The Obama Administration has once again reaffirmed the new relativism controlling Washington in the nomination of James Comey as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, even as it struggles to put out the controversy over its attack on free press principles. Comey was a critical player in the abuse warrantless surveillance program of the Bush Administration and will now be put in charge of the people carrying out such surveillance. The Administration has been spinning the nomination by pointing out that it was Comey who opposed efforts of the Bush White House in a famous confrontation by the hospital bed of the Attorney General John Ashcroft. However, while that was admirable, Comey did what all officials in his position are duty bound to do (though few in the Bush Administration fulfilled that obligation). Comey however also was critical in other abuses of warrantless surveillance as well as the abusive treatment of Jose Padilla and Plamegate. He is no hero for civil libertarians by any measure.
Continue reading “The One-Eyed Man In the Land Of The Blind: James Comey Set To Be Next FBI Director Despite Past Civil Liberties Controversies”
Category: Politics
The Obama Administration is currently struggling to deal with disclosure of its attack on the free press under Attorney General Eric Holder. Now, it’s U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, Bill Killian, suggesting an equally disturbing attack on free speech. Killian told a meeting with local Muslim citizens that he wants to “educate” people about how civil rights laws can be used against anti-Muslim speech. He made these comments along side of the FBI special agent in charge of the Knoxville office.
By Mike Appleton, Guest Blogger
“The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers any paid vacation time and is one of only a few rich countries that do not require employers to offer at least some paid holidays.”
-Rebecca Ray, Mila Sanes and John Schmidt, No Vacation Nation (Center for Economic and Policy Research, May, 2013)
The leisure and hospitality industry in Central Florida employs over 216,000 people, more than 20% of the entire Metro Orlando workforce. These are primarily low-wage jobs, with few benefits. Hotel maids, for example, earn a median wage of $9.20 per hour. It is estimated that 81% of the lowest-wage workers have no ability to earn paid sick time. Nationally, a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research concluded that 37% of working women (some 13,000,000) in companies with more than 15 employees cannot take a paid sick day if they or a family member are ill. Among employed Latinos (a quickly growing demographic in Orange County, Florida), 49% lack access to any paid sick leave.
The combined effect of low wages and no benefits means that on any given day tens of thousands of Metro Orlando workers must decide whether to go to work sick, send a sick child to school, or stay home without pay and even risk termination of their employment. In May of 2012, a coalition of Orlando activists began a citizen’s initiative to mandate that private employers in Orange County with 15 or more employees provide workers with up to 7 days of paid sick leave each year. That effort has generated two lawsuits to date and the quick adoption of an ALEC-inspired state law preempting the Orange County initiative. Continue reading “ALEC in Wonderland, An Act In Two Plays (Part 2)”
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
Over the years we have heard the stories about Supreme Court justices coming under fire for attending political rallies and symposiums and for taking gifts from political organizations. Abe Fortas and his subsequent resignation from the Supreme Court is one instance that comes to mind. More recently, of course, Justice Clarence Thomas’ exploits come to mind. “Justice Clarence Thomas is an ethics problem in a black robe. Just eight months after ThinkProgress broke the story of Thomas’ attendance at a Koch-sponsored political fundraiser, we learn that Thomas doesn’t just do unethical favors for wealthy right-wing donors — they also do expensive favors for him.
Leading conservative donor Harlan Crow, whose company often litigates in federal court, provided $500,000 to allow Thomas’s wife to start a Tea Party group and he once gave Thomas a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank which frequently files briefs in Thomas’ Court, also gave Thomas a $15,000 gift.” Think Progress
What we may have missed in those earlier discussions is how important the lower courts and appeals court judges are in enforcing corporate or political legislation and policies. What would you say if corporations and partisan foundations or think tanks and oil companies were deeply involved in making sure the judges know who their real “friends” are? Continue reading “It’s All About the Judges”
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
When I started as a college student about 50 years ago I took the Sociology I course as a required subject. There is little I remember from that course and less I remember about the instructor, except for his introductory words on the first day of class. To paraphrase him he said: “You will be taking a lot of courses in what are called the Social Sciences. Approach them all, including mine, with skepticism because they really aren’t science courses like those you’ve learned as a high school student. They will spend a lot of lecture time though trying to prove they are truly scientific, don’t believe them”. His clear meaning was that although the Social Sciences try to operate as if they are using the scientific method of experiments/research to prove theories, most of the work done is skewed to prove the theory of choice by those doing the research. In the five decades since that lecture my own experience and reading has taught me how true the advice from that long forgotten Sociology instructor is.
The social science that has my attention at the moment is Economics. I’ve read many an economist, from all points on the political spectrum and frankly while I favor those such as Krugman and Baker, I take most of what they say as opinion, rather than scientifically determined truth. Yes I’ve even read “Freakonomics” by Levitt and Dubner and the follow-up “Superfreakonomics” and while they were good reads I see them as not only bad science, but a conflation of economics with other social sciences that is superficial at best. This is really the problem with many economists and their theories. They presume to divine human behavior via the prism of economic theory. In the end their proofs are merely retrofitting their pre-judgments. That brings me to the “Austerity” movement which has hampered the recovery from the economic “depression” brought on by the wars and tax reductions of the Bush years, while it has also caused a crisis worldwide through its imposition upon many nations. The foundation research that has justified this “Austerity” movement came from two Harvard Professors: Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. A University of Massachusetts student Thomas Herndon found that their work was filled with mathematical errors in their research spreadsheets. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/reinhart-rogoff-austerity-research-errors_n_3094015.html Their spreadsheets were their “proofs” that economic austerity promotes economic recovery and this theory, long held by many economists, is the basis for the imposition of austerity onto so many Nation’s economies and is the source of bitter national debate in our own. Though I will present some overview and links amplifying “austerity’s” false assumptions, my interest is in presenting my view on why the powers that be have imposed this doctrine, whose effects fall squarely upon 99% of the people of these nations, leaving the wealthiest unscathed. Continue reading “The Austerity Conspiracy”
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
The idea for this guest blog came from Anonymously Yours, who has been around at Jonathan Turley’s Blog, for at least as long as I have. We have had an E Mail relationship, offline for many years. He sent me the link that I’ll be basically using and I think his judgment was on the money. The topic is George Washington’s Farewell Address, how prescient our First President was and how much good advice he gave that we should heed today, after the passage of 218 years.
Like every other American child what I learned about George Washington came from school and little else. When I started learning about him and the revolutionary war, it was common when speaking about him to call him “The Father of Our Country”. As the years passed this description has seemingly fallen out of consciousness and we usually only see him referenced wearing a white wig and a tri-corn hat on President’s Day selling cars. Certainly too, as my education progressed through High School and College, the view of Washington as one of our Founding Father’s was diminished as compared to his more glamorous and brilliant cohort among the Founding Fathers, Jefferson, Franklin and Madison. It is easy to see why this change came about. When you think of Washington, most would see the famous portrait I’ve used as a picture above. The portrait shows a prim-mouthed, rather dour man with a wig. History has given us certain personal details like his famous wooden false teeth. History has also supplied a childish, hagiographic mythology that he never told a lie and threw a coin across the Potomac. There is even some debate about his competence as a General. Indeed, the traitor Benedict Arnold is considered by many to be the best military mind on our side during the Revolution.
So when AY sent me his E Mail, I was at first skeptical about the project until I read the link. While in some sense I knew about his Farewell Address in the back of my mind, rereading it and the commentary on it caused me to rethink George Washington. As I see now he was a great man, in a true sense and he at least gave this country a good start. He also made a contribution regarding how he felt this country should comport itself that is relevant today, although certainly not heeded. Let’s explore Washington’s message and see what wisdom we can draw from it today, or should have drawn in the ensuing 218 years since it was written. Continue reading “The Father of Our Country”
We just discussed a story of a kindergartner who was disciplined for a LEGO gun that he brought to school that was smaller than a quarter. Now we have another kindergartner who was suspended for the rest of the year (10 days) for bringing an orange-tipped toy gun to school. Rather than simply discuss the matter with his parents, school officials proceeded to interrogate him for hours without calling his parents– a growing problem that we discussed in another story today. The toy was in the boy’s backpack and he was pulled into an interrogation with police. I cannot imagine what officers did for two hours in questioning a 5 year old child but it is clear that Calvert County officials have zero crime and even less judgment. During his detention with the officials and police, the boy wet his pants.
Many people in the world have been waiting for the departure of extremist Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From the sounds of his likely replacement, Saeed Jalili, some may look back with longing. Jalili is a former Revolutionary Guard who continues the extremist Islamic principles of governance of his predecessor. This week, he promised to “defend the rights of women as mothers” as opposed to what he referred to as “economic context” of feminists and the West. Men will continue of course to be defined as men as opposed to fathers.
In the last couple weeks, it has been astonishing to watch Democrats once again abandoning a core principle — in this case the protection of the free press — to excuse another abuse of the Obama Administration. The new talking point for defenders of the Obama Administration is that it is really not that bad to seize the records of journalists or label a journalist a potential criminal co-conspirator so long as they are not actually prosecuted. None however are quite so adamant as Georgetown Professor and MSNBC Political Analyst Michael Eric Dyson who called Eric Holder our “law giver” and “the Moses of our time.” In this case, of course, Moses came down from the mountain and endorsed the killing of any citizen deemed a national security threat, allowed warrantless surveillance, blocked public interest challenges to abuses of power, and attacked the free press. While some of us believe Holder should be fired, Dyson apparently believes Holder should be be beatified.
I have previously expressed my view of the meeting ordered by President Barack Obama of Attorney General Eric Holder with representatives of the media. This feeble response was taken in lieu of the more obvious step of firing Holder for his attack on the free press. The proposed meeting was, in my view, an insulting gesture of effectively having Holder investigate Holder. It was made even more transparent by the decision of the Justice Department that the meeting had to be off-the-record. That was too much for two principled media organizations New York Times, CNN, and Associated Press which have refused (correctly) to attend. Continue reading “Media Refuses To Attend Holder Confab Over Monitoring Of Reporters”
The Iranian government is continuing its crackdown on non-Muslim faiths this month with a shocking arrest of a minister in the middle of a service at Iran’s largest Persian-language Pentecostal church. One can only imagine the response of Muslims in the country if a Muslim cleric was arrested in the middle of a service in another country. However, the Iranian government pulled Pastor Robert Asserian off the altar and literally dragged him out of the church. The move is viewed as a warning to non-Muslims before the June 14 presidential election to replace President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
We recently celebrated the showing of tolerance in Arizona when the legislators allowed an atheist member to give the opening “prayer.” Democratic Representative Juan Mendez, of Tempe, is an atheist and opened the session by asking his colleagues not to bow their heads but look at each other. That did not sit well with Arizona State Rep. Steven Smith who proceeded the next day to give not one, but two prayers. The second prayer was to express “repentance” of the secular invocation offered the day before by Mendez. He was joined by half of the Arizona lawmakers in using prayer as a condemnation of Mendez and atheists.
Here is today’s column in USA Today calling for the firing of Attorney General Eric Holder (I have added a couple lines removed in editing). Holder is not the only individual who needs to leave federal office but he is the first. Equally responsible are his deputy, James Cole, and Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who played critical roles in the investigation of journalists with Associated Press and Fox News. Notably, Obama reportedly “fired” IRS Director Steve Miller (who was reportedly already leaving) over the IRS scandal though there is no indication of any knowledge on his part. In Holder’s case, he was personally involved in targeting journalists (in the Fox case) and launched an attack on the media that has been condemned by a wide array of public interest and media groups. Yet, Holder has been asked to hold a simple meeting with aggrieved media representatives by Obama.
There is an interesting conflict that has arisen between Interpol and the Putin government. Putin’s government has demanded the arrest of UK-based fund manager William Browder for his alleged tax evasion and told Interpol to put him on its list of wanted individuals. In a rare denial, Interpol decided that the Putin regime was pursuing Browder for offenses “of a predominantly political nature” and refused to assist the Russians.
Continue reading “Interpol Rebuffs Putin On Demand For Whistleblower’s Arrest”
Truong Duy Nhat, 49, is a leading blogger in Vietnam who has been challenging the government on its authoritarian laws. The Communist government has now responded by arresting him for “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe on the interests of the state.” This truly Orwellian charge could result in a seven year sentence for the blogger.
Continue reading “Leading Blogger Arrested In Vietnam In Major Crackdown On Free Speech”