Plagiarizing speeches

About twenty years ago I was invited to be chief guest at the award ceremony for the Science Fair at the middle school in the district where I live. The invitation was not due to my non-existent eminence but because the head of the science department knew me (he had participated in the summer program I ran for many years to teach inquiry-based teaching techniques to area middle and high school science teachers) and knew I would be agreeable to doing it as a favor to him. [Read more…]

Atheists offered a religious tax break

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, sued the government saying that a controversial tax break that allows ‘ministers of the gospel’ to clam part of their salary as a tax-free housing allowance gave undue privileges for religion that was denied to leaders of non-religious organizations, and thus violated the neutrality requirement of the Establishment Clause. [Read more…]

We need more Mannings and Snowdens

So Bradley Manning will go to jail for telling the world what the US government is doing. I suspect that it was his release of the Collateral Murder video, in which US troops in a helicopter gunship shot people (including two Reuters journalists) walking along a street and then also gunned down passersby who stopped to help the wounded, all the while exchanging gleeful comments and congratulations at this act of cold-blooded murder, that triggered the desire by the Obama regime to have him punished as severely as possible. They now have their pound of flesh from Manning and seek to get the same from Edward Snowden. [Read more…]

Standard operating procedure

Cenk Uygur plays a recording of a voicemail message left by a member of Congress that shows how Congress gets contributions from lobbyists, by simply pointing out that they have influence on committees that serve the interests of the lobbyists. Members of Congress know that proposing new legislation is a surefire way to get contributions, which is why there are periodic proposals for tax reform that don’t actually result in any reforms. They are a way of churning the pot. [Read more…]