Once more to the brink

It looks like a significant element of the Republican party has convinced itself that brinkmanship that threatens to bring the government to a halt by withholding funding for its operations unless Obama care is repealed is a winning strategy. They are threatening to shut down the government in the fall unless all funding for Obamacare is removed. This policy is so insane that it has alarmed even people like Mitt Romney. [Read more…]

Interesting same-sex marriage case in the UK

The same-sex law passed in the UK recently exempted religious institutions from having to perform such marriages. But now a couple is testing that provision by taking the church to court.

Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, 42, and his partner, Tony, 49 — millionaires who run a surrogacy company in Britain and the U.S. — have been a high-profile couple since 1999 when they became the first gay couple to be named on the birth certificate of their child. [Read more…]

Needed: Lovejoy’s Law

I think that we need a revised version of Godwin’s Law for anyone who trots out 9/11 as the justification for giving the government sweeping powers that allow it to ride roughshod over the constitution and human and civil rights. New Jersey governor Chris Christie is the latest to hide his authoritarian nature behind the events of 9/11, even stooping to biblical language about ‘widows and orphans’. [Read more…]

Changing views of gender

NPR reporter Margot Adler does softer feature stories for the network and is one of their best reporters, thoughtfully examining various aspects of political and social life. From various things she has spoken about in the past, I figure she is roughly my age which is perhaps why I find many of her takes on issues resonating with me.

In a recent report she described her experience during a recent visit to a college where it struck her forcefully how rapidly views on gender identify have changed in recent years and how she, like many of us in the older generation, has to learn to keep up with the changes, especially with the nature of civil rights struggles. (You can listen to the audio below or read the transcript here. [Read more…]

The new US government defense against legal challenges

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution is short and to the point.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The phrases I italicized state quite clearly that you can only search a person’s private possessions if you get a warrant from a judge and that warrant must have as its basis a sworn oath that there is probable cause to suspect that there is evidence to be found, and that what is to be searched has to be clearly specified in advance. It is meant to prevent the government from simply invading people’s privacy at random, hoping to find something incriminating. [UPDATE: See the comment by dmclean for a more sophisticated analysis of what is allowed and not allowed by the Fourth Amendment.] [Read more…]

A new kind of bicameral legislature

As another byproduct of the Edward Snowden revelations, it has become clear that the real legislative division in the US is not between the House of Representatives and the Senate but between an Insider Congress and an Outsider Congress.

The defense of the Obama administration to the revelations about widespread NSA surveillance is that they have ‘fully informed’ members of Congress, and since these members are supposed to be representatives of the people, then everything is fine. But as this article from Glenn Greenwald points out, there seems to be two Congresses. There is an inner coterie of people who are in the leadership and who get secret briefings and support the government’s programs and its secrecy, and there are the rest who are stonewalled when they ask for information, and yet are expected to vote on issues without knowing what is going on. [Read more…]

The surveillance data is not being used just for terrorism

It turns out (what a surprise) that the massive collection of data by the NSA is not being used just for detecting terrorist threats.

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. [Read more…]

The Daily Show on the minimum wage battle

Jon Oliver was on fire in this series of three clips dealing with the strikes by fast-food workers who are trying to get the minimum wages raised from the current $7.25 an hour (which works out to about $15,000 per year for a 40 hour week) to a more realistic $15. Of course this is generating huge amounts of protests by the very same people who think that raising taxes on the rich, even the top 1%, would create enormous hardship on the wealthy. I don’t know if it was ever truly the case that minimum wage fast food jobs were exclusively for adolescents to earn some pocket money but it is clearly no longer true. These jobs have become primary ones for adults and they deserve to have a living wage. [Read more…]