The nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense should have been a fairly routine affair. After all, he had actually served in the military (and as an infantryman on the front lines and not an officer), he had been a US senator and a Republican one to boot. He was a typical run-of-the-mill politician. [Read more…]
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…]
I have been writing about the revolving door between Wall Street and the government. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal has an article that sheds an interesting light on this process and how favorably it is viewed by Wall Street. It concerns primarily Jack Lew, president Obama’s current Chief of Staff and nominee to be Treasury Secretary. [Read more…]
Across Europe, a movement has started to implement what is called a Robin Hood Tax that seeks to levy a small tax on financial transactions that would produce large amounts of revenue to pay for much-needed public services. The details can be seen here.
The Robin Hood Tax is gaining support. The European Parliament in December 2012 voted 533 to 91 (with 32 abstaining) in favor of the Financial Transaction Tax, which is the same idea as the Robin Hood Tax, and then last month the European Union gave approval to 11 countries to implement it.
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I was chatting one day with the handyman who does stuff at our house and was shocked at the prices that he and his wife (who is also self-employed) have to pay to buy health insurance. Even after paying so much, that coverage provides much less than what my wife and I have through her employer-based insurance. For even routine medical procedures, he pays far more out-of-pocket than I do. [Read more…]