Many civil libertarians refused to vote for President Barack Obama given his dismal record in the expansion of the security state, surveillance law, and assertions of unchecked executive power. The Administration went into radio silence on such issues during the campaign in an effort to win back liberals (as they did on medical marijuana) only to announce after the election that they would resume the same policies. The Democratic leadership has shown the same duplicity on civil liberties for years — including hiding knowledge of the Bush torture program and surveillance programs as well as blocking any meaningful investigations into those alleged crimes. Now, some Democrats have reportedly put that hypocrisy on public display again. Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the bill which, as originally written, required warrants for the reading of emails and was heralded by Democrats during the campaign as their showing of fealty to privacy and civil liberties. The Justice Department then took the bill and flipped it to serve as a sweeping denial of privacy rights . . . and some Senators are pushing on passage now that the election is over. The bill includes warrantless access to university email systems.
Category: Media
Cortland County District Attorney Mark Suben, 69, recently secured reelection after a tough campaign. Nothing strange there. District Attorney positions are often much sought-after positions. However, Suben was hounded by media questions of whether he was previously known as Gus Thomas, a porn star in at least 12 films, such as “Devil’s Due,” “Bedroom Bedlam,” “Deep Throat 2,” “Lecher” and “The Love Witch.” He vehemently denied the allegations . . . until he was reelected. He now admits that he repeatedly lied to the public and the press but he refuses to resign. In “Devil’s Due,” he played an actor who tricked women into bondage.
We have been following (here and here and and and here and and here and here) the worsening situation in England concerning free speech. As noted in a recent column, free speech appears to be dying in the West with the increasing criminalization of speech under discrimination, hate, and blasphemy laws. The article below details the crackdown on Internet speech in the country from charging a teenager who made offensive comments about a murder to a man who burned a paper poppy, the symbol of the war dead.
Continue reading “England Cracks Down On Unacceptable Internet Speech”
Many of us were irate over the disclosure that our school had been misreporting data to U.S. News — resulting in GW being stripped of its ranking as a top 50 college. The university has now released more information on this calamity in a posting from Vice Provost Forrest Maltzman.
It truly sounds like something out of Saturday Night Live: the Taliban inadvertently revealed their contacts when someone hit the “reply all” button on an email which showed their entire mailing list. The Taliban are known as cave dwelling Troglodytes who destroyed ancient artifacts and pushed much of Afghanistan back into the dark ages. Thus, it could not happen to a more deserving group of guys.
Continue reading “Taliban Spokesman Inadvertently Discloses Whole Mailing List In Email”
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
While the United States of America is many things to many people, it is not as is popularly conceived a Democracy and it never has been. This view is not coming from a perspective of politics, but one of stark reality. The thinking of the overwhelming majority of our Founding Fathers, as embodied in the Constitution they wrote, was certainly not to give power to the masses. I don’t believe this point is in dispute by the majority of Constitutional experts, despite their various positions on the political spectrum. Most politicians with self-awareness and intelligence have always known that we are not a Democracy as a country, despite the fact that most also proclaim it to be a Democracy. The problem with what I just wrote is that defining Democracy is a very slippery process and as I will show, the word means very different thing to many different people.
Permit me to begin by defining Democracy in terms of the myth that has been created around it in American parlance: “Democracy represents both the Will and the Rule of the People over their government. As such it is the best form of government for all”. Whether we believe it or not all Americans have grown up under this national myth and its’ use is ubiquitous to both domestic and foreign policy. The many wars this country has fought were prosecuted in the interests of this myth of Democracy, whether in destroying the Axis in World War II to save the world, or to nurture its creation and existence in numerous foreign lands. A student of history understands that the reasons for the wars America has fought are far more complex and ultimately self-serving than protecting Democracy. Nevertheless, to initially go to war, a populace must be energized by the belief that it will be fought for a higher purpose, in order to send it young adults to fight and potentially die. This energy in America usually has come from a combination of the myth of protecting democracy and a general threat to all the people. The simple rubric in my lifetime and in the history before it, is that we are fighting for Democracy. I will explore this myth, so central to our lives of citizens and discuss its implications. Continue reading “Democracy in America: What Does it Mean?”
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
CEO Gregory Rayburn of Hostess Brands, maker of Twinkies, Ho Ho’s, and Sno Balls, has announced plans to liquidate the 83-year old company. The company is in its second bankruptcy in a decade. Hostess sold about $2.5 billion worth of snack products last year with Twinkies leading the pack. However, the company has nearly $1 billion in debt and has $2 billion in unfunded pension obligations.
Yesterday we reported the allegation brought against Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo, that he had had sex with a 16-year-old boy. Clash denied the allegation and insisted that the accused, now 23, was 18 when they started having an intimate relationship. (The age of consent in the state is 17). Now, the accuser has withdrawn the complaint and said that indeed it was an “adult consensual” relationship. The question is whether Clash should not sue the individual for defamation and whether, if the accuser gave a statement to the police, whether he should be prosecuted for a false police report.
Continue reading “Accuser Recants Criminal Allegations Against Sesame Street Actor”
Last night, while discussing the Petraeus scandal on CNN, the network played a 911 call from one of the four major figures in the scandal: Jill Kelley. The call is perfectly bizarre in which Kelley, a Florida socialite, claims “honorary diplomatic” status to get the police to stop people from walking across her lawn. The dispatcher listens patiently and appears to resist the temptation to tell her that he will be sending over some honorary police to protect their honorary diplomatic residence.
We previously discussed the bizarre scandal unfolding in the New Orleans U.S. Attorney’s Office. Fred Heebe, a Louisiana landfill owner, has filed an interesting defamation lawsuit against a federal prosecutor who he claims has used anonymous identities to trash him on the Internet. Using a former FBI forensic linguist expert, Heebe has shown remarkable similarities between language used in filings by Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone and statements written by someone on media websites under the name “Henry L. Mencken1951.” With the finding that the language overlap “strongly indicates” Perricone, Heebe has filed suit and issued subpoenas. The federal case involves alleged bribes (including an almost $500,000 bribe to a state official) to close a rival landfill in Gretna, Louisiana. Heebe however was never charged with a crime. Perricone, 61, has since resigned after 21 years as a prosecutor but an investigation continued at the Justice Department as well as the civil lawsuit. He recently admitted to posting hundreds of comments. Now the scandal has caused U.S. Attorney Jim Letten to demote his second-in-command, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jan Mann.
Word on “the street” is not good for Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo. Clash was arrested is facing charges for allegedly having a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy. Clash insists that the accused, now 23, was 18 when they started having an intimate relationship. Truth be known, I always thought it would be tightly wound Bert who ended up in the slammer. Notably, it was the Show that appears to have reported Clash.[UPDATE: The accuser, who remains nameless, has recanted his allegations].
Below is my column today in USA Today on some of the state referendum votes last week. While the presidential election was understandably the focus of media commentary, state referendum votes held some surprises. At a time when a majority of citizens view our political system as dysfunctional and unresponsive, these referendums show that citizens can still take direct action in seeking change. Here is the column:
Continue reading “Will We Tolerate Democracy?”
by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
“If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and ignorance.” – Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, VI, 21.
Anyone who has read my work here or known me for any length of time has heard me use this quote before. It is more than just a pithy quote from one of the great Stoic minds of antiquity, it is a summation of one of my personal ethics. Earlier this week, Professor Turley posted an item about former President Bill Clinton entitled “Clinton: We Don’t Need A President Who Will Not Tell You The Truth“. The gist of the article was that a President who lied under oath as Clinton did most certainly didn’t need to be critical of other politicians lying as it was simple hypocrisy even if the point former President Clinton made was valid. This brings us to a prime and necessary component of the propaganda scenario, the liar. Lying is a commonality in our species. Everyone lies about something some time. “No, that dress doesn’t make you look fat, honey.” “I was ambushed by baboons on the way to work this morning.” “I can’t go out tonight because I have to stay home and wax my dog.” Or the classic . . .
These are not the lies that are of primary importance in propaganda. White lies, while not necessarily ethically the best thing in the world, are a social lubricant that helps keep society cohesive. If everyone told the truth about everything all the time, the homicide and suicide rates would probably sky-rocket. We are going to focus on the truly bad actors. The liars in propaganda who are looking to get you to do something they want that is usually not in your best interests and/or harmful to others. Since many dangerous liars are sociopaths or psychopaths, the question becomes how do you spot a liar, a sociopath or a psychopath? First we start with how to spot a generic liar before considering how to spot socio- and psychopaths at a later date.
Mark Basseley Youssef (aka Nakoula Basseley Nakoula), the filmmaker connected to the controversial film “The Innocence of Muslims,” has been sentenced to a year in prison for violations of his probation for his 2010 bank fraud conviction. The arrest of Youssef raised immediate objections that, while the Obama Administration insisted that it would not punish such acts of free speech, it set out to arrest him on any possible grounds to satisfy the “Arab Street.”
We have yet another tragedy of a gay student bullied to the point that he committed suicide. Tim Ribberink, 20, left a note saying that he simply could not take the teasing and isolation anymore despite his love for his parents. His image puts another face on the costs of homophobia and intolerance. Ribberlink was studying to be a history teacher.
Continue reading “Dutch Suicide Highlights Homophobia In Netherlands”