Category: Ethics, Morality & Religion
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Can someone tell me how Ireland plans to enforce this law without turning into a country like Saudi Arabia? The weird thing is that the law was passed last month and not in the past century. When a modern Western country whose economy is based on science and technology adopts an absurdly medieval law, one would…
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The first casualty in war is truth, closely followed by the rule of law. In the run up to and during the Iraq war the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration bombarded us with lies and their war efforts were riddled with unlawful actions that skirted or directly violated US as well as international laws. Among the extra-legal methods…
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I happened to catch parts of Tuesday's Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor. The most fascinating exchange of the day took place when Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) questioned the judge. Sessions, a southern right winger, whose own nomination to federal judgeship was blocked in 1986 partially because of his attitude towards racial issues,interrogated Sotomayor about her opinions on race…
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Readers may remember this book review about the Crypto Jews of Spain and Portugal. Their stories were a complicated maze of religious faith, persecution and conversion under duress. Above all, their history was also about tenaciously and secretly holding on to a personal identity despite considerable external threats. Christian persecution of Jews is now mostly a matter of the past and the Crypto Jews, several generations…
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The Texas legislature has given preliminary approval for issuing state licence plates that read "Choose Life." The revenue raised from the sale of the specialty plates will be used to fund adoptions and pro-life counseling at state pregnancy centers. The Senate tentatively passed a bill to establish "Choose Life" license plates, with revenue going to promote adoption.…
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Can't wait to see this happen. But given the physical and moral cowardice of right wing blowhards, it probably won't.
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While the lawmakers and the media are tiptoeing around the torture memos and debating whom they implicate, cartoonist Nick Anderson of the Houston Chronicle evokes images of Abu Ghraib to point to the real torturers.
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Does anybody who has been watching/reading the news more carefully than I have lately know if there's any serious talk about impeaching Jay Bybee? Just curious. With the most recent release of torture memos, I'm sure there's increased chatter regarding the possibility that John Yoo — and, a fortiori, Jay Bybee — is a war…
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The story of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by the Bush-Cheney administration is now unfolding in strange and unexpected ways. Just until last Sunday, President Obama and his spokespersons, even while they made the torture memos public, insisted that no prosecution of the planners and the executors was on the horizon. Suddenly, just in the past two days, the position of…
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I don't believe anyone here at Accidental Blogger has yet mentioned the strip-search case currently pending at the U.S. Supreme Court. A school strip searched a 13 year old girl; the legal question is whether that violated her constitutional rights, which disturbingly is not an easy question. One of her classmates had gotten caught taking…
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In case you haven't watched today's news, here are the "torture memos" issued by Bush-Cheney's Justice Department which enabled the top administration bosses and their underlings in the CIA to carry out illegal torture tactics on prisoners. War criminals like Dick Cheney still justify their actions with impunity. Why should he worry? The weak-kneed Obama administration, even while making the…
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