I have been highlighting the many ways is people who are poor and/or nonwhite tend to be at the receiving end of harsher treatment from the police and other authorities if they run afoul of them for any reason when out in public. Now Matt Taibbi describes how New York City subjects them to harassment by the police even if they are not out in public but are inside their own apartment buildings. It is called the ‘Clean Halls’ program. [Read more…]
John Davis was taking an exit to the city of Cleveland off I-90 when he saw a panhandler in a wheelchair by the side of the road. He tried to give the man two one-dollar bills but they fluttered to the ground. An eagle-eyed police officer saw this and immediately cited Davis for littering, an offence that carried with it a $344 fine. [Read more…]
In a normal political world, congressman Allen West (R-FL) would be considered a crazy person. West is one of the most extreme of the Tea Party favorites, making one absurd claim after another to their great delight, his latest being the charge that 80 members of the Democratic party were also members of the Communist party. [Read more…]
The US First Circuit Court of Appeals has dealt another blow is favor of same sex marriage by uninanimously ruling that the infamous Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional. [Read more…]
One of the things the US administration and Congress is really good at is grandstanding when the media is around to take note. Take for example, the rapidity with which the US government arranged for the visa for the Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng and the moves by congress to fast-track US citizenship for the Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi who aided the CIA in its search for Osama bin Laden. [Read more…]
Although his trial ended yesterday with a partial acquittal and mistrial, it is clear that John Edwards’ life in politics is over, even though a case can be made that these charges should never have been brought in the first place, and mainly benefited a politically ambitious prosecutor. [Read more…]
The New York Times reveals today that it is the Obama administration and Israel that launched cyber attacks on Iran via the worm named Stuxnet, and that Obama directly gave a secret order to have the program, named Olympic Games, proceed. [Read more…]
An interesting article in Rolling Stone profiles the 16 big donors to the Mitt Romney campaign. No surprise, they are all extremely wealthy. [Read more…]
JC Penney is an icon of the American middle class. So it’s decision to run a Father’s Day ad featuring a same sex couple playing with their children is noteworthy, especially after their decision to hire Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson and rejecting the demands by the homophobes that she be fired.
According to Alexander Furnas writing at The Atlantic, our ever-inventive friends at the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA are ever on the trail of new and more intrusive ways to make travel even more unpleasant. They have developed a ‘pre-crime’ detection program (reminiscent of the film Minority Report) known as FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology), because all bad programs need a catchy acronym to help gain acceptance. [Read more…]