Decline and Fall
May 10th, 2008 @ 4:16 pm
Internal Homeand Security checkpoint
Apr 8th, 2008 @ 8:28 am
Homeland Security "suspends" property rights, religious freedom
The New York Times reports: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last week issued waivers suspending more than 30 laws he said could interfere with “the expeditious construction of barriers” in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The list included laws protecting the environment, endangered species, antiquities, farms, forests, Native American graves and religious freedom.
The secretary of homeland security was granted the power in 2005 to void any federal law that might interfere with fence building on the border. For good measure, Congress forbade the courts to second-guess the secretary’s determinations. So long as Mr. Chertoff is willing to say it is necessary to void a given law, his word is final.
Mar 19th, 2008 @ 9:17 am
If he’s unclear on the idea of democracy then how can he spread it by force?
Mar 6th, 2008 @ 4:27 pm
Ready, Aim, Foreign Policy
In a little-noticed but disturbing transformation, U.S. foreign policy decision-making is moving from the Department of State to the Department of Defense. A report released today shows that this shift of authority is on the verge of becoming permanent even as the Department of State and Congress sit passively on the sidelines.
The report, entitled “Ready, Aim, Foreign Policy ”, is a publication of the Just the Facts Project, a ten-year collaboration on security issues between the Washington Office on Latin America, the Center for International Policy, and the Latin America Working Group Education Fund. The report was released as the Senate held hearings on the Southern Command’s annual report to Congress on Thursday, March 6.
The shift toward Pentagon control over large areas of foreign assistance “will have a crucial bearing on how U.S. power is exercised and projected around the world,” says the new report.
The trend will “diminish congressional, public and even diplomatic control over a substantial lever and symbol of foreign policy. It will undercut human rights values in our relations with the rest of the world, and increase the trend toward a projection of U.S. global power based primarily on military might,” adds the report.
“It is not acceptable to say ‘State is broken,’ and shift responsibilities to the Defense Department; if State is broken, fix it,” said Joy Olson, Executive Director of the Washington Office on Latin America.
“Military aid is one of the riskiest tools in the U.S. foreign policy toolbox. It requires careful diplomatic management and close congressional oversight,” said Adam Isacson, Program Director at the Center for International Policy. “Moving aid into the Defense budget is weakening a 45-year-old legal framework that sought to guarantee both of those.”
The report’s authors stress that the drift toward Pentagon authority over assistance could quickly undermine key human-rights safeguards in U.S. foreign policy, as almost all human rights conditions on foreign assistance are limited to programs funded through State.
“If the Pentagon takes charge of all military aid decisions, we’ll lose the few human rights tools at our disposal. U.S. aid and training will become even more an entitlement program for the world’s militaries,” said Lisa Haugaard, Director of the Latin America Working Group Education Fund.
“Ready, Aim, Foreign Policy” is available at the Websites of all three groups.
Feb 28th, 2008 @ 8:48 am
Political show trials. Can't happen in America, right?
Don Siegelman, a popular Democratic governor of Alabama, a Republican state, was framed in a crooked trial, convicted on June 29, 2006, and sent to Federal prison by the corrupt and immoral Bush administration.
The frame-up of Siegelman and businessman Richard Scrushy is so crystal clear and blatant that 52 former state attorney generals from across America, both Republicans and Democrats, have urged the US Congress to investigate the Bush administration’s use of the US Department of Justice to rid themselves of a Democratic governor who “they could not beat fair and square,” according to Grant Woods, former Republican Attorney General of Arizona.
On February 24, 2008, “60 Minutes” broadcast a damning indictment of the railroading of Siegelman. Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who did opposition research for Rove, testified to the House Judiciary Committee and went public on “60 Minutes.” The segment is so compelling that the Republican-owned CBS affiliate in Alabama, WHNT, blacked out the broadcast.
The Department of Justice refuses to release Siegelman trial documents to Congress.
Siegelman’s family home was broken into. Siegelman’s attorney’s office was broken into and ransacked. Jill Simpson’s house was burned down, and her car was run off the road.
Feb 27th, 2008 @ 9:01 am
McCarthyism? What was that?
Are American Teens Losing the Humanities?
Study Shows Some Teens Are Blanking on the Basics of History, Culture
Feb. 26, 2008—
A recent study sponsored by Washington, D.C.-based organization Common Core revealed that almost 20 percent of 1,200 American teens could not identify the American enemy in World War II, and more than 25 percent mistakenly believed that Columbus sailed to America after 1750. Half did not know whom Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated.
“It is easy to make light of such ignorance. In reality, however, a deep lack of knowledge is neither humorous nor trivial,” said Lynne Munson, Common Core’s executive director.
Test your 17-year-old knowledge. Take parts of the quiz HERE.
The report, titled “Still at Risk: What Students Don’t Know, Even Now,” was Munson’s brainchild. It was her idea to conduct a survey drawn on a pool of questions from an earlier survey taken in 1986. Munson and her assistant selected the questions, then consulted Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, who analyzed the results of the survey and authored the report.
“The question of how much our 17-year-olds know is particularly pressing, given broader social trends. After all, these students are less than a year away from reaching legal adulthood, making them eligible to vote and serve in the nation’s armed forces,” Hess said.
He noted that there is no current reliable national measure of how much students know about history and literature, and pointed out, “More disturbing than the aggregate results may be some of the items that many 17-year-olds did not know.”
Hess pointed out some of the following results from Common Core’s survey:
- Nearly a third could not identify “ask not what your country can do for you” as the words of President John F. Kennedy.
- A third did not know that the Bill of Rights is the source of American rights to freedom of religion and speech.
- Just two in five could place the Civil War in the correct 50-year period, and just half knew that The Federalist papers were written to encourage ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
- Nearly a quarter could not correctly identify Adolf Hitler.
- Less than half could identify the literary figures of Job or Oedipus, while barely one in two could identify the plot of George Orwell’s immortal book “1984.”
“What should we take from these findings? It is essential that parents, policymakers, and educators examine what we are doing when it comes to the teaching of history and culture,” Hess said.
“We must ask whether popular reform currents are delivering the results we wish and, if not, what we should do about it.”
Feb 26th, 2008 @ 2:18 pm
“When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.”
PlatoFeb 21st, 2008 @ 11:00 am
Sixty years later...
