On December 31, 2013, a US District Court judge in Brooklyn, New York ruled that US border officials need not have ‘reasonable suspicion’ in order to search and copy people’s laptops, cell phones, and other devices at border checkpoints. The judge’s opinion can be seen here. [Read more…]
It looks like the UK has its own share of nutty politicians who seem to think that their god is like one of these deranged people who go around randomly killing innocent people and causing havoc out of a sense of grievance. [Read more…]
I am taking a brief break from the Greece prayer case to discuss a new court ruling that is significant for bloggers. The Ninth Circuit U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Friday that bloggers have the same free speech protections as journalists. [Read more…]
The only time I see any of the talk shows on TV is when clips of them appear to show how idiotic they are. So while I have a vague idea of the various shows that are around, I have never actually watched one for any extended time. The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee does a remarkable one-woman performance that looks at the people and dynamics of a program called The Five that appears on Fox News and she shows more of it than I normally see. [Read more…]
Many of those angered by Edward Snowden’s disclosures try to imply cowardice in his part and say that in order to prove that he is an honorable man, he should come back to the US, give himself up to the authorities, and allow his case to work its way through the legal system, pointing to Daniel Ellsberg’s example. This is, of course, disingenuous. Ellsberg himself says that things are very different now and that the Obama administration is much worse than Nixon’s in the way it treats whistleblowers and that Snowden did the right thing in leaving the country. [Read more…]
When we last discussed this story, on December 12, 2013 a US District Court judge had ordered the removal of the huge cross on the top of Mount Soledad, staying his order for 90 days until any appeals are filed and heard. The Ninth Circle Court of Appeals had ruled that the cross standing on federally owned land was a violation of the Establishment Clause and the situation needed to be remedied in some way and while the District Court judge said he disagreed with the ruling, given the constraints the Appeals Court had imposed, he saw no option other than its removal. [Read more…]
I watched the season 3 premiere of Sherlock last night on PBS. The series is loosely based on the Conan Doyle stories updated to the modern period. It was fun. What the show lacks in plausibility it makes up in the way that the characters are drawn and portrayed. The casting of the main characters is first rate. The first episode of the new season was broadcast in the UK on January 1, 2014 but the big secret that people were waiting to see revealed was not reported widely in the US and I managed to avoid reading about it. [Read more…]
While America as a whole experiments with its clunky Affordable Care Act, the state of Vermont is on track to implement a state-run single-payer system, starting in 2017. Sean McElwee writing in The Atlantic explains in detail what the plan will do and how it came about. [Read more…]
Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education laying out the neutrality requirement that governments needed to comply with when it came to religion (that I summarized in part 3) basically said that the government had to be strictly neutral between religious sects and also between religion and non-religion. That latter requirement has been particularly difficult to implement without requiring the government to not have anything to do with religion at all and over time we have seen a steady weakening of the resolve to implement it. [Read more…]
I mentioned before how Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Diane Feinstein, heads of the intelligence committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate respectively, are two of the most ardent supporters of the national security state and its coercive apparatus. When it comes to supporting authoritarianism, there is no partisan gridlock because both of them work as a single team. As I predicted yesterday, both are already indicating reluctance about even president Obama’s limited reforms of the NSA. [Read more…]