Ready for the spring climbing season which is the busiest of the year. more than 300 foreign climbers have been given permission to climb everest with about 400 sherpas helping them. it is a dangerous job to say the least. and last year, he wrote a disturbing piece called the disposing man, a book on sherpas. so the idea of them being disposable, what do you mean by that? well, i think what i was writing about and really what it comes down to is this sort of routinization of sherpa death on the passes. there have always been sherpas dying on everest. but it was sort of done on the idea of speaker decisions for god and country. now it is done with the tourist destination. what we know is about 1% of everyone who leaves base camp is not going to come back. and as a work place safety statistic that is pretty much off the charts. so you know, if you re a sherpa,
Americans approve of the president s handling of the terrorism. which is quite dramatic, considering republicans tend to be the party that s more trusted as being tough on terrorists, et cetera, et cetera. so that was a very, very important moment. just for the president and the country. i think the low of the year had to be the debt ceiling hostage taking by the republicans, where the country was held hostage over the most ridiculous of things. and what was really troubling about this is we ve had the government and the country taken hostage for political purposes before. we, of course, had the government shutdown in the 90s. but never before have we really seen the routinization of hostage taking as a political weapon, as we ve seen. i kind of liken it to the overuse of the filibuster now. we ve always had the filibuster, but it used to be used quite judiciously, when the minority was particularly egrieved and it was critical to the nation s importance. now we have the filibuster use