In an earlier post, I expressed my discomfort with getting a mailing stating how many times I had voted in the past five elections and the average for my neighborhood. But Darren Smith says that in some areas mailings are a getting far more specific, to the point of being vaguely intimidating. He quotes from one such letter:
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Brianne Gorod, an Appellate Counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, says that those who think (like I do) that the US Supreme Court agreeing to take on the federal subsidies issue is a sign that they are going to disallow it and thus seriously wound Obamacare are being too pessimistic (or too optimistic, if you happen to be an opponent of the health care law).
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What should you do when you know that someone wants to kiss you but is finding it hard to get to you? The polite thing to do is to help them out by going up to them and giving them a gentle kiss, as we see in this case.
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The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution tersely says that “Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion”. Over time, this short phrase has had to be fleshed out and this has resulted in a messy stew of decisions resulting in great confusion.
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I read a news item recently about a 90-year old man who was arrested (twice!) in Fort Lauderdale because he violated a city ordinance that prohibited people from feeding homeless people in public. While the city asserts that it is doing so for the good of the homeless, one cannot help but have the suspicion that the real reason is that they don’t want the sight of homeless people to ruin the tourist experience for this popular vacation spot.
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Research results in applied psychology often have a big impact on the general public because those works address questions that people can directly relate to. Who isn’t interested in what we are like and how we relate to others? Sometimes the research results cause great controversy and can even lead to rapid changes in public policy.
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The US Supreme Court on Friday decided to hear the case King v. Burwell of whether the subsidies provided by the health exchanges set up by the federal government under Obamacare are constitutional. This is ominous. Why?
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Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California is one of the most progressive members of Congress. In this interview with Stephen Colbert, she also shows that she is a pretty good sport. It is one of the silliest of such interviews by Colbert that I have seen and he pushes the limits quite a bit but Lee does not flinch and gives as good as she gets.
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The revelations of CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi’s abusive behavior towards women have been stunning. Among many women who moved in the same circles as he did, his behavior was apparently common knowledge and they took care to avoid him and quietly passed the warning along to other women who might be unsuspecting. But that quiet network was not enough to prevent some women from not knowing and thus falling victim. To make it worse, there was also a belief among some that he was gay, thus leading some women to put their guard down in his presence and think that he only wanted to be their friend. Among men, the reactions were all over the place but the primary one was why no women had publicly accused him of behaviors that had been apparently going on for a long time.
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Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show points out the things that the Democratic party did not talk about during the election. I am not saying that doing so would have changed the outcome but it was curious how they ran such a defensive, and even apologetic, campaign when they did have some achievements to their credit.
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