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silveradeptGreetings. The Supreme Court of the United States said that if the police arrest you, they can strip-search you repeatedly. Even if you're never charged with a crime. Elsewhere, the government of Scotland is unwilling to let a man who wishes to go about naked leave the prison where he is held...or, for that matter, allow him to mingle with the regular prison population.
Elsewhere, Michigan's Democrats had to get an order from a judge to get the Republican Party to follow the state constitution and call for votes when sufficient members request it. That's how far the Governor and his party have gone toward suspending the normal operation of democracy in Michigan. Not just taking over towns and suspending their democratically-elected local government, but ignoring the opposition party in the legislature when they want to.
No, wait. It's worse than that. The majority party in Michigan is not only ignoring the clearly-voiced requests of the minority, they're claiming two-thirds mandates in three seconds without a roll-call vote and then claiming that mandate official journal of the legislature so they can make their laws take immediate effect, rather than having to wait for the Constitutionally-mandated enacting time, 90 days after the end of a Legislature session. Some of the legislature that may have been improperly claimed? The "emergency manager" law that's allowing the Republicans to dissolve democracy, a move to block the graduate student instructors' union from adding more members, and the destruction of domestic partner benefits for public employees. Oh, and trying to make it harder for ballot initiatives to repeal laws passed by the legislature. If a court finds the Republicans to have been doing this illegally and unconstitutionally, how much of this session gets unspun and undone? And furthermore, how much damage has to be undone that's already been effected?
Elsewhere in the world today, North Korea's plans to launch a satellite into orbit using a three-stage rocket has the international community on edge about missile activities coming form inside the country.
A day after the United States offered a $10 million USD reward for information leading to his capture, the leader of Laskhar-e-Taiba appeared at a press conference to deliver his schedule so that the United States could talk to him whenever they wanted to. In Pakistan, where we already have a very love-hate relationship with the government and security services there.
A teenager in China sold his kidney to get some iProducts. Now five people are being charged in the sale and trafficking of organs over the matter. And the kid? Suffering from renal failure, where having another kidney would have been useful.
Domestically, Through better diagnostic tools or more incidences, autism diagnoses in the United States have gone up 78 percent in the last ten years. That's approximately 1 in 88 children in the United States.
Despite what you may hear from the talking heads, when someone says the Romney-Ryan-Republican budget is Social Darwinism, they're telling the absolute truth, and you can look at the proposal itself to see that truth.
The panopticon says that George Zimmerman, the person not prosecuted for the shooting of Trayvon Martin, was not injured at all when he arrives at the police station, which makes him and the police report btoh liars.
Georgia's Senate passed a bill that outlawed abortions after 20 weeks, no exceptions, on the premise that fetuses feel pain. However, when a state representative found his daughter had a pregnancy that would result in a dead fetus and a harmed mother, he put in for an exemption for medically futile pregnancies. Despite seeing the reasons to include exemptions, the Georgia House passed the bill solely with the "futile pregnancy" exemption - no rape or incest. And for his trouble, the state representative and others will face challengers from the right of their conservative positions because they were insufficiently orthodox in allowing the one exemption.
In Wisconsin, Scott Walker quietly signs a bill that makes it harder for those suffering wage discrimination to get their hearing in court, undoing some of the work done by the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Law done federally. When asked about why they did such things, on of the prominent Republican pushers of the bill argued "money is more important to men" as a reason for the repeal. When pressed on his data, he said "I know it's true, because Ann Coulter said so" and apparently, her word is gospel.
And in South Carolina, a teacher has been suspended for reading books, including Ender's Game, to students, after a parent complained the books had "pornographic" and other material. Having read Ender's Game, there are not enough Whiskeys, Tangoes, and Foxtrots to explain this accusation. Plus, aren't teachers supposed to be teaching students about the world outside? Doesn't that mean they need some latitude?
Oh, one more. A teacher's aide in Michigan was fired for refusing to hand over their personal Facebook password to school administrators after a personal post on personal time rubbed those administrators the wrong way. I know that when you're on the clock, you're Speaking For The Company, but policing someone's personal and private lives is a severe invasion of their privacy.
I believe that the NSA and other agencies are forbidden from engaging in domestic spying activities without proper court orders. So they outsource the work to private companies with ties to supposedly-allied governments to do the spying for them. All very nicely able to avoid any requirements for court orders and to have plausible deniability about the activities of such contractors, of course. And with the FBI being trained that they could break or bend the law in their work, and you have a government that, for most intents and practices, doesn't really care about the laws, unless they can use them to their advantage. Or to deny the existence of any partnerships that might be in place between them and major tech companies.
Republican candidate Rick Santorum believes the UC system does not teach American History, to the point of offering no courses in it at all. Republican candidate Rick Santorum is a pants-on-fire liar. That said, what he said was not stupid or off-the-cuff, but a severely encoded dog-whistle to the conservative movement.
And then, Mitt Romney can lie repeatedly in front of journalists, and the journalists don't report on the lying with any force. They report on what was said, instead. Much like how reporters and talking heads tut-tut about the Social Darwinism comment, without actually taking a look into whether or not the comment is objectively true.
Into opinions, where thirteen reasons appear on why decisions and Courts and elections all count for something, and how important things are going to be depending on where the justices fall. (And whether or not one could then accuse the Court of "judicial activism" in the conservative direction for once.
Messrs. Gramm and McMillin make an excellent case for removing tax loopholes and raising tax rates in their argument that the economy would improve more if we lowered tax rates, by pointing out the benefits of globalization, the shifting of capital from one place to another to take advantage of lower taxes, and the proliferation of business income being reported as personal income instead. In short, they say, "Well, if we didn't keep making it easier to cheat the system, then we'd probably have a fairer tax burden." They also indicate their belief that the U.S. has the most progressive income tax structure based solely on how much of GDP comes from rich people in taxes - which is true, most likely - but that's a measure of what's collected in actual, not in potential. I suspect in potential, the U.S. is not as progressive as it could be.
If you hear someone complaining that the Trayvon Martin attention is really about ginning up racial tensions to vote politically, check carefully to see whether the person writing genuinely cares about racial issues in this country.
Yeah, that's everything. Kind of depressing. Actually, very depressing. But there have been a lot of new kitty stories around the f-list, so that's happy-making.
Elsewhere, Michigan's Democrats had to get an order from a judge to get the Republican Party to follow the state constitution and call for votes when sufficient members request it. That's how far the Governor and his party have gone toward suspending the normal operation of democracy in Michigan. Not just taking over towns and suspending their democratically-elected local government, but ignoring the opposition party in the legislature when they want to.
No, wait. It's worse than that. The majority party in Michigan is not only ignoring the clearly-voiced requests of the minority, they're claiming two-thirds mandates in three seconds without a roll-call vote and then claiming that mandate official journal of the legislature so they can make their laws take immediate effect, rather than having to wait for the Constitutionally-mandated enacting time, 90 days after the end of a Legislature session. Some of the legislature that may have been improperly claimed? The "emergency manager" law that's allowing the Republicans to dissolve democracy, a move to block the graduate student instructors' union from adding more members, and the destruction of domestic partner benefits for public employees. Oh, and trying to make it harder for ballot initiatives to repeal laws passed by the legislature. If a court finds the Republicans to have been doing this illegally and unconstitutionally, how much of this session gets unspun and undone? And furthermore, how much damage has to be undone that's already been effected?
Elsewhere in the world today, North Korea's plans to launch a satellite into orbit using a three-stage rocket has the international community on edge about missile activities coming form inside the country.
A day after the United States offered a $10 million USD reward for information leading to his capture, the leader of Laskhar-e-Taiba appeared at a press conference to deliver his schedule so that the United States could talk to him whenever they wanted to. In Pakistan, where we already have a very love-hate relationship with the government and security services there.
A teenager in China sold his kidney to get some iProducts. Now five people are being charged in the sale and trafficking of organs over the matter. And the kid? Suffering from renal failure, where having another kidney would have been useful.
Domestically, Through better diagnostic tools or more incidences, autism diagnoses in the United States have gone up 78 percent in the last ten years. That's approximately 1 in 88 children in the United States.
Despite what you may hear from the talking heads, when someone says the Romney-Ryan-Republican budget is Social Darwinism, they're telling the absolute truth, and you can look at the proposal itself to see that truth.
The panopticon says that George Zimmerman, the person not prosecuted for the shooting of Trayvon Martin, was not injured at all when he arrives at the police station, which makes him and the police report btoh liars.
Georgia's Senate passed a bill that outlawed abortions after 20 weeks, no exceptions, on the premise that fetuses feel pain. However, when a state representative found his daughter had a pregnancy that would result in a dead fetus and a harmed mother, he put in for an exemption for medically futile pregnancies. Despite seeing the reasons to include exemptions, the Georgia House passed the bill solely with the "futile pregnancy" exemption - no rape or incest. And for his trouble, the state representative and others will face challengers from the right of their conservative positions because they were insufficiently orthodox in allowing the one exemption.
In Wisconsin, Scott Walker quietly signs a bill that makes it harder for those suffering wage discrimination to get their hearing in court, undoing some of the work done by the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Law done federally. When asked about why they did such things, on of the prominent Republican pushers of the bill argued "money is more important to men" as a reason for the repeal. When pressed on his data, he said "I know it's true, because Ann Coulter said so" and apparently, her word is gospel.
And in South Carolina, a teacher has been suspended for reading books, including Ender's Game, to students, after a parent complained the books had "pornographic" and other material. Having read Ender's Game, there are not enough Whiskeys, Tangoes, and Foxtrots to explain this accusation. Plus, aren't teachers supposed to be teaching students about the world outside? Doesn't that mean they need some latitude?
Oh, one more. A teacher's aide in Michigan was fired for refusing to hand over their personal Facebook password to school administrators after a personal post on personal time rubbed those administrators the wrong way. I know that when you're on the clock, you're Speaking For The Company, but policing someone's personal and private lives is a severe invasion of their privacy.
I believe that the NSA and other agencies are forbidden from engaging in domestic spying activities without proper court orders. So they outsource the work to private companies with ties to supposedly-allied governments to do the spying for them. All very nicely able to avoid any requirements for court orders and to have plausible deniability about the activities of such contractors, of course. And with the FBI being trained that they could break or bend the law in their work, and you have a government that, for most intents and practices, doesn't really care about the laws, unless they can use them to their advantage. Or to deny the existence of any partnerships that might be in place between them and major tech companies.
Republican candidate Rick Santorum believes the UC system does not teach American History, to the point of offering no courses in it at all. Republican candidate Rick Santorum is a pants-on-fire liar. That said, what he said was not stupid or off-the-cuff, but a severely encoded dog-whistle to the conservative movement.
And then, Mitt Romney can lie repeatedly in front of journalists, and the journalists don't report on the lying with any force. They report on what was said, instead. Much like how reporters and talking heads tut-tut about the Social Darwinism comment, without actually taking a look into whether or not the comment is objectively true.
Into opinions, where thirteen reasons appear on why decisions and Courts and elections all count for something, and how important things are going to be depending on where the justices fall. (And whether or not one could then accuse the Court of "judicial activism" in the conservative direction for once.
Messrs. Gramm and McMillin make an excellent case for removing tax loopholes and raising tax rates in their argument that the economy would improve more if we lowered tax rates, by pointing out the benefits of globalization, the shifting of capital from one place to another to take advantage of lower taxes, and the proliferation of business income being reported as personal income instead. In short, they say, "Well, if we didn't keep making it easier to cheat the system, then we'd probably have a fairer tax burden." They also indicate their belief that the U.S. has the most progressive income tax structure based solely on how much of GDP comes from rich people in taxes - which is true, most likely - but that's a measure of what's collected in actual, not in potential. I suspect in potential, the U.S. is not as progressive as it could be.
If you hear someone complaining that the Trayvon Martin attention is really about ginning up racial tensions to vote politically, check carefully to see whether the person writing genuinely cares about racial issues in this country.
Yeah, that's everything. Kind of depressing. Actually, very depressing. But there have been a lot of new kitty stories around the f-list, so that's happy-making.
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-10 07:46 pm (UTC)When, as occasioonally, they have anticipated or culminated public opinion, they have been no worse, and sometimes better, than the public opinion.