Via Jonathan Turley I learned something that I had not known before, and that is that in India the law requires you to get government approval to change your religion. That bizarre law had its genesis in preventing forcible conversions by giving a third party the opportunity to judge if the person genuinely agreed to the conversion.
[Read more…]
As was expected, the full panel of judges in the DC District Court of Appeals has decided to re-hear the Halbig v. Burwell case where a panel of three judges voted 2-1 that the tax credits provided by the federal government was not allowed under the Affordable Care Act, saying that the language of the act only allowed exchanges set up the states to do so.
[Read more…]
The Sunday Assembly movement began in the UK and is sponsoring ‘atheist churches’ around the world for the growing number of nonbelievers to get together regularly for fellowship and to work for good causes around the motto “Live Better, Help Often, and Wonder More”.
[Read more…]
So Eric Cantor, after having faithfully protected the interests of Wall Street while pretending to serve the public as Majority Leader in the House of Representatives before losing his primary to a Tea Party candidate, decided to quit his job early and go straight to Wall Street at a high salary even though he has no financial background. It is no surprise that his role will be to provide access to congress to serve his company’s needs.
[Read more…]
The telecommunication companies are pushing hard against net neutrality so that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can charge different rates to companies for use of their networks. This would result in large companies that are willing to pay being able to provide faster response times than smaller, poorer companies, eventually squeezing the latter out of business. President Obama appointed the head of the lobbying body of the cable companies to head the FCC, which strongly hinted that the fix was in.
[Read more…]
Ever since the federal government started requiring universities to make publicly available knowledge about any incidents of crime that take place on or near their campuses, we get email notification of any incidents that occur. Initially it was somewhat jarring to get them, since they shattered the illusion that we lived in a crime-free bubble but it is a good thing if it encourages people to be more aware of their surroundings and take precautions to avoid becoming the victims of crime.
[Read more…]
The Vatican admits that it doesn’t fully understand youth culture. Really? I am so surprised. Who would have thought that adopting reactionary views towards women and the LGBT community would alienate young people? In order to combat this failure, the “Pontifical Council for Culture invited sociologists, Web experts and theologians to a three-day, closed-door event Feb. 6-9 [2013] aimed at studying “emerging youth cultures.””
[Read more…]
Major Jason Wright, one of the military’s judge advocate generals assigned to the team to defend Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the prisoners at Guantanamo, has quit the military saying that those tribunals have become heavily stacked against the defendants and now are little more than show trials and that the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep its torture practices secret and to deny the prisoners the basic legal rights to a fair trial, such as secretly recording the conversations between attorney and client..
[Read more…]
It is true that these companies extort money from the needy and get them trapped in a cycle of debt. The problem is that they also serve a need. Many people live paycheck-to-paycheck, just barely getting by, and any sudden emergency (car repair, medical bill, broken furnace) can throw their delicately balanced finances out of whack and they often feel they have nowhere else to turn to at short notice.
[Read more…]
Even since the US Supreme Court’s United States v. Windor decision in 2013 that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, every single challenge to state bans on same-sex marriage has been overturned in the federal courts. Until today, when the movement received its first setback.
[Read more…]