Capella, alpha star of the constellation Auriga, rises over Mt. Everest in this panoramic view of the top of the world at night. The scene was recorded in late November near Namche Bazar, Nepal, gateway to the Himalayan mountain range. Moonlight illuminates the famous peaks of Everest (8840 meters) and Lhotse (8516 meters) at the far left, and a stupa (a Buddhist religious monument) in the foreground, along the main trail to the Everest Base Camp. The light in the valley is from the Tengboche Monastery, also along the trail at about 4000 meters. From left to right above the moonlit peaks, the stars of Auriga give way to bright giant star Aldebaran eye of the Taurus the Bull, the Pleiades star cluster, alpha Ceti, and finally alpha Phoenicis of the Phoenix. Credit: Babak Tafreshi (TWAN).
From the Venus Project:
The Venus Project presents a bold, direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture. There are many people today who are concerned with the serious problems that face our modern society: unemployment, violent crime, technological unemployment, over-population and the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems. As you will see, The Venus Project is dedicated to confronting all of these problems by actively engaging in the research, development, and application of workable solutions. Through the use of innovative approaches to social awareness, educational incentives, and the consistent application of the best that science and technology can offer directly to the social system, The Venus Project offers a comprehensive plan for social reclamation in which human beings, technology, and nature will be able to coexist in a long-term, sustainable state of dynamic equilibrium.
Designing the Future by Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project [PDF]
Tags: Native Americans
From Mary Annette Pember at The Progressive:
This Thanksgiving, as an Ojibwe woman, I will grieve for what Europeans did to native peoples here. But I will also give thanks for life.
I will grieve because Europeans killed most of us quickly and directly at first and later resorted to more cunning means of forced assimilation, such as boarding schools and discriminatory land allotment. It is estimated that there were between 7 million and 10 million indigenous individuals inhabiting what is now America at the beginning of European contact in the early 15th century. By 1900, there were only about 230,000 of us left.
Some might wonder why a Native-American woman would give thanks on a holiday that highlights the beginning of the end for many tribes. I give thanks because that’s what we Ojibwe do. We express gratitude for the great gift of life given to us by the creator.
Traditional Ojibwe religion is deeply rooted in the understanding that life, ever moving, ever changing, is a tremendous gift. This understanding dates way back before the days when the Wampanoag Indians sat down with the Pilgrims for that now famous meal.
We also understand that there is no escaping life’s relentless nature. We are leaves on a tree, in various states of growth. At some time, we will turn color, fall from the tree, swirl colorfully around some kid’s feet and join the soil once again.
Tags: Native Americans
From Lamar Hankins at Freethought San Marcos:
In America, most of us have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, though there are still plenty of people without enough food and shelter, especially since the great recession hit just over a year ago. Actually, the Great Recession has been going on much longer for those of us on Main Street and Side Street and Back Street. It was only when Wall Street started hurting that the politicians got concerned enough to respond to their needs. The needs of Main Street, Side Street, and Back Street have yet to be met, except for getting rid of a few clunkers for cash to stimulate moribund automobile and truck sales.
Congress has virtually ignored the high rate of unemployment, which exceeds 15%, if those job-seekers who have become discouraged from ever finding a job are included in the official unemployment figures. If the Works Progress Administration worked during the Great Depression, why wouldn’t it work during this Great Recession?
[...]
And America goes merrily along for over eight years now spending about $265 million per day in Afghanistan, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Associated Press figures reveal that the War in Iraq has cost American taxpayers about $400 million per day for the last six years. All of this is happening while about one-seventh of the world population is hungry or starving to death.
The United Nations has estimated the cost of ending world hunger at about $195 billion a year, less than $535 million per day–about $130 million less per day than the cost of prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[...]
As most Americans sit down with friends and loved ones for Thanksgiving dinner this week, thanking god for our good fortune seems hollow, self-centered, and crass, an exercise in arrogant pride. A Thanksgiving Blessing more in keeping with our reality might read like the following:
A Universal Blessing for America’s Thanksgiving Dinners
For the blessings of the earth that gladden our lives, we give thanks.
Blessings are not shared equally. May we find within ourselves hearts of generosity and sharing.
See also: Thanksgiving a time to consider Native Americans’ plight
Tags: great recession, Native Americans
From Pew Research Center:
The journey home for Thanksgiving won’t be quite so far this year for many young adults. Instead of traveling across country or across town, many grown sons and daughters will be coming to dinner from their old bedroom down the hall, which now doubles as their recession-era refuge.
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center finds that 13% of parents with grown children say one of their adult sons or daughters has moved back home in the past year. Social scientists call them “boomerangers” — young adults who move in with parents after living away from home. This recession has produced a bumper crop.
Census Bureau data confirm that proportionately fewer young singles are living solo now than before the recession. Overall, the proportion of adults ages 18 to 29 who live alone declined from 7.9% in 2007 to 7.3% in 2009. Similar drops in the proportion of young people who live by themselves occurred during or immediately after the recessions of 1982 and 2001.
The current decline has been particularly steep among young women; the proportion who live by themselves fell by a full percentage point to 6.1%. Among young men, the share living on their own fell 0.2 percentage points to 8.4%, a statistically insignificant change.
Tags: great recession
Solar Impulse, the solar-powered plane, took its first runway test, and eventually the plane is expected to take a 20 to 25 day trip around the world. [source: inhabitat.com]
Tags: solar energy
From Jacqueline Keeler:
I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving.
This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people.
Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing “Land of the Pilgrim’s pride” in “America the Beautiful.” Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing “Land of the Indian’s pride” instead.
[...]
I see, in the “First Thanksgiving” story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism.
Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused.
Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle.
Tags: Native Americans
From the Angry Black Woman:
Fucking MARVELOUS. Western corporations fuck up the planet, western environmentalists march in an persuade, sometimes by economic might, governments that in order to fix it, the citizens of the fucked up places must give up their land. WHAT KIND OF FUCKED UP BULLSHIT REASONING IS THIS SHIT GODDAMMIT?!?!?!?!?!?!? I am so SICK of this everlasting insistence that Westerners know better and to hell with studying the local set up to see WHAT it is and WHY it has worked the way it has, no. We must import Western ideas wholesale and impose them on every damn place, completely ignoring the fuckery they bring into other people’s lives until said other people have suffered/hurt/died, in the case of Africa; according to PDF From Refuge to Refugee: The African Case MILLIONS of people; and god knows how many in Asia; and have had to raise holy hell before we back off!
Article based on the book:Conservation Refugees: When protecting nature means kicking people out:
“We are enemies of conservation,” declared Maasai leader Martin Saning’o, standing before a session of the November 2004 World Conservation Congress sponsored by IUCN in Bangkok, Thailand. The nomadic Maasai, who have over the past thirty years lost most of their grazing range to conservation projects throughout eastern Africa, hadn’t always felt that way. In fact, Saning’o reminded his audience, “…we were the original conservationists.” The room was hushed as he quietly explained how pastoral and nomadic cattlemen have traditionally protected their range: “Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems.” Then he tried to fathom the strange version of land conservation that has impoverished his people, more than one hundred thousand of whom have been displaced from southern Kenya and the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Like the Batwa, the Maasai have not been fairly compensated. Their culture is dissolving and they live in poverty.
“We don’t want to be like you,” Saning’o told a room of shocked white faces. “We want you to be like us. We are here to change your minds. You cannot accomplish conservation without us.”
Tags: conservation refugees
From Jacki Rand Choctaw at the Daily Iowan:
Native social values then and now are centered on a view of humanity, the natural world, and the spiritual realm as a whole. . . . Native social values, based on an alternate calculation, have always been simply counterintuitive to a capitalist mind. The “kindness” of Native nations, sovereign then and sovereign today, not to mention their lands, rivers, minerals, timber, and other resources — for which they received virtually nothing — are the original source of United States “greatness.” Theft and exploitation of indigenous resources and labor, human-rights violations, and commodified African bodies, without which there would be no American ingenuity, created the big boost to U.S. world domination.
This Thanksgiving, I exhort Americans to honor their first president’s decree with petitions to the government of his and other founders’ creation “to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord.” Recognize our treaties, humanity, and agency in your ancestors’ survival. Absent that, we will continue to meet you, treaties in hand, in the courts of the land.
Tags: Native Americans
From Winter Rabbit at DailyKos and cross-posted at Native American Netroots:
Frank James, a Wampanoag tribal member, would have given a speech in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1970; however, the ones in charge of the Thanksgiving ceremony at Plymouth Rock denied Frank James from ever uttering it. I learned about this in The Thanksgiving Day Massacre…Or, would you like Turkey with your genocide?
The timeline itself along with basic knowledge of the Pilgrim’s religious beliefs exposes the fact that historically speaking, Thanksgiving was literally about gratitude for genocide. Furthermore, the low population counts of the Pequot in more recent years points to how the devastating effects of the English’s, or Separatists’, or Pilgrims’, or Puritans’ crime of genocide almost destroyed the Pequot population. The English, who no doubt formed an American Colony in New England, claimed the land as theirs by the Doctrine of Discovery, which is still in effect today as federal law.
To be accurate, the word genocide was not created until 1944 by Raphael Lemkin;nonetheless, the word genocide is appropriate when discussing the near extermination of the Pequot. To be clear, the Doctrine of Discovery legally applied to the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England, but not to the Pilgrims in New Plymouth. What was the difference?
Tags: Native Americans
From Ojibwa at DailyKos:
When the subject of slavery in the Americas is discussed, many people assume that this is about the 13 million Africans who were captured, enslaved and transported to the Americas to work on the plantations. Yet the history of slavery in the Americas starts long before this. From the very beginning of the European discovery of the American continents, Europeans were involved with slavery: not African slaves, but American Indians.
Tags: Native Americans
From Workplace Prof Blog:
No more jumps out of the page and slaps you in the face, but the Eleventh Circuit still does not think that a worker often called ‘boy’ established a racially hostile environment.
In Alexander v. Opelika Pub. Schs., No. 08-11014 (11th Cir. 11/10/09), a public school employee in Alabama who allegedly was called “boy” eight times over two years and heard a supervisor comment about a noose did not present sufficient evidence to survive summary judgment on his racial harassment claim.
If we’re lucky, the 11th Circuit’s miserly construction of Title VII will be slapped down again by the Supreme Court.
Tags: Title VII
From the NYT:
The most important new antidiscrimination law in two decades — the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act — will take effect in the nation’s workplaces next weekend, prohibiting employers from requesting genetic testing or considering someone’s genetic background in hiring, firing or promotions.
[...]
The biggest change resulting from the law is that it will — except in a few circumstances — prohibit employers and health insurers from asking employees to give their family medical histories. The law also bans group health plans from the common practice of rewarding workers, often with lower premiums or one-time payments, if they give their family medical histories when completing health risk questionnaires.
From Slate:
This June, in Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court held that the city of New Haven discriminated against white firefighters when it rejected the results of a promotion exam that eliminated almost all of the minority candidates. Frank Ricci and other white firefighters, as well as one Latino, claimed that the city intentionally discriminated against them on the basis of race, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, by rejecting the exam simply because too many of the highest scorers were white and thus denying them promotions.* New Haven’s defense was that it rejected the exam because using it would have violated another part of Title VII that prohibits tests that have a disparate impact on minorities—meaning any test that needlessly screens out a disproportionate number of minorities. During oral argument, Justice Souter worried that Ricci’s lawsuit put New Haven in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation”: liable for disparate-impact discrimination against blacks if it used the test and liable for intentional discrimination against whites if it didn’t use it.
Sure enough, last week, just as New Haven prepared to promote a group consisting almost entirely of white fire captains and lieutenants based on the exam results, a black New Haven firefighter, Michael Briscoe, filed a disparate-impact lawsuit against the city. Like Frank Ricci, Briscoe is a sympathetic plaintiff. He received the highest score of any candidate on the oral portion of the lieutenant’s promotion exam. But he isn’t eligible for promotion because the city based 60 percent of each candidate’s score on the written exam. On this part of the test, Briscoe—like most black candidates for promotion—did comparatively badly.
It’s tempting to dismiss Briscoe as a sore loser. But if he’s right, New Haven is using an outdated promotion exam that screens out some of the most qualified candidates and locks in the effects of past discrimination. That’s precisely what Title VII’s disparate-impact prohibition is designed to prevent. And disparate-impact doctrine may be the most important part of civil rights law today, because although fewer and fewer employers openly discriminate on the basis of race, plenty still inadvertently perpetuate the effects of past discrimination by using flawed tests. [Read the rest here]
Tags: disparate impact doctrine, employment discrimination, employment law, systemic effects of institutional racism
From National Geographic:
During the 2009 Leonid meteor shower, you may see anywhere from 30 to 300 shooting stars an hour, depending on whether you’re in the right place to see the showy peak on November 17, experts predict.
With the highest number of meteors streaking across the skies around 4:45 p.m. ET, the Leonids peak will be effectively invisible for viewers in North America and Europe. In those regions, sky-watchers are advised to venture out away from bright city lights between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. on the 17th, when they should see 30 to 50 meteors an hour. [source: National Geographic]
Those in the eastern U.S. and Canada are especially favored because Leo will be high in the southeast sky between 3:30 and 5:30 a.m. EST, just before Earth is expected to exit the meteor cloud. [source: space.com]
From the National Journal:
Cyber-defenders know what to prepare themselves for because the United States has used the kinds of weapons that now target the Pentagon, federal agencies, and American corporations. They are designed to steal information, disrupt communications, and commandeer computer systems. The U.S. is forming a cyberwar plan based largely on the experience of intelligence agencies and military operations. It is still in nascent stages, but it is likely to support the conduct of conventional war for generations to come. Some believe it may even become the dominant force.
Senior military leaders didn’t come of age in a digital world, and they’ve been skeptical of computerized attacks. Mostly younger officers, who received their early combat education through video games and Dungeons & Dragons, wage these battles. To them, digital weapons are as familiar and useful as rifles and grenades. [...]
Today, cyber-warriors use the global telecommunications network to commandeer an adversary’s phones or shut down its Web servers. This activity is a natural evolution of the information war doctrine.
[...]
President Obama confirmed that cyber-warriors have aimed at American networks. “We know that cyber-intruders have probed our electrical grid,” he said at the White House in May, when he unveiled the next stage of the national cyber-security strategy. The president also confirmed, for the first time, that the weapons of cyberwar had claimed victims. “In other countries, cyberattacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.”
[...]
Military officers describe cyberspace as the fifth domain of war, after land, sea, air, and space. But cyberspace is unique in one important respect — it’s the only battlefield created by humans.
[..]
In a 2008 article in Armed Forces Journal, Col. Charles Williamson III, a legal adviser for the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency, proposed building a military “botnet,” an army of centrally controlled computers to launch coordinated attacks on other machines. Williamson echoed a widely held concern among military officials that other nations are building up their cyber-forces more quickly. “America has no credible deterrent, and our adversaries prove it every day by attacking everywhere,” he wrote.
[...]
Presumably, China has no interest in crippling Wall Street, because it owns much of it.
[source: National Journal]
Tags: cyberwar, information war
Party like it’s 1999? From commondreams.org:
Today marks the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act and related legislation. [...]
The repeal of Glass-Steagall removed the legal prohibition on combinations between commercial banks on the one hand, and investment banks and other financial services companies on the other. Glass-Steagall’s strict rules originated in the U.S. government’s response to the Depression and reflected the learned experience of the severe dangers to consumers and the overall financial system of permitting giant financial institutions to combine commercial banking with other financial operations.
[...]
What lessons should be learned from the 10-year debacle?
First, Glass-Steagall’s key insight was in the need to treat regulation from an industry structure point of view. Glass-Steagall’s authors did not set out to establish a regulatory system to oversee companies that combined commercial banking and investment banking. They simply banned the combination of these enterprises. Cleaning up the current mess, we need strategies that focus on industry structure — meaning, especially, that we must break up the big banks — as well as more traditional regulation.
Second, we need to return to Glass-Steagall’s more particular understanding: depository institutions backed by federal insurance protection cannot be involved in the risky, speculative betting of the investment banking world. (Notably, the Glass-Steagall problem is now worse than it was before the financial crisis, following JP Morgan’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, and Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch.) Moreover, we need not just to reinstate Glass-Steagall, but infuse its underlying principles throughout the financial regulatory scheme. Commercial banks should not be in the business of speculation. They have a job to do in providing credit to the real economy. They should do that. Their job is not to engage in betting on derivatives and other exotic financial instruments.
Third, giant financial institutions exercise too much political power, and for that reason alone must be broken up.
Fourth, we need broad reform in the area of money and politics. We need public financing of Congressional regulations, even stronger lobbyist reforms, and tight restrictions to close the revolving door through which individuals spin as they travel between positions in government and industry.
[Source: commondreams.org]
From the NYT:
There is water on the Moon, scientists stated unequivocally on Friday, and considerable amounts of it.
An Indian space mission claims to have found water on the moon, raising hopes that a manned base could be established there within the next two decades.
It has been widely believed that the moon was dry, but data from India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission allegedly found clear evidence of water there, apparently concentrated at the poles and possibly formed by the solar wind.
What’s more, water appears to still be forming, advancing the possibility that human life could be sustained there. Scientists hope that astronauts could one day not only drink the water but extract oxygen from it to breathe and hydrogen to use as fuel.
This ‘discovery’ kind of reminds me of that ole tale about some European sailing the ocean blue in 1492. You may have heard of it.
Tags: water on the moon
After a local Schenectady denizen’s FOIA request to access the local city code — to learn whether he was running afoul of any local ordinances due to an unruly dog — is denied, he learns he must pay at least $200 to have access to the city code.
From the Albany Times Union:
Two options seem unreasonably expensive for an individual: He could purchase a copy of the code in a paper binder from General Code for $656 or on a CD-ROM disk bundled with General Code’s software for $200.
General Code is a private sector company the city has contracted with for about $20,000 “to create a comprehensive, searchable electronic version of the code that eventually will be posted on the Web and available to all.”
Schenectady is not alone — with lovely blue states like Oregon and California in the mix.
See also: Professor Posts “Illegal Copy” of Guide To Oregon Public Record Laws and dares the AG to respond.
Open-access champion Carl Malamud’s “All the Government’s Information” is a must:
Tags: copyrighted city laws
From the Sylvia Rivera Law Project:
In October 2009, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law. This law makes it a federal hate crime to assault people based on sexual orientation, gender and gender identity by expanding the scope of a 1968 law that applies to people attacked because of their race, religion or national origin. In support of this goal, it expands the authority of the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute such crimes instead of or in collaboration with local authorities. The law also provides major increases in funding for the U.S. Department of Justice and local law enforcement to use in prosecuting these crimes – including special additional resources to go toward prosecution of youth for hate crimes.
The recent expansion of the federal hates crimes legislation has received extensive praise and celebration by mainstream lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organizations because it purports to “protect” LGBT people from attacks on the basis of their expressed and/or perceived identities for the first time ever on a federal level. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project does not see this as a victory. As an organization that centers racial and economic justice in our work and that understands mass imprisonment as a primary vector of violence in the lives of our constituents, we believe that hate crimes legislation is a counterproductive response to the violence faced by LGBT people.
Already, the U.S. incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world. One out of every thirty-two people in the U.S. live under criminal punishment system supervision. African-American people are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white people; Latin@ people are twice as likely to be incarcerated as white people. LGBTS and queer people, transgender people, and poor people are also at greatly increased risk for interaction with the criminal justice system. It is clear that this monstrous system of laws and enforcement specifically targets marginalized communities, particularly people of color.
What hate crimes laws do is expand and increase the power of the same unjust and corrupt criminal punishment system. Evidence demonstrates that hate crimes legislation, like other criminal punishment legislation, is used unequally and improperly against communities that are already marginalized in our society. These laws increase the already staggering incarceration rates of people of color, poor people, queer people and transgender people based on a system that is inherently and deeply corrupt.
The evidence also shows that hate crime laws and other “get tough on crime” measures do not deter or prevent violence. Increased incarceration does not deter others from committing violent acts motivated by hate, does not it rehabilitate those who have committed past acts of hate, and does not make anyone safer. As we see trans people profiled by police, disproportionately arrested and detained, caught in systems of poverty and detention, and facing extreme violence in prisons, jails and detention centers, we believe that this system itself is a main perpetrator of violence against our communities.
We are also dismayed by the joining of a law that is supposedly about “preventing” violence with the funding for continued extreme violence and colonialism abroad. This particular bill was attached to a $680-billion measure for the Pentagon’s budget, which includes $130 billion for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan protects no one, inside or outside of U.S. borders.
We continue to work in solidarity with many organizations and individuals to support people in prison, to reduce incarceration, to end the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and to create systems of accountability that do not rely on prisons or policing and that meaningfully improve the health and safety of our communities–especially redistribution of wealth, health care, and housing. A few of the many other organizations doing radical and transformative work to increase the health and safety of our communities include:
- The Audre Lorde Project
- FIERCE
- Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
- Queers for Economic Justice
- Right Rides
- TGI Justice Project
- and The Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois
For these reasons, we believe that a law that links our community’s experiences of violence and death to a demand for increased criminal punishment, as well as further funding for imperialist war, is a strategic mistake of significant proportion.
Tags: hate crimes bill, matthew shepard, president obama signs hate crimes bill, Sylvia Rivera Law Project
From NASA:
In this spectacular image, observations using infrared light and X-ray light see through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core. Note that the center of the galaxy is located within the bright white region to the right of and just below the middle of the image. The entire image width covers about one-half a degree, about the same angular width as the full moon. Credit: NASA, ESA, SSC, CXC, and STScI
A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy [was unveiled by] NASA on Nov. 10. This event [commemorated] the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609.
In celebration of this International Year of Astronomy, NASA is releasing images of the galactic center region as seen by its Great Observatories to more than 150 planetariums, museums, nature centers, libraries and schools across the country.
From the Angry Black Woman:
Someday someone will explain to me this fascination America has with the idea that Michelle Obama has white relatives like it’s remotely unusual for a descendant of slaves in America. I notice with all the talk of “So and so was impregnated by X slaveowner” and the rush to interview the white relatives so they can say the obligatory “I’d love to reunite with that side of the family and talk about our history” no one discusses exactly how so many mulattoes came to be born during and after slavery. I know the story of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings has been played as very romantic, but I sincerely doubt that even if it was that way for them, the same is true of Michelle Obama’s great great great grandmother’s relationship with the man that bought her when she was 6 and impregnated her at 15.
Read the rest of this excellent piece here.
Tags: institutional racism
From talkingpointsmemo.com:
ACORN is suing the U.S. government over a law passed recently by Congress that bars the controversial community group from receiving federal money.
In a complaint filed this morning in U.S. District Court in New York, ACORN charges that the law is unconstitutional, because it’s a bill of attainder — that is, it targets a specific individual or group for punishment.
The complaint, brought on behalf of ACORN by the Center for Constitutional Rights, also mounts a broader push-back against ACORN’s conservative critics. According to a draft version examined by TPMmuckraker, it claims that the law to defund ACORN was passed thanks to “a public relations campaign orchestrated by political forces” that are hostile to its work registering low-income voters. And it charges that ACORN “earned the animosity of political forces who are dedicated to the proposition that the fewer poor people who vote the better.”
Complaint for Injunctive and Declaratory Relief [PDF]
Bill of Attainder Fact Sheet [PDF]
ACORN v. USA Exhibits [PDF]
ACORN v. USA Memo of Law [PDF]
From the Guardian(UK):
Wolf Blitzer apparently really distinguished himself yesterday by asking Nidal Hasan’s military lawyer, retired Colonel John Galligan, how on earth he could do such a thing.
[...]
The best line of Obama’s Ft. Hood speech, by the way, was: “We are a nation of laws whose commitment to justice is so enduring that we would treat a gunman and give him due process, just as surely as we will see that he pays for his crimes.” That’s not a liberal sentiment, nor (obviously) a conservative one, but a constitutional one. Any American who doesn’t see this isn’t really much of an American.
Wolf Blitzer is one of those clueless, privileged, pathetic idiots who will never be able to make the distinction between his ass and his face. While this quintessential jackass obliviously makes an even bigger ass of himself on a daily basis, he dominates the airwaves with his pseudo-journalism and banks a six figure salary. Perhaps we are the bigger idiots to allow a world in which the “Wolf Blitzers” flourish to continue on the same sorry path.
Tags: wolf blitzer
Tags: 21st century
From the NYT:
About one-third of all adult homeless men are veterans, and an average night finds an estimated 131,000 of them from five decades bedding down on streets and in charity sanctuaries. About 3 in 100 of them are back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem of homelessness for Vietnam veterans is, shamefully, well known. But the men and women in this growing cohort took just 18 months to find rock bottom, compared with the five years-plus of the previous generation’s veterans.
Tags: homelessness, veteran's day
From the ABA Journal:
An Illinois judge has decided that an anonymous commenter on a newspaper website will be unmasked, even though the mother of a teen about whom “Hipcheck16″ allegedly made “deeply disturbing” comments hasn’t yet decided whether to sue over the posting.
Tags: your rights online
