The Daily Show has yet more fun at the expense of CNN for its coverage of the Boston bombings, showing how they seemed to have thrown editorial judgment out the window in their effort to portray a sense of immediacy and urgency, even when they had no idea what was going on and were simply making wild guesses based on the flimsiest of evidence. [Read more…]
Some people are fearful that Sharia law (i.e., laws that are based on Islamic religious beliefs) will be introduced in the US and are taking steps to pre-emptively pass legislation that would prevent this from happening. As one might expect, I am opposed to any laws or legal system that depends upon religion for their justification. We have a secular constitution and the Establishment Clause should effectively bar any government action that seeks to advance or hinder any particular religion or advance or hinder religion in general. [Read more…]
I wrote before about the faulty analysis by two Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that asserted that when the debt-to-GDP ratio reached a critical point of 90% in a country, the rate of economic growth took a nose-dive and went into negative territory. This analysis was used to spook policymakers, especially in the US and Europe, that bringing deficits under control was the most urgent priority, and that taking measures to stimulate growth and create jobs was the wrong approach. Governments went on an austerity spree, resulting in many people being thrown out of work and social services cut, casuing immense hardship. [Read more…]
Last Friday morning when I heard news that Tamalan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers thought to be responsible for the Boston bombing, had been killed and that his 19-year old younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was being looked for, I thought that the story was pretty much over, bar the predictable ending. [Read more…]
Last week the New Zealand parliament passed a law legalizing same sex marriage. The vote was 77-44 in favor. The bill has to be signed by the country’s governor general to become law but that is a formality since his role is largely ceremonial and does not have executive powers. [Read more…]
It seems like each passing day we hear worse news from Guantanamo where flagrant violations of simple decency, let alone legal rights, are practiced routinely. Waterboarding may have ended but prisoner abuse continues unabated. Now the New York Times has published on its op-ed pages on April 15, 2013 a heart-wrenching piece by Guantanamo detainee Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel titled Gitmo is killing me. Moqbel has been held there for over eleven years without charges or trial and is now on a hunger strike and is being force-fed by guards. His description of his treatment (delivered verbally and transcribed) is horrific. [Read more…]
[UPDATE: According to the transcript of the questioning of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 22 by the authorities (see page 4), he actually was read his Miranda rights. So it looks like there was a change in policy on this and that is a good thing.]
What is it about acts like the Boston bombing that make people become so unhinged and overthrow all due processes? Already we have calls for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be tortured, denied Miranda rights, and treated as an enemy combatant. [Read more…]
Before law enforcement officials released photographs of the two suspects in the Boston bombing, some media outlets went overboard in their attempt to finger ‘dark-skinned’ people as culprits for the Boston bombing. [Read more…]
The way we file taxes in the US is odd. For most of us, almost all the documents that we use to prepare our tax returns are also provided directly to the government, so the government has the same information that we use. We then prepare our returns, send it in, and the government checks to see if we did it right. Surely it would make more sense for the government to calculate our taxes and then send us a statement to check to see if there was any error, the way that credit card companies compile a bill based on all our expenditures and then tell us how much we owe. If we wish, we can check their calculations with the receipts we have. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Spain already have such systems. [Read more…]
It is no secret that the US exempts Israel from the strictures it applies to other countries and carves out special exemptions from the rules. For example, violations of UN resolutions that are given as the reason to justify invading other countries are ignored or supported when the violations are done by Israel, which holds the lead for the most violations. You can see a list of the resolutions here. [Read more…]