Coming on the heels of the story about the TSA’s aggressive handling of a four-year old child, we now have an even worse case of an aggressive pat-down given to a seven-year old girl with cerebral palsy who uses crutches, resulting in the family missing their flight. Add to this the charges of stealing, and the TSA is well on its way to becoming the most hated agency of the government. [Read more…]
TIME magazine publishes an annual list of the 100 most influential people. At a dinner given for this year’s mentions, Stephen Colbert gave a speech that included the following comments aimed at the Catholic church and Cardinal Thomas Dolan who is a smug example of Catholic homophobia and sexism. (Unfortunately I have not been able to find a video of the speech.) [Read more…]
Sometimes I think that the TSA is going out of its way to make people think they have gone totally berserk.
Charles Davis recounts how as a newly minted reporter starting his first job in 2007, he learned first hand how the system works when he reported on what should have been an important story only to have his editors quash it because they feared that if they published it they would lose access to the powerful politician who had spoken to him on the record. [Read more…]
A black couple bought a foreclosed house and were doing something to it prior to moving in when they were attacked by neighbors at gunpoint who thought they were burglars. To add insult to injury, because they did not have the purchase documents on them, the law enforcement officers whom the neighbors called did not believe they were the owners and arrested the couple and took them to jail where they were forced to spend the night. [Read more…]
It looks like the Catholic church has decided to go all in on the issue of birth control.
Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George says that the church is willing to close its hospitals if their insurance companies are required to provide contraceptive services to all employees. [Read more…]
One of the mysteries of governmental responses to the current financial crises in the US and Europe has been the call for more austerity and belt tightening, even at the risk of social turmoil. One would think that the natural tendency for policy makers fighting a depressed economy is for increased government spending to stimulate employment and growth. And yet we hear endless blathering about the importance of balancing budgets and closing deficits, by which is meant cutting social programs that benefit the majority rather than cutting spending on defense or raising taxes on the wealthy. [Read more…]
The excellent news program Democracy Now! had a discussion with three people about the increasingly police state nature of the US. One guest was William Binney, a whistleblower who used to work for the National Security Agency for nearly 40 years and revealed their covert and illegal invasion of American’s communications. He was unsuccessfully prosecuted by president Obama’s administration for whistleblowing. The second was Laura Poitras, an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker who made films about Iraq and Yemen and is currently working on one about increasing domestic surveillance and the attacks on whistleblowers. The third was internet security expert and hacker Jacob Appelbaum who has been a spokesperson for WikiLeaks and has tried to create portals of anonymity for web users. Listen to them describe their experiences. [Read more…]