The government thinks we have no right to any privacy

I have written before about the infamous National Security Letters that the government issues to people that demands not only that they turn over any information the government asks for but forbids the recipient from telling anyone, even their lawyers or spouses, that they even received such a letter. As a result, I had never even seen such a letter even though the government sent out 56,607 such letters in 2004 alone
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Elizabeth Warren on the new populism

The senator from Massachusetts is hosting a conference on The New Populism tomorrow in Washington, DC that seeks to promote the following agenda:

The New Populism Conference is an all-day event focused on strategies for educating, energizing and mobilizing around an agenda for economic change that strong majorities of Americans already support, including:

  • Investing in good jobs to achieve full employment
  • Ensuring that anyone who works full time should not be in poverty
  • Breaking up the banks that are “too big to fail”
  • Increasing, not cutting, Social Security benefits
  • Recognizing that America is not broke; the rich and big corporations are not paying their fair share.
  • Rejecting the Supreme Court’s view that corporations are people, and refusing to let big money buy our democracy.

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Lawrence Lessig on campaign reform

As a result of recent US Supreme Court rulings, rich people now have vastly greater freedom to contribute money to political campaigns and to candidates. It has now become possible for a single wealthy individual to bankroll a candidate for president and there are people like Sheldon Adelson who have made no secret of their intention to buy a candidate in this way. Maybe we will soon have a system in which wealthy people buy and sell and trade political parties and candidates the way they do now with professional sports teams and players. The candidates could wear clothing displaying the logos of their funders, like in NASCAR.
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Atheists are still number 1! But getting better

A recent Pew poll surveyed voters’ attitudes about a range of qualities of people and what would make them more likely to vote for, less likely and indifferent. It turns out that for voters, being an atheist is the least desirable quality in a candidate for elected office, with 53% saying that they were less likely to vote for an atheist, while 41% said it would not matter and just 5% saying it would make them more likely.
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The ‘War on Poverty’ has become ‘The War on the Poor’

Debtor’s prisons consisting of people sent to jail because they were too poor to pay fines were common in the 18th century. Charles Dickens’s father was someone who was sent to a debtor’s prison and his shame over this is said to have been a significant influence in his crusade against the way that poor people were treated. Such prisons were outlawed in the UK in 1869.
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Songs for spring

I first heard the song Everybody’s Talkin’ by Harry Nilsson when it was part of the soundtrack to the film Midnight Cowboy and it immediately struck a chord with me, both the words and music. I came across this performance by Nilsson on the web and thought I would share it with those of you who may have never heard it. Like George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun when he was part of The Beatles, it is a song that I think of when we are emerging from the cold of winter.
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CIA promises not to use fake vaccination campaigns again

The use by the US government of a fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan as part of its efforts to find Osama bin Laden was an outrage. Heroic vaccination workers in that and other countries like Afghanistan and Nigeria were already battling obscurantist anti-vaccination Muslim religious leaders who were frightening people by saying that this was some kind of dark western plot. The revelation that the CIA was using the vaccination program for its own ends has given these people support for their allegations and made the work of public health officials that much harder and has led to many health workers had being murdered and the resurgence of this dreaded disease, just when it seemed like it we were on the verge of eradicating it worldwide.
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Back to religious proselytizing in the Air Force?

There had been many complaints that the US military and the Air Force in particular showed preference for Christianity and even allowed senior officers to openly proselytize and discriminate against non-Christians. In response, a regulation was promulgated that bars senior officers from “the actual or apparent use of their positions to promote their religious convictions to their subordinates.” That seems reasonable, right?
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