The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has struck down the graphic warning images on cigarette packages in an important opinion on corporate speech rights. I have been a long critic of the images on both constitutional and policy grounds. Previously the Sixth Circuit rejected the same free speech claims.
Continue reading “Graphic Cigarette Labels Struck Down By D.C. Circuit”
Reports now indicate that all nine wounded bystanders in the recent shooting near the Empire State building were shot not by the gunman, Jeffrey Johnson, 58, (left) but by police officers.
Continue reading “All Nine Wounded in New York Were Shot By NYPD Officers”
You may recall how recently an array of high ranking Israeli officials in the Netanyahu government, including National Security Council head Ya’akov Amidror and Interior Minister Eli Yishai, briefed ultra-Orthodox rabbi and Shas leader Ovadia Yosef on the proposed war with Iran in the hopes of receiving his blessing. Both the war (which Netanyahu reportedly wants before the U.S. presidential election) and the need to get nod from a religious leader were criticized, including by some of us who noted the extreme views of Yosef. Now, Yosef has called upon Jews to pray for the death of Iranians and the destruction of the nation of Iran. Now we have spiritual leaders is both countries calling on God to annihilate whole countries as examples of divine and moral justice.
Continue reading “Leading Israeli Rabbi Calls For The Death of Iranians and Destruction of Iran”
New York Family Court Judge Bryan Hedges, 65, thought that he had resigned from the bench in Onondaga County in April after allegations that he sexually abuse with 5-year-old deaf niece. However, the state Commission on Judicial Conduct decided to retroactively remove him from the bench and bar him from ever holding a judicial office again in the state of New York despite that fact that the incident occurred 40 years ago and before he become an attorney. It presents an interesting case on the reach of judicial ethics for judges.
Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
According to Huffington Post, the following 2010 interview that Michael D. Higgins, the current president of Ireland, did with Boston conservative radio talk show host Michael Graham went viral recently.
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
Judith Jarvis Thomson, professor emeritus at MIT, provides some interesting thought experiments in her article entitled In Defense of Abortion. Thomson acknowledges the problem of determining the particular moment during gestation when a fetus becomes a human being, so she starts by granting that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. From there, the argument usually goes that, since every person has a right to life, a fetus has a right to life. The fetus’s right to life supersedes the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body.
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
Rep. Todd Akin, Republican senatorial candidate from Missouri: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” Now you can buy a bottle to collect these vital toxins.
“Unless you’ve been in a soundproof booth for the past three days (lucky you), you’ve probably heard a lot about this mysterious chemical that women can produce on demand to prevent them from becoming pregnant. For centuries, women have, according to anti-choicers, been able to ward off becoming impregnated by their rapists by emitting this substance during their rape. Despite being a miracle of science and biology, we’ve never known its name.”
H/T: Pharyngula.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
The issues discussed on this blog are wide-ranging even though at base we are all about upholding the Constitution and ensuring civil liberties. The disputed election of a President began this millennium in controversy, underlined by a horrific terrorist attack and the prosecution of two unnecessary wars. These wars have lasted longer than any other American war save for the Viet Nam debacle. They have resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, more than eight thousand of our troops, tens of thousands of soldiers with crippling injuries and unprecedented suicide rates among both active and inactive members of our armed forces. Trillions of dollars have been wasted on these adventures in the imperialistic pursuit of empire and no end is in sight, although our complicit corporate media has ceased to find interest in coverage of the continuing devastation.
As we know the linchpin for these phony wars was the attack on 9/11 by a team of Saudi Arabians purportedly working for Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. However, the blueprint for this endless quest for America Hegemony was made public in 1997 with the publishing of the manifesto for the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century . This conceptualization laid out plans for a putative American Empire and its’ signatories prominently included those who would become part of the administration of George W. Bush. A list of those signatories will continue after the page break, with the most prominent in bold links. Continue reading “Lest We Forget”
By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
For eons, defenders of the monotheistic religions have cited the introduction of morality to the human species as the unquestionable foundation for the belief in a deity that moves with humanity through time and intervenes in human affairs to fulfill his will. Philosopher Robert Adams has asserted that human moral properties “cannot be stated entirely in the language of physics, chemistry, biology, and human or animal psychology” but require a divine perspective to be understood. (The Virtue of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)). No less a pillar of Christianity than C.S. Lewis, opined that the existence of seemingly universal laws of morality contrary to the selfish laws of nature such as survival of the fittest, implied that an intelligent creator served as the foundation and basis. To Lewis and those of his ilk, the best and simplest explanation was God as author of the good in the human heart. Lewis’ ideas were not new.
Building on Aristotle’s definition of morality as human happiness or eudaimonia, Thomas Aquinas, had contended centuries before Lewis that, “If we speak of the ultimate end with respect to the thing itself, then human and all other beings share it together, for God is the ultimate end for all things without exception.” The thirteenth century monk therefore concluded, “There can be no complete and final happiness [beatitudo] for us save in the vision of God”; “the human mind’s final perfection is by coming to union with God.” Thus communion with the deity was the fountainhead of all human goodness and subscribing to the religion that best mapped the revelations of that deity onto human experience was the true path to human happiness and ultimate morality.
Continue reading “The Genealogy of Morals: God, Homo Homini Lupus, Or The Moral Animal?”
Prince Harry’s latest drunken escapade is now laid out for hundreds of millions to see in all of his naked glory . . . except for people in England. The Royal family moved quickly to effectively bar British newspapers from publishing the photos under the English libel laws, which I have criticized in the past as both draconian and restrictive of free speech. Now the Sun is bucking the effective order from the palace and now running the photos. In the meantime, millions of Brits were able to see the photos barred in newspapers but simply turning on their computers.
Coley Mitchell, 32, has been arrested after he was found drunk with his pants down in a campus locker room with two lab monkeys at the Georgia Health Sciences University. The charge of public intoxication is interesting since he was presumably working at the lab.
Jennelle Carrillo is suing the Dallas Cowboys and its owner Jerry Jones for toasting her bottom before a Blue & Silver scrimmage at the Cowboys stadium. Carrillo says that she sat on a black marble bench outside the stadium on a hot 101 degree day. The result, she says, was sever burns on her buttocks.
Continue reading “Tort In The End Zone: Woman Sues Dallas Cowboys Over Burned Buttocks”
Lois Ann “Lolo’’ Goodman, 70, was a well-known US Open judge who faced down the likes of John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors in heated calls. However, Goodman is now in jail after police accused her of killing her husband Alan Goodman, 80, with a coffee mug back in Los Angeles.
This piece by Elias Garcia Martinez is entitled “Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man), but many would prefer not to look after an artist “restored” the painting in Borja, Spain. Many are outraged at that artist — described only as an amateur artist in her 80s — for the effective destruction of the work from 1910.
Continue reading “Ecce Homo: Spaniards Outraged After “Beholding” Restored Painting”
We have yet another case of passengers being thrown off planes because of a message on their clothing. Arijit Guha and his wife were returning from a funeral on Delta at the Buffalo-Niagara Airport when they were told that his tee-shirt mocking the TSA made passengers and employees feel “very uncomfortable”. Guha is an Arizona State University graduate student.
Continue reading “TSA and Delta Force Couple Off Plane For Wearing Tee-Shirt Mocking TSA”