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…]
No one on The Daily Show is as convincing in caricaturing clueless sexism as Jason Jones.
(This clip appeared on April 17, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
As I have written before most people, especially if they are not young and/or a person of color and/or poor, usually have no reason to fear interactions with the police. And most police officers are unlikely to abuse their power. But there have been occasions when unscrupulous police have abused people because of the presumption that their version of events will be taken as the correct one. [Read more…]
An always welcome development is the rise of alternative major English news sources to counterbalance those that report from the perspective of the US and Western European governments. Al Jazeera (funded by the Qatar government) is one such voice and now RT (which receives funding from the Russian government) is another rising force. [Read more…]
It seems like we are moving into an era where basic rights and freedoms are valued not as abstract principles but situationally, depending on the conditions under which the rights are threatened. Equal treatment under the law has always been an imperfectly applied ideal and in the past was violated with impunity but at least in the post-civil rights era, such selectivity was much more discreet. We are entering an era in which there is no longer even any pretense that the laws will be equally applied. [Read more…]
A couple of days ago, The Daily Show had a bit on the ‘war on women’ topic and in the process outraged Bill Donahue of The Catholic League, not that hard to do because he seems to be in a state of eternal apoplexy. In fact, going on TV and screaming that his finely tuned Catholic feelings are hurt seems to be his full-time occupation. [Read more…]