ahem, fry. With the Presidential election to come in November, America’s Republican Party are currently soldiering through the process of nominating a candidate to rival President Barack Obama.

We may only be a few weeks into a contest that will go on until August, but I think it’s pretty safe for me to now call the race for Mitt Romney. I don’t have a reputation on which to stake such things, but let’s just say ‘I swear on my mum’s life’ and leave it at that.

Having narrowly edged out google search phenomenon and sweater-vest rocking Evangelical Rick Santorum in Iowa, Romney cruised to victory in New Hampshire with close to 40% of the vote. The next primary moves the six candidates to South Carolina, where Romney’s rivals have already begun to take the desperate pot-shots characteristic of an ailing campaign.

Republican Presidential Race: The Candidates

With not long until the Iowa Caucus officially kick-starts the GOP Presidential race and the likelihood of Mitt Romney’s eventual triumph about as inevitable as the last two times I commented on the issue, it would perhaps be prudent to take a different approach and provide a short description of each of the candidates in the Republican field.

Capture of US drone further damages US-Iran relations.

Earlier this month, an unmanned reconnaissance plane which reportedly belonged to the US crash landed in Iran.  On Thursday the Iranian press released video and photographic evidence of the fact that they had captured a foreign drone and were claiming that it was sent to Iran by the US to spy on Iran and gather secret information.  This was later confirmed by the US who admitted that they had lost a drone and that this was the drone that belonged to them.

The US say that the drone went down due to a mechanical malfunction and was not shot down by Iranian forces, however this claim is denied by the Iranian forces who say that they brought it down.  General Ami Ali Hajizadeh who is chief of the Revolutionary Guard’s aerospace division says that “it was downed through a joint operation by the Guards and Iran’s regular army,” and that it was attacked by an electronic ambush which caused minimal damage.