AFP is reporting another outrage out of the Iranian legal system where a journalist Bahman Ahmadi Amoui has been sentenced to over seven years in jail and a flogging with 34 lashes. Amoui was a critic of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s economic policies.
Amoui, who has been in jail since June 20th. He was an editor at the respected economic publication Sarmayeh. Iranian authorities shutdown the paper when it continued to criticize the economic policies of Ahmadinejad.
This follows the six-year jail sentence handed down a few days earlier to journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi.
For pictures of other journalists arrested in Iran, click here.
For the full story, click here.
u bees right about dat
Bdaman:
“Government jobs don’t produce a product.”
Hot Air, CO2, and Bullshit come to mind.
Byron all one needs to do is to look at the number of jobs saved or created in the government sector verses private industry. Of course the numbers in the private industry are skewed to the positive so it is actually worse than what is being reported.
Get a government job and get a guaranteed paycheck from the taxpayer. Government jobs don’t produce a product.
Anon Nurse:
what are those things we don’t know here in the US?
Our government has grown into a leviathan and needs to put under control. I think the problem has more to do with the vested bureaucrats than it does with the politicians. The bureaucrats want to keep the steady paycheck coming so who knows how low they will go. But both groups are probably equally corrupt and use us like serfs.
If we had any balls at all we would, as a unified mass, refuse to pay our taxes until this crap is straightened out.
Byron,
I didn’t see your comment when I posted mine.
You said, “I think there has to be more to that story, US troops do not pull school children from their beds in the middle of the night and execute them.”
I’d like to believe that there’s more to the story and plan to follow it. Having said this, there are many things going on that I would never have believed. Domestically. Right here. Things that, if known, would send this country reeling, to a degree not seen in a long while — perhaps since Watergate.
Swarthmore mom: Thanks for the additional information. When children are killed, it’s hard to know what to say.
(Someone may bring up the issue of child soldiers, so I’ll do it first. According to a survey undertaken by UNICEF and partners in 2003, there are an estimated 8000 former child soldiers in Afghanistan (www.unicef.org/infobycountry/afghanistan_23051.html).)
Children are, by definition, innocent and should be treated as such. The killing of children — any children — is despicable. The children referenced in the Democracy Now! article were reportedly “schoolchildren dragged from their beds and shot.”
anon nurse:
I think there has to be more to that story, US troops do not pull school children from their beds in the middle of the night and execute them. I need an overwhelming amount of evidence for me to believe this story. Now I could believe they were conducting a raid and were fired on either by the children or others and that children were killed in the fire fight.
On the surface it sounds like some Taliban slight of hand.
Please keep us apprised of this, I would like to know the real truth.
anon nurse According to the BBC four more children were killed today. Unfortunately the military loves these cluster bombs. The stories have been picked up by the mainstream media.
This is off-thread:
Was this covered by the MSM?
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/6/us_led_forces_accused_of_executing
US-Led Forces Accused of Executing Schoolchildren in Afghanistan
“In Afghanistan, hundreds have taken to the streets of Kabul and elsewhere to protest the US killing of civilians. The incident that has sparked the most outrage took place in eastern Kunar on December 27th, when ten Afghans, eight of them schoolchildren, were killed. According to the Times of London, US-led troops dragged innocent children from their beds and shot them during a nighttime raid. Afghan government investigators said the eight students were aged from eleven to seventeen, all but one of them from the same family.”
(Jill, Are you reading???)
Jill wrote: “Our govt. is a govt. of the weak. They cannot rule through law, so they use the tools of repression.”
Yep. There are goon squads operating domestically. I’d stake my life on it. Though repressive groups have always been around, if we really care about the future of this country, we’d better expose and stop practices that run contrary to the rule of law and the Constitution.
raff,
Glad you enjoyed it.
And I’d always heard the phrase was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” but I suppose “a dancing propaganda monkey in sheep’s clothing” is a bit of a mouthful. 😀
Buddha,
I have to agree with Mike S. that I enjoyed yours and Toms dispensing of the latest troll breakout. Are we sure that Offtopic isn’t Bdaman in sheep’s clothing?
“If one assumes individual men engaged in commerce to be corrupt how can one then assume people engaged in government to be of good intention?”
When we were a country of laws and not men, this wasn’t an issue.
Laws make equity and ergo justice (or as Learned Hand called it the “shadow of justice”). When the law applies to all, as it’s supposed to despite what the last idiot and the current idiot in the White House think, then the law also constrains the men in government from bad actions. And when you don’t punish the obviously guilty as in the case of ordering torture, you breed civil unrest and possible anarchy or civil war.
Laws. Regulations. Equal Enforcement. That’s what makes a just society.
Not men. Men are all ultimately corruptible unless constrained. As Bob is so fond of reminding us, mankind has not changed one bit from the pool of slime we evolved from. We cannot trust other men to always restrain other men. Ergo, we must trust the law to do it, The problem now is that sociopaths using graft have indeed turned this into a country of men and not laws. If it were still a country of laws, Cheney would be on death row and Saudi Arabia in flames.
Lottakatz:
Actually, I think if you do a little research you will find that John D. Rockefeller produced gas and oil for very competitive rates. And the stories you read about “Trust Busting” and “Robber Barons” have a component of propaganda to them.
I will nose around and see if I can come up with some sources for my assertion.
In my opinion what you see today is not capitalism and so it looks corrupt.
My biggest question about regulation basically boils down to the fallibility of human beings. If one assumes individual men engaged in commerce to be corrupt how can one then assume people engaged in government to be of good intention?
Just because one is not making large amounts of money does not inoculate them from basic human vices. How do we know or trust that regulations will be in the best interest of the country and the economy and will serve the “common good”?
Buddha:
I’m thinking about what you and others say about economics.
Byron: “You sure you arent a closet capitalist?”
Ummm, no. I’m big on regulation, not protectionism. Capitalism unrestrained is a Ponzi scheme IMO. If you get in on the ground floor and make enough money you can simply take a loss on every unit of product you sell and drive your competition into bankruptcy, or you and ‘yours’ can maintain a market based on price-fixing. The Rockefeller fortune is based on just those two lynch-pin tactics. What we see now is not regulation but government protection for the highest bidders.
Byron,
You are so close to another set of red pills I bet you can smell them. The first set were good for you. When you find this set? It’ll be even better for you.
Lottakatz:
“This is because IMO cable companies have virtual monopolies on the infrastructure and those monopolies are protected by local laws as is the cable provider in my area.”
I agree keep government out of the private sector and let markets work.
You sure you arent a closet capitalist? Maybe I’m a closet socialist. Because I agree with you a good deal on economics (starting with your ideas for, was it GM, employee ownership).
“typical capitalist practices reinforced by monopolies protected at every level of government”
I would like to state for the record that a true capitalists does not believe in government protectionism of industry. The ones that do believe in protectionism are rightfully called Fascists. I would also like to say that in my opinion a monopoly can only exist with government protection.
OffTopic, Currently, the US has high broadband price rates for slow bb speed, Japan gets almost 10X the speed for 25% the price. The US is at the low end of the bb speed scale. (Chart below) This is because IMO cable companies have virtual monopolies on the infrastructure and those monopolies are protected by local laws as is the cable provider in my area.
The only place I can go if I want to change my cable/ISP service is down: to DSL through a telephone company or to satellite- also slower. A lack of net neutrality will further consolidate the flow of information based on profitability.
Where the rubber meets the road American consumers (which comprise the largest number of bb customers by country) are screwed by typical capitalist practices reinforced by monopolies protected at every level of government and what you, OT, advocate will only make it worse by further encouraging the rapacious nature of bb providers. Less for more. If small users could be protected and consumers could get services comensurate with their cost, net neutrality provisions wouldn’t be needed but what we have today demonstrates that the promised ideal is not what the suppliers have ever had in mind. If it was we would already have it in major part.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=384007
————-
Mike Spindell: “We don’t flog them or jail them. We just bar them from the mainstream media, or ridicule them for their contrary opinions.”
***
Nice to see you again! Your right about the how they’re treated but actually we do on occassion jail them (Lyndal Harrington). With the use of Administrative Subpoenas and National Security Letters our bloggers can be harassed, searched, have their possessions confiscated and jailed. We don’t even know the magnitude of the problem because the National Security Letters are classified and if the recipients of them talk about them they can be jailed for that revelation.
This link and quote deals with the use of an Administrative subpoena by the TSA, the first in use by the TSA. Administrative subpoena power is vested in government agencies, not the judiciary though if one refuses to comply a court order can be secured to enforce the AS. No doubt the refusal to comply will be used as an element of just cause for seeking a court order- at least from a judge like out Tennessee friend.
Most people when having a subpoena put in their hand and told they have to comply will not realize that there are distinctions between what they are served with (a civil matter) and a criminal search warrant or subpoena.
It’s really scary out there these days, can flogging be far behind? (Only half joking.)
http://www.startribune.com/science/80431447.html
“Elliott, from Winter Springs, Fla., said TSA agents had showed up at his house, demanding that he reveal who leaked the security directive.
The administrative subpoena — a demand for information issued without a judge’s approval — is a civil, not a criminal document.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said her organization is supporting Elliott.
Another travel blogger who received a subpoena, Steve Frischling, said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his laptop computer.
Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.”
Oh, ok, I see now. thanks, your right.