One of the shocking things that emerged from the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of the police was that the federal government does not have a reliable national database of deaths at the hands of the police. Allie Gross and Brian Schatz report that there are some hopes that this may change.
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Hasan Minhaj of The Daily Show looks at how Salt Lake City Utah has addressed the problem of the homeless. Why, the idea is so crazy that it just might work.
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The above reaction was that of a New Hampshire resident quoted by Nigel Parry in his profile of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders who has been dropping hints that he might seek the Democratic nomination for president. It may be a quixotic quest but those of us who dread an election that pits Hillary Clinton against any of the Republicans, need someone to raise the flag for progressive issues during the campaign and he certainly fits the bill.
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Satirical programs like The Daily Show that use news headlines as their raw material have difficulty dealing with tragedies like the shootings at Charlie Hebdo. How can they treat such events with humor without being perceived as grossly insensitive? On the other hand, the victims were in the same line of work as them and so they cannot blithely ignore a story that cuts so closely to home.
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Scott Horton has a new book out titled LORDS OF SECRECY: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare. A summary of the book states:
Forty years ago, a majority of Americans were highly engaged in issues of war and peace. Whether to go to war or keep out of conflicts was a vital question at the heart of the country’s vibrant, if fractious, democracy. But American political consciousness has drifted. In the last decade, America has gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while pursuing a new kind of warfare in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Pakistan. National security issues have increasingly faded from the political agenda, due in part to the growth of government secrecy.
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In an earlier post I mentioned how the just-defeated Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa, a very superstitious man in a very superstitious country, frequently consulted with his astrologer to ensure that the stars were properly aligned to ensure his success in all things, including his re-election bid. It turns out that even I underestimated the extent of his dependence on astrologers, as this article describes, written two days before the election.
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President Mahinda Rajapaksa suffered a shock defeat in the presidential elections held today in Sri Lanka. As recently as November, he seemed to be riding high. He had changed the constitution to allow him to run for a third term of office and in November called for elections two years ahead of schedule because of his confidence in winning.
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If we take at face value the initial reports that the people who murdered twelve people in Paris were Muslims taking revenge on that satirical magazine for its caricatures of Mohammed and general irreverence, then it is likely that they, and any larger group that was behind them, had two other goals as well.
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The murderous attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that killed ten journalists and two police once again illustrates the danger of the idea that anything should be exempt from examination, satire, even ridicule. The murderers are purported to have said that they were avenging their prophet in retaliation for the various articles and cartoons that the magazine has published over recent years that lampooned prophet Mohammed.
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Yesterday I wrote about the case of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, a man well connected politically and socially, getting to agree to a sweetheart plea deal even though the crime that was alleged against him, (running what seemed like a sex slave ring that included underage girls to serve his influential set of friends) is a horrible crime. He was sentenced to just 18 months in prison (he was released after 13 months) and even then he was only required to report to the prison each night, providing us with yet another glaring example of our two-tiered justice system which throws the book at poor people for minor offenses but coddles the wealthy even when they commit major ones. He was also required to pay the legal costs and an undisclosed sum (reportedly around $150,000) to each of the defendants.
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