Update: Here’s the link for those who cannot see the embedded video.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The Obama administration can be characterized by at least three features: vast over-reaching in its claim to executive power, egregiously violating people’s liberties, and indulging in excessive secrecy.
Whistleblowers have provided a valuable service in letting us know what is going on and exposing wrongdoing and the administration has been a vigorous prosecutor of leakers and whistleblowers, demanding access to all manner of private communications from reporters and employees in their efforts to identify and harshly punish anyone who crosses them. [Read more…]
TED talks are well known to policy wonks and geeks. I find many of them quite interesting and have linked to them. But while many people know of them, not so many know that the audience at TED conferences tend to be the well-heeled because it is for members only and the cost of attending can be quite high. [Read more…]
I do not directly trade in stocks although like anyone with a retirement account, someone is trading on the stock market with my savings. My lack of interest may be related to my lack of interest in gambling generally and to my lack of a desire to make more money. I have a job that pays me enough for my needs and that is enough. My main interest in the financial world is more on the macro side, to understand how it impacts the political and social worlds. But the recent global financial turmoil has resulted in me learning more about the world of high finance than I ever wanted. [Read more…]
According to the Washington Post, he has signed an Executive Order that subjects anyone (Americans or foreigners) to penalties if they obstruct the administration’s preferred policies in Yemen. [Read more…]
In following up the recent revelations of sexual abuse and cover up in the Orthodox Jewish community, I came across Shmarya Rosenberg, a blogger at Failed Messiah, who has been shining a bright and unflattering light on what goes on in that world. His website reveals a religious community whose leaders and members seems to be as zealous as the Catholic Church in protecting sexual predators and abusers and rapists. [Read more…]
Last Thursday, a panel of state appellate court judges ruled that proclamations of a Colorado Day of Prayer by successive governors violated the ‘Preference Clause’, the state constitution’s equivalent of the Establishment Clause of the federal constitution. The judges state in their opinion what should be obvious, that not having the government endorse their praying is not tantamount to not allowing them to pray at all. [Read more…]
In a previous post, I mused about the incessant swearing in the premier episode in the new HBO comedy Veep and wondered how normal it was. The comments from people familiar with that world suggested that it was quite common for people in high levels of government to swear all the time. [Read more…]
One of the most pernicious developments in modern journalism is the number of newspaper reports that feature anonymous sources. Anonymity is allowable and understandable for whistleblowers who risk retaliation for exposing wrongdoing or for victims of crimes or are otherwise in danger but now it is routinely given to high officials who are merely seeking to advance an agenda or are fighting internal turf wars and do not want their fingerprints over it. [Read more…]