NPR reporter Wade Goodwyn has been talking to people in Texas and, tongue firmly in cheek, gives us the lowdown on how president Obama is using the Jade Helm 15 military exercise in Texas to set in motion his plans to declare martial law and seize control of the country starting with Texas, something that I wrote about a few days ago.
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Next month will bring the verdict by the US Supreme Court on the same-sex marriage case. Here is my entirely speculative narrative of what I think will happen, based on the hearings and my perceptions of the justices’ views. The fact that the US Supreme Court did not take up any of the challenges to same-sex marriage cases as long as US Appeals Courts across the country upheld them suggests to me that the Supreme Court was deeply split on what to do about this issue.
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These have not been easy times for the group known as liberal Zionists, those who support a two-state solution and envisaged an Israel that upheld democratic values and human rights and co-existed peacefully with a Palestinian state and its Arab neighbors. There was always a latent contradiction in the fact that any state that has an official religion and makes laws accommodating it necessarily undermines democracy but liberal Zionists felt that the influence of religion could be minimized and Israel could be Jewish state the same way that England has an official chirch.
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Today is Mother’s Day that, along with Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day and Sweetest Day and Secretary’s Day and who knows what else, are heavily promoted by businesses in order to get people to buy stuff out of guilt that if they don’t spend heavily on their mothers, that means they are not dutiful and caring children. It also enables some people to think that remembering their mothers on this day and sending her a gift or a card means that they can pretty much ignore her the rest of the year.
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When governments engage in atrocities like torture, they invariably need the assistance of people in health care professions, such as doctors and nurses, to collaborate in these practices since they have the necessary expertise to both monitor them and develop even more methods of torture. Unfortunately they usually have enough of such people to help them, either because those medical professionals are willing to overlook the appalling ethics of what they are doing or because their jobs depend upon them going along or they actually profit from it.
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Last week Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. I did not follow the ousted chair of Hewlett-Packard’s effort to unseat Barbara Boxer for the US senate in 2010, a race that she lost handily. So I missed the fact that in her primary race against fellow Republican Tom Campbell, she ran an unintentionally hilarious attack ad against him, the one that has come to be called the Demon Sheep ad. It truly deserves a spot on any list of memorable campaign ads.
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The ACLU is representing two black men who they claim were the victims of racial profiling when they were stopped by Colorado Springs police. One of the men used his phone to record the event as it happened even as he was pulled from the car, right up until the point when he was pushed face down into the ground and handcuffed.
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The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled unanimously in the case of ACLU et. al, vs. Clapper et. al. that one aspect of the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata (one of the secret programs revealed by Edward Snowden) “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized” under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. (You can read the opinion here.) The issue was whether the NSA’s collection of metadata was legal. A lower court had dismissed the ACLU’s claim but the Appeals Court overturned it and sent it back to the district court to be dealt with accordingly. Because they found it illegal under the law, they did not venture to decide on its constitutionality.
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The only interesting thing about the Republican primary process will be to see how extreme the candidates’ rhetoric will get before they get eliminated one by one and to predict who will be next to get the hook and be yanked off the stage. But of course, many of them will not see this as a humiliation. They are likely in this just to feed their egos, increase their public profile, and enhance their speaking fees. They probably see this a no-lose proposition.
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