One day in April last year, I opened the local newspaper to read a sensational story of the successful thwarting of a plot by five ‘terrorists’, people from the area, to blow up a bridge south of Cleveland. They accepted a plea deal in November that resulted in four of them receiving sentences ranging from 6 to 11 years with the remaining person still awaiting mental competency evaluation. The US attorney’s office had asked for sentences ranging from 19 to 30 years. [Read more…]

The US Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling yesterday in Clapper v. Amnesty International rejected the claims of journalists and human rights groups that the government was secretly putting people under surveillance without getting a warrant. The court ruled against them on the technical grounds that the people suing lacked standing because they could not prove that they were being watched and monitored. Why couldn’t they do that? Because the government keeps the entire program secret, a practice started under president Bush and enthusiastically embraced by the Obama administration. [Read more…]

You would think by now that it would be pretty clear that some things are not funny and that no sensible person these days would do them because they are offensive. And yet, some people still do not seem to have got the message. [Read more…]

It is extraordinary the things that some legislators worry about. The Judiciary Committee of the state legislature of North Carolina has approved House Bill 34 that seeks to protect the citizens of that state from being traumatized by seeing the ‘private parts’ of people who may willfully expose them in any public place. This was apparently triggered by a topless rally held in Asheville last year by women protesting that men are allowed to be topless in public while women are not, and demanding equality. [Read more…]

Some of you may have read about the situation that arose in a Detroit hospital where a father requested that no black nurses touch his newborn child and on the surface it appears that the hospital tried to comply with his wishes. To my surprise, the news report says that it is an ‘open secret’ for requests to be made that treatment not be provided by doctors and nurses of a different race and for those requests to be accommodated as much as possible. [Read more…]

Remember one-time Assistant Secretary of State and multiple-times Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes? He is the person responsible for the website Kung Fu Monkey creating the ‘crazification factor’, i.e., for quantifying exactly what percentage of the US population is so nuts that it will buy into any proposition, however extreme. That figure is 27%. [Read more…]