Last week the New Zealand parliament passed a law legalizing same sex marriage. The vote was 77-44 in favor. The bill has to be signed by the country’s governor general to become law but that is a formality since his role is largely ceremonial and does not have executive powers. [Read more…]
It seems like each passing day we hear worse news from Guantanamo where flagrant violations of simple decency, let alone legal rights, are practiced routinely. Waterboarding may have ended but prisoner abuse continues unabated. Now the New York Times has published on its op-ed pages on April 15, 2013 a heart-wrenching piece by Guantanamo detainee Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel titled Gitmo is killing me. Moqbel has been held there for over eleven years without charges or trial and is now on a hunger strike and is being force-fed by guards. His description of his treatment (delivered verbally and transcribed) is horrific. [Read more…]
[UPDATE: According to the transcript of the questioning of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on April 22 by the authorities (see page 4), he actually was read his Miranda rights. So it looks like there was a change in policy on this and that is a good thing.]
What is it about acts like the Boston bombing that make people become so unhinged and overthrow all due processes? Already we have calls for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be tortured, denied Miranda rights, and treated as an enemy combatant. [Read more…]
Before law enforcement officials released photographs of the two suspects in the Boston bombing, some media outlets went overboard in their attempt to finger ‘dark-skinned’ people as culprits for the Boston bombing. [Read more…]
The way we file taxes in the US is odd. For most of us, almost all the documents that we use to prepare our tax returns are also provided directly to the government, so the government has the same information that we use. We then prepare our returns, send it in, and the government checks to see if we did it right. Surely it would make more sense for the government to calculate our taxes and then send us a statement to check to see if there was any error, the way that credit card companies compile a bill based on all our expenditures and then tell us how much we owe. If we wish, we can check their calculations with the receipts we have. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Spain already have such systems. [Read more…]
It is no secret that the US exempts Israel from the strictures it applies to other countries and carves out special exemptions from the rules. For example, violations of UN resolutions that are given as the reason to justify invading other countries are ignored or supported when the violations are done by Israel, which holds the lead for the most violations. You can see a list of the resolutions here. [Read more…]
The debate over gun control is a complicated one. A case can be made that people should have the right to own guns of their own. But there is no question that opponents of any form of gun control invest in the Second Amendment an almost mystical quality that suggests that any regulation of any kind is a horrendous violation, and this is taking them over the cliff leading to a kind of extremism that can backfire. [Read more…]
Now that the hunt seems to be over for the people who carried out the Boston marathon bombings, there is some debate over what rights the captured person has, particularly his Miranda rights. There are those who make the facile argument that the bombing was an ‘act of terror’ and that those accused of such acts are not deserving of due process rights. Apparently the suspect is not going to be read his Miranda rights until after extensive questioning. [Read more…]
It is obvious that Kentucky senator Rand Paul has, like so many others in the Republican party, presidential ambitions that are likely to manifest itself in a run in 2016. The reason is that if you miss that chance, the next best opportunity will be 2024, and that might seem like too long a wait for Republicans who see the demographic shifts working against them. [Read more…]
A new bipartisan commission reports on what many of us knew for a long time but some in the media chose to ignore, that the US was systematically and massively practicing torture at the same time that top government officials from president Bush on down were denying that they were doing so and claiming high moral reasons, that it went against our values and so on. [Read more…]