Net neutrality under threat

The telecommunication companies are pushing hard against net neutrality so that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can charge different rates to companies for use of their networks. This would result in large companies that are willing to pay being able to provide faster response times than smaller, poorer companies, eventually squeezing the latter out of business. President Obama appointed the head of the lobbying body of the cable companies to head the FCC, which strongly hinted that the fix was in.
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Justice-American style

Major Jason Wright, one of the military’s judge advocate generals assigned to the team to defend Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the prisoners at Guantanamo, has quit the military saying that those tribunals have become heavily stacked against the defendants and now are little more than show trials and that the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep its torture practices secret and to deny the prisoners the basic legal rights to a fair trial, such as secretly recording the conversations between attorney and client..
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Reflections on the PA atheist conference

Last weekend’s conference in Pittsburgh of the PA atheists and humanists was a lot of fun. I have mentioned before that I am somewhat asocial but whenever I do get out to events like this, I have a good time. I met several readers of this blog who introduced themselves to me and I enjoyed talking with them during the breaks and over meals. I knew they were regular readers of my blog because as my talk slides were being readied for projection on the screen, my computer wallpaper that consists of a picture of my dog appeared briefly and they could identify him as Baxter the Wonder Dog!
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Why equal rights for gays is advancing so quickly

As many commentators have noted, the pace at which equal rights for gays has been advancing in the US has been nothing short of remarkable. Within a decade we have moved from a time in which one state after another passed laws and constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriages to one in which public opinion has shifted so far that likely none of them would pass now, not to mention an almost unanimous string of judicial rulings overturning such bans.
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The US roots of Uganda’s anti-gay fervor

John Oliver describes how some US evangelicals, likely frustrated by steadily losing ground in the battle for equal rights for the LGBT community here, have shifted their hate campaign to other countries and have found fertile ground in Uganda which, although it has anti-gay laws dating back to the British colonial period, had not intensified the bigotry until the recent push by people like Scott Lively.
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The Colbert Report takes a look at my district

In his ongoing series interviewing congressional representatives from each of the districts, Stephen Colbert spoke with Marcia Fudge of Ohio’s 11th district which happens to be the one in which I live so it was particularly fun to for me to watch. Colbert made the obligatory jokes disparaging Cleveland such as the river catching fire but that was to be expected.
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Another 47% moment?

Some will recall the emergence of a video during the 2012 election campaign that had been secretly recorded of Mitt Romney speaking to a group of wealthy people, cementing even further his image as a plutocrat who had contempt for the poor. Now a similar audio recording of Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell pandering to billionaires at a closed-door meeting has emerged.
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