I have been railing about the menace of blasphemy laws and once again Pakistan’s infamous laws have revealed that, in addition to being an outrageous infringement of people’s rights of free speech and discriminatory against religious minorities, they also serve as a way for people to settle private grudges and advance their own agendas at the expense of others. The charges can carry the death penalty. [Read more…]
Once in while, a news item comes along that inadvertently gives us a telling insight into our media mindset. NPR featured this obituary by the Associated Press’s business reporters Pamela Sampson and Pablo Gorondi on the legacy of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez that had this quite extraordinary passage that tells you all that you need to know about what the oligarchy and its media lackeys consider development and progress. Sampson says: [Read more…]
George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay Politics and the English Language makes the case that politics degrades language because when politicians want to look truthful while telling lies they do so by making their language convoluted and using big words so that the listener is not aware of what the speaker is actually saying. Orwell says that users of such language should be viewed warily and recommends that people who want to communicate truthfully and accurately would do well to adopt a straightforward style using simple and common words and vivid and accurate metaphors. [Read more…]
I have noticed a peculiar tendency on the part of what is commonly identified as the ‘left’ or the ‘liberal’ wing of American politics. It surfaced again in the filibuster by senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) of the nomination of John Brennan to be head of the CIA until he got an answer to his question of whether the US had the legal authority to kill a non-combatant US citizen in the US without due process. (Se Justin Raimondo’s interesting take on the what the filibuster and the response to it says about the realignment of politics in the US.) [Read more…]
In the course of giving four reasons why the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is doomed, this article quotes Jay Michaelson, a gay rights advocate who has a JD from Yale Law School. who says, “Marriage has always been a matter of state law, and DOMA has been unconstitutional since the moment it was passed. Moreover, DOMA targets a specific minority group, and discriminates against it. Discrimination is un-American.” [My italics-MS] [Read more…]
The death of Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez reminds columnist Ted Rall of the shameful role that the New York Times played in the 2002 US-backed coup that overthrew Chavez, with the US government and the Times quickly endorsing the change. Alas for them, there was a mass popular uprising, backed by some factions of the military, in favor of Chavez that enabled the wily leader to turn the tables on the coup plotters and get back in power within 48 hours. [Read more…]
The talking filibuster by senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and the sharp questioning of the Attorney General Eric Holder by senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) produced some positive results. Afterwards, Holder issued a letter that said that the answer to the question “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” is no. The White House press secretary Jay Carney was slightly less categorical at a later press conference, saying “The president has not and would not use drone strikes against American citizens on American soil” but then quoted Holder’s letter implying that the president agreed with it. [Read more…]
Senator Rand Paul conducted an old-fashioned six thirteen-hour long talking filibuster on the floor of the US Senate against the nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA because he was rightly concerned that the Obama administration would not state unequivocally that the answer was ‘no’ to the question “Do you believe that the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a US citizen on US soil, and without trial?” [Read more…]
A lot of the most useful information that is generated these days comes courtesy of the government and is funded by taxpayers. This is particularly true about basic research, which is mostly funded by government agencies like the NIH and NSF. But quite often, private sector interests lobby lawmakers to allow them to take that information out of the public domain and make it proprietary and charge people huge amounts of money to gain access to that information, even though we have already paid for that information through our taxes. That was one of the things that infuriated Aaron Swartz and for which the justice department hounded him until his death. [Read more…]
Much of the stated opposition to raising the marginal tax rates on the top two percent of income-earners was that it would hurt ‘small businesses’, the presumed engine of economic growth. But the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says that this gives a seriously distorted picture of who belongs in that category. [Read more…]