A babysitter reported to the police that the house had been invaded and robbed by two men, one of whom who looked like the family’s neighbor, who was black. What she did not take into account was a child’s power of observation.
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Those warmongers who advocated for the invasion of Iraq and are now feeling some heat for that disastrous decision have developed a set of excuses that are trotted out whenever they are confronted with their crimes. What they do is shift from one excuse to another when they get cornered. Here is a list.
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It appears that former NSA director Keith Alexander is now consulting on cybersecurity and getting paid $600,000 per month and this is naturally raising questions about the nature of the information he might be willing to give that is worth so much, given that he worked in a top-security agency. It also shows that there’s big money to be made by hyperinflating threats.
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Today is the first anniversary of the landmark ruling United States v. Windsor that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional and opened the floodgates to a large number of court cases that have ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. So far 14 District Courts have ruled in favor of same-sex marriage (with Indiana joining them yesterday) and other courts have ruled favorably on related aspects of same-sex marriage, such as whether states that do not allow it must respect the marriages of those who were legally married in other states. There has not been a single defeat.
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Today in the final day of preliminary round group matches at the World Cup. After today’s games, only the top two teams in each group of four will advance to the next round of knockout games. (In the US where we tend to use more violent metaphors, it is called ‘sudden death’.) In Group G, Germany plays the United States while Portugal plays Ghana. From the prior matches Germany and the US each have four points while the other two have one point each.
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Dick Cheney’s re-emergence to defend his obsession with invading Iraq and his attempts to put the blame for the current mess on the Obama administration has run into some opposition even from his most loyal base of support, Fox News. The Daily Show could not help piling on.
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The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that police cannot search one’s cell phone without a warrant. This is a good decision that puts at least some brake on the invasion of privacy by the government.
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For all the hope for democracy that was generated by the toppling of the Mubarak regime by popular demonstrations, we now see Egypt slide back into a familiar system, with a military general taking power in a coup and then consolidating his power by elections that are heavily slanted in his favor, cracking down on the media, and a judicial system that treats dissidents and opponents of the government harshly.
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I have railed against the abuse of the US government’s notorious ‘No Fly List’, where the government keeps a secret list that tells airlines not to let people fly without telling them why they have been forbidden, what they need to do to get their names removed, nor even (in the early days) that they have such a list at all. This is such an arbitrary abuse of government power and due process that it boggles the mind
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Thanks to Mark Tiborsky of the Cleveland Freethinkers, the Q/A portion of my debate last Saturday with Joe Puckett has been posted. I find the Q/A parts the most interesting because I enjoy dialogue more than giving speeches because you often address specific points.
The creators of the videos were hampered by not getting a direct sound feed from the microphones but had to pick it up from the air which is the reason for the slightly inferior quality.
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