The US First Circuit Court of Appeals has dealt another blow is favor of same sex marriage by uninanimously ruling that the infamous Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional. [Read more…]
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The US First Circuit Court of Appeals has dealt another blow is favor of same sex marriage by uninanimously ruling that the infamous Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional. [Read more…]
One of the things the US administration and Congress is really good at is grandstanding when the media is around to take note. Take for example, the rapidity with which the US government arranged for the visa for the Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng and the moves by congress to fast-track US citizenship for the Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi who aided the CIA in its search for Osama bin Laden. [Read more…]
Although his trial ended yesterday with a partial acquittal and mistrial, it is clear that John Edwards’ life in politics is over, even though a case can be made that these charges should never have been brought in the first place, and mainly benefited a politically ambitious prosecutor. [Read more…]
The New York Times reveals today that it is the Obama administration and Israel that launched cyber attacks on Iran via the worm named Stuxnet, and that Obama directly gave a secret order to have the program, named Olympic Games, proceed. [Read more…]
An interesting article in Rolling Stone profiles the 16 big donors to the Mitt Romney campaign. No surprise, they are all extremely wealthy. [Read more…]
JC Penney is an icon of the American middle class. So it’s decision to run a Father’s Day ad featuring a same sex couple playing with their children is noteworthy, especially after their decision to hire Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson and rejecting the demands by the homophobes that she be fired.
According to Alexander Furnas writing at The Atlantic, our ever-inventive friends at the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA are ever on the trail of new and more intrusive ways to make travel even more unpleasant. They have developed a ‘pre-crime’ detection program (reminiscent of the film Minority Report) known as FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology), because all bad programs need a catchy acronym to help gain acceptance. [Read more…]
The US government and Congress and media are in a lather about the 33 year prison sentence given to the Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi, who carried out a fake vaccination program in Pakistan order to aid the CIA in its attempts to find Osama bin Laden. In retaliation, Congress has moved to cut aid to Pakistan, make Afridi a naturalized citizen, and to award him a gold medal. [Read more…]
Like many people, I watch the occasional TED talk, usually because someone else recommended it to me. From watching the talks, I had a vague idea that they were given at a conference of some kind but was not curious enough to try and find out what the conferences were about and who attended. [Read more…]
The labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ in politics originated in the first French National Assembly in 1789 following the revolution, and was named according to the seating arrangement of the groups in the chamber as seen from the president’s chair. The largely economic views associated with those groups became synonymous with left-wing and right-wing politics, with the left seeking social justice largely through redistributive social and economic policies. [Read more…]