When Liberation is Worse Than Oppression - "To a happily captive and wildly enthusiastic audience of cadets at West Point on May 27 Bush announced that "Difficult challenges remain in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but America is safer and the world is more secure because these two countries are now democracies and they are allies in the cause of freedom and peace." Three days later "US forces killed two Iraqi women - one of them about to give birth - when troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post. ... "The world is more secure" because American troops kill a pregnant woman and shell small Iraqi towns? Is this what the graduating class at West Point is looking forward to?"
Bush's Sick Vision of 'Democracy' - "Perhaps the nation would be better served if all members of government simply played ring around the rosy or a good hearty game of tag, because this pantomime of a fully functioning system of checks and balances is an insult to those of us who actually believe in democracy. ... What is the obvious set of issues here? The game goes something like this: The President breaks a law. A court rules that the President broke the law. Our Congress then responds swiftly by vowing to introduce a bill that would make the President's actions retroactively legal, thereby showing that his astute reading of the Constitution was simply ahead of its time. Then the President signs the bill into law, which he has the option to disregard according to his own signing edict -- which he has already done at least 750 times."
Journalists and 'Leakers' Feel Heat - "Media advocates are alarmed at what they see as a mounting assault on press freedom in country after country, arguing it is potentially chilling the pursuit of truth as U.S. and European leaders pursue wars on terror and in Iraq."
A declaration of war - "This week, the conservatives declared war. ... They declared war on the idea that journalists have not just the right but the obligation to hold those in power accountable for their actions. They declared war on the idea that journalists, not the government and not a political party, get to decide what appears in the press. They declared war on the idea that the public has a right to know what the government is doing in our name. This is a profound threat to our democracy, and we underestimate it at our peril."
New laws to punish whistle blowers - "The crackdown is aimed at preventing cases such as that of Katharine Gun, a former translator at GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, who leaked a memo showing that in the months before the Iraq war in 2003 the Americans wanted GCHQ’s help in bugging the homes and offices of UN security council members."
Why American Liberalism is Impossible - "You cannot be a liberal in any meaningful sense of the word and talk about winning a war on terror. It is a ridiculous inconsistency and a revealing one. When someone representing himself as a liberal feels he must appeal to Americans in these terms, it tells us a lot about the state of that nation’s values, just as it did when Michael Moore announced he supported that arrogant, perfumed generalissimo, Wesley Clark, for president. How can you have a war against a technique? Terror is not an army, not an idea, not a philosophy. It is what people with serious grievances of many kinds resort to when they have no other means of redress. The rational approach would be sorting out the grievances, but the rational approach doesn’t achieve the true objectives of a War on Terror."
Days of peace, harmony may be numbered in High Court - "But as more difficult cases came before the justices began their summer break on Friday, it became clear that "the early buzz of peace, love, harmony and Kumbaya was probably overstated," said Ohio State University law professor Douglas Berman. "This is a closely divided court on a lot of issues that can't help but express genuine disagreements on the way critical legal issues ought to be looked at." The divisions aren't just along liberal-conservative lines. Within the reinforced conservative wing of the court, there are strong and sometimes conflicting opinions."
Marine Recruiter Attacks Demonstrators - "The question that this incident must raise is this: if a US Marine recruiter, while safely ensconced behind a desk in an air-conditioned office in New Haven, working in a position that plainly keeps him in the public eye, feels free to use a baseball bat to beat a protester . . . then how much restraint do we imagine that his compatriots use against Iraqis?"
Four Installations Across The Country Are Affected By Order From U.S. Space Command - "Space Command would not comment on the reason for the security increase."
Chewing the fat: New theories on world's obesity pandemic - "Fatty hamburgers, sugar-laden sodas and a couch-potato lifestyle: these are the familiar villains in the crisis of obesity sweeping developed countries.
But what if they had been convicted without fair trial? What if the global fat explosion had other causes? What, for instance, if air conditioning or lack of sleep helped make you fat? Or what if obesity were caused by a microbe -- what if, bang, you caught an unlucky sneeze and this made you chub out? These ideas challenge the mainstream view that the bulging waistlines of an advancing society can be overwhelmingly pinned to diet and lifestyle."
Human Family Tree: Shallow Roots - "Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth -- the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today. That means everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There's even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ. "It's a mathematical certainty that that person existed," said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book Mapping Human History traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago."
Quote of the Day
"You know the one thing that is wrong in this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say."
~ President Bill Clinton
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