This seems to be a recurring theme in American society - if something bad happens to someone, there must be somebody else who is to blame, and who must compensate the injured party for that harm ( Read more... )

The Facebook group "telling Dick Cheney to shut the hell up" (of which I'm a fan) had a haiku contest. These were my entries. They were fun to write ( Read more... )

I was talking to a friend this evening when he started griping about one of his favorite subjects to gripe about. My usual response when he does this is to remind him that we've had this conversation several times before and that we have nothing new to say, so we might as well drop it. (It's not even that we substantially disagree about what he's ( Read more... )

In this NYT article, quotes a speech in Ohio by George W. Bush in which he said that justices need to apply the law as it is written. This from a man who has repeatedly violated the law and the US constitution whenever it suited him: authorizing torture, detaining people without the benefit of trial, authorizing illegal surveillance, unilaterally ( Read more... )

McCain really galls me. He has the audacity to claim that Obama tried to legislate failure in Iraq just because he voted against authorizing a troop increase. He claims that Obama put his own self-interest over the country's interest. There are just a few problems with those assertions ( Read more... )

So I actually was quoted in the New York Times, in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/technology/15digi.htmlRead more... )

PEMBERTON, N.J. -- Calling it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country,” John McCain ripped into the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Guantanamo detainees access to civilian trials for the second day in a row. “We're now going to have the courts flooded with so-called "habeas corpus suits" against the government, whether it be ( Read more... )

After reading the opinions and letting them digest awhile, it strikes me that Bush lost this case (and eroded Executive authority) precisely because he tried to evade both US and international law in his handling of prisoners ( Read more... )

The Supreme Court ruled today that "enemy combatants" detained at Gitmo have the right to habeas corpus - that is, they have the right to contest their detention in court and to have have a court rule whether they are being detained lawfully ( Read more... )

I ran across an interesting NYT article on the difference between the US First Amendment and other western countries' ideas of free speech.I like the tolerance we have for speech here, even hate speech. As disgusting as it can be when people give full expression to their prejudices, it's good overall that such speech is legal. I'd much rather ( Read more... )