Supporting Chelsea Manning

Glenn Greenwald writes that he and First Look Media, the parent company that publishes The Intercept that he and others write for, has announced a $60,000 matching gift to help Chelsea Manning in her legal defense. We should never forget Manning’s heroic actions and revelations that preceded those of Edward Snowden, and had such a major positive impact. Her release of the video that showed a US gunship mercilessly and gleefully mowing down Iraqi civilians in the street in broad daylight horrified the world and exposed the brutality of the US occupation.
[Read more…]

Reaction to the Iran deal

I have been amused by the reactions to the deal arrived at between the P5+1 nations and Iran. Even before the full text of the final deal was released, some people had denounced it, invoking as usual the tired example of Neville Chamberlain at Munich. When reporters have interviewed these critics about it, you may have noticed that they never ask the question “Exactly what sections in the text of the deal are you objecting to and why?”. This is because it is understood that neither the politician nor the reporter have likely read the agreement at all or if they have, they merely skimmed through the document and have not fully understood it.
[Read more…]

The sports stadium scam

One of the things I hate about professional sports in the US is the way that wealthy team owners extort public money for fancy stadiums that not only do not benefit the public but actually siphon money away from much needed and better services that many more people would benefit from. It is one more of the many ways that money is diverted from the poor to the rich.
[Read more…]

Boy Scouts inch towards fuller acceptance of gay scouts

The Boy Scouts seem to be slowly inching their way towards modernity when it comes to dealing with gays. After initially rejecting gay scouts, and then having a kind of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ attitude, they decided in 2013 to accept gay scouts but not gay adult scout leaders. But now they have reversed that policy too. On July 10, the Executive Committee unanimously adopted a resolution that “will allow chartered organizations to select adult leaders without regard to sexual orientation”.
[Read more…]

Counteracting the billionaires in US politics

The US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United has opened the floodgates to money in US politics, since it ruled against limiting the amount of money that private groups can spend on elections. There are estimates that the 2016 election will see about $10 billion spent, an obscene amount. The influence of money has always been large but now it is so massive and the Federal Election Commission is so dysfunctional that the head of the FEC has pretty much thrown her hands up in the air and said that she cannot control the abuses anymore.
[Read more…]

Whistleblower of APA complicity in torture vindicated

Jean Maria Arrigo is a 71-year old psychologist who for nearly a decade tried to expose the complicity of the American Psychological Association in the Bush administration’s torture program and for her pains was subjected to a campaign of harassment by leading officials of the APA, often done behind closed doors, and had her warnings treated with indifference by the bulk of the membership.
[Read more…]

The difficulty of teaching tolerance

Omar Currie is a 25-year old second-year third-grade elementary school teacher in Charlotte, NC. He noticed that one of the children in his class was being bullied and called ‘gay’ in a derogatory way by fellow students. In order to make the child feel that he was not alone and to teach children tolerance and acceptance, he recalled that he had heard in his teacher-education program about a book called King & King by Linda De Haan and Stern Nijland that is a fable that tells the story of two princes who fall in love and get married. Since the class was reading fairy stories, he thought that book would make for a timely inclusion. The book was not available in his school library but his assistant principal had a copy and he borrowed it and read it to the class.
[Read more…]

What happened to the death panel hysteria?

You may recall that when Obamacare was first introduced, one of the features that critics seized on was the fact that doctors would be reimbursed for counseling Medicare patients on end-of-life care. This was taken as proof that the government was seeking to cut costs by condemning grandma to death by cutting off life-saving treatment for those who were no longer able to live productive lives. As a result of the furor over what were called ‘death panels’, that feature was removed.
[Read more…]