Human Rights
"It's a national disgrace that President Bush has yet again bowed to the
far-right extremists," said Human Rights Campaign President Joe
Solmonese
WASHINGTON - In a column for the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, Executive Editor Fred Barnes broke the news that President Bush has decided to bow to the weeks of demands from the right-wing extremist groups and hold a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House to reiterate his support of the Federal Marriage Amendment. According to Barnes, the Rose Garden press conference is scheduled for Monday, June 5, a day before the Senate is expected to vote down the Constitutional amendment.
"It's a national disgrace that President Bush has yet again bowed to the far-right extremists. Instead of addressing the real challenges facing American families -- from record high gas prices, bankrupting health care costs and an endless and costly war in Iraq -- the President will further divide this country and put the far-right extremist's interests ahead of the American people's well-being," said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese.
WASHINGTON - In a column for the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, Executive Editor Fred Barnes broke the news that President Bush has decided to bow to the weeks of demands from the right-wing extremist groups and hold a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House to reiterate his support of the Federal Marriage Amendment. According to Barnes, the Rose Garden press conference is scheduled for Monday, June 5, a day before the Senate is expected to vote down the Constitutional amendment.
"It's a national disgrace that President Bush has yet again bowed to the far-right extremists. Instead of addressing the real challenges facing American families -- from record high gas prices, bankrupting health care costs and an endless and costly war in Iraq -- the President will further divide this country and put the far-right extremist's interests ahead of the American people's well-being," said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese.
A terrorism trial of two Muslims in federal court in Sacramento has thus far left the FBI looking manipulative, credulous, and prodigiously extravagant.
At the center of the case are two Pakistanis living in Lodi, a small town south of Sacramento. One, 23-year-old Hamid Hayat, a cherry picker, stands accused of being a terrorist who trained at an Al Qaeda camp and returned to the United States to wreak havoc. The other, his 48-year-old father, Umer Hayat, an ice-cream truck driver, is charged with lying to the FBI about his son's activities. If found guilty, the son faces 39 years in prison, the father 16.
Their ordeal began last summer, when Hamid Hayat, fresh back from a two-year trip to Pakistan where he has spent half his life, was interrogated by the FBI. Soon his father was pulled in. When the indictments came down, the news headlines were that Hamid had attended a terror-training camp in Pakistan, that there was a terror ring centered in Lodi. Both father and son had made full confessions.
At the center of the case are two Pakistanis living in Lodi, a small town south of Sacramento. One, 23-year-old Hamid Hayat, a cherry picker, stands accused of being a terrorist who trained at an Al Qaeda camp and returned to the United States to wreak havoc. The other, his 48-year-old father, Umer Hayat, an ice-cream truck driver, is charged with lying to the FBI about his son's activities. If found guilty, the son faces 39 years in prison, the father 16.
Their ordeal began last summer, when Hamid Hayat, fresh back from a two-year trip to Pakistan where he has spent half his life, was interrogated by the FBI. Soon his father was pulled in. When the indictments came down, the news headlines were that Hamid had attended a terror-training camp in Pakistan, that there was a terror ring centered in Lodi. Both father and son had made full confessions.
Given the Bush administration’s rhetoric regarding the Iranian government you wouldn’t think the two have much, if anything, in common. In his 2002 State of the Union address President Bush referred to Iran as part of an “axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” And he criticized the Iranian government’s efforts to “repress the Iranian people’s hope of freedom.” This week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified before the Senate regarding the administration’s request for $75 million to help further democracy in Iran, in which she stated that Iran was under the control of a “radical regime.” Yet the Bush administration recently went out of its way to support an Iranian initiative to deny access to gay and lesbian organizations within the United Nations.
Few law enforcement institutions have been so thoroughly discredited in recent years as the FBI's forensic laboratory. In 1997, the Bureau's inspector general (IG) at the time issued a devastating report, stigmatizing one instance after another of mishandled and contaminated evidence, inept technicians, and outright fabrication. The IG concluded that there were "serious and credible allegations of incompetence" and perjured courtroom testimony.
My view is that taken as a whole, forensic evidence as used by prosecutors is inherently untrustworthy. Of course the apex forensic hero of prosecutors, long promoted as the bottom line in reliability -- at least until the arrival of DNA matching -- has been the fingerprint.
My view is that taken as a whole, forensic evidence as used by prosecutors is inherently untrustworthy. Of course the apex forensic hero of prosecutors, long promoted as the bottom line in reliability -- at least until the arrival of DNA matching -- has been the fingerprint.
Paranoid America -- by which I mean its governors -- has long dreamed of foolproof technology to guard the Homeland from subversion, or penetration, by alien hostiles.
In its latest variant, the vaunted technology comes in the form of the sweeps by the computers of the National Security Agency (NSA), programmed to intercept hundreds of millions of phone, e-mail and fax messages. These days, as much as a third of global communications are on fiber-optic cable routes that that pass through the United States.
The NSA's programmers claim that the artificial intelligence programs -- terabytes of speech, text and image data -- monitoring the filters are of such refinement that they can determine the sex, age and class of the communicators and, no doubt (though they take care not to boast of any such profiling), their genetic and linguistic ethnicity, too. After all, Middle Easterners are surely a prime target.
In its latest variant, the vaunted technology comes in the form of the sweeps by the computers of the National Security Agency (NSA), programmed to intercept hundreds of millions of phone, e-mail and fax messages. These days, as much as a third of global communications are on fiber-optic cable routes that that pass through the United States.
The NSA's programmers claim that the artificial intelligence programs -- terabytes of speech, text and image data -- monitoring the filters are of such refinement that they can determine the sex, age and class of the communicators and, no doubt (though they take care not to boast of any such profiling), their genetic and linguistic ethnicity, too. After all, Middle Easterners are surely a prime target.
The FBI was probably tapping Edward Said's phone right up to the day he died in September of 2003. A year earlier, when he was already a very sick man, Said was scheduled to speak at an event at the Kopkind Colony summer session near Guilford, Vt. The morning of Friday, August 2, the day he was scheduled to arrive, John Scagliotti picked up the phone at the Colony's old farmhouse and found it was dead. He went to a neighbor to report the fault.
"Within half an hour," Scagliotti remembers, "there was a knock at the front door, and there was a man who said, 'I hear you have phone problems,' he said. Now I am a gay man. I know what a phone service repairman is meant to look like. In the Village, the phone man is a gay icon. Tool belt, jeans, work shirt, work boots. This man has a madras shirt, Dockers slacks, brown loafer shoes. He goes to an outside junction box, and a few minutes later, the phone is working. Off he goes."
"Within half an hour," Scagliotti remembers, "there was a knock at the front door, and there was a man who said, 'I hear you have phone problems,' he said. Now I am a gay man. I know what a phone service repairman is meant to look like. In the Village, the phone man is a gay icon. Tool belt, jeans, work shirt, work boots. This man has a madras shirt, Dockers slacks, brown loafer shoes. He goes to an outside junction box, and a few minutes later, the phone is working. Off he goes."
"The road has potholes but equality is on the horizon," said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese.
WASHINGTON - Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) Americans scored big wins in 2005, according to a new report from the Human Rights Campaign. The report - "Equality from State to State: GLBT Americans and State Legislation 2005" - details record-setting and historic state legislation affecting the GLBT community over the past year.
"The road has potholes but equality is on the horizon," said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. "This report proves that as the national conversation over equality continues, Americans come down on the side of fairness. When the fog of divisive politics recedes, the real stories emerge of hard-working GLBT Americans seeking equality wins."
More state anti-discrimination bills passed in 2005 than in any other year. Eleven bills were passed in state legislatures that established or strengthened statewide anti-discrimination protections for the GLBT community.
WASHINGTON - Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) Americans scored big wins in 2005, according to a new report from the Human Rights Campaign. The report - "Equality from State to State: GLBT Americans and State Legislation 2005" - details record-setting and historic state legislation affecting the GLBT community over the past year.
"The road has potholes but equality is on the horizon," said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. "This report proves that as the national conversation over equality continues, Americans come down on the side of fairness. When the fog of divisive politics recedes, the real stories emerge of hard-working GLBT Americans seeking equality wins."
More state anti-discrimination bills passed in 2005 than in any other year. Eleven bills were passed in state legislatures that established or strengthened statewide anti-discrimination protections for the GLBT community.
Five shots rang out in the name of homeland security and suddenly a nervous, Costa Rica-born U.S. citizen lay dead on a jetway at Miami International Airport - tragic collateral damage in a war that seems less rational with each passing day.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesman later tried to fob off last week's shooting by two air marshals of 44-year-old Rigoberto Alpizar, who was unarmed and suffered from bipolar disorder, as a "textbook response" to the threat of terrorism. If that's true, God help us all. It looked more like a flailing, messy overreaction to nothing much and, at the same time, a signal to the American public that, when real terrorists don't present themselves, we're more than willing to wage war on ourselves.
Americans - certainly Americans of color - may well have more to fear from domestic security forces than al-Qaida.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesman later tried to fob off last week's shooting by two air marshals of 44-year-old Rigoberto Alpizar, who was unarmed and suffered from bipolar disorder, as a "textbook response" to the threat of terrorism. If that's true, God help us all. It looked more like a flailing, messy overreaction to nothing much and, at the same time, a signal to the American public that, when real terrorists don't present themselves, we're more than willing to wage war on ourselves.
Americans - certainly Americans of color - may well have more to fear from domestic security forces than al-Qaida.
Let's hear it for Protestant fundamentalists (American variety) yet again. Was there ever a more pragmatic bunch? After centuries of howling No Popery and denouncing the Whore of Rome, they're now trying to give us a U.S. Supreme Court that will, in the probable event of Samuel Alito's confirmation, boast no less than five Roman Catholics, a clear majority -- in order of arrival on the bench: Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and, most likely, Alito.
You can see why the conservative Christians don't trust Protestants when it comes to matters of Choice or any of their other cherished issues. The two Protestants on the Supreme Court are the justices they hate most: a liberal Republican, John Stevens and a libertarian, David Souter.
You can see why the conservative Christians don't trust Protestants when it comes to matters of Choice or any of their other cherished issues. The two Protestants on the Supreme Court are the justices they hate most: a liberal Republican, John Stevens and a libertarian, David Souter.
Several decades ago, “controversial” subjects in news media included
many issues that are now well beyond controversy. During the first
half of the 1960s, fierce arguments raged in print and on the
airwaves about questions like: Does a black person (a “Negro,” in the
language of the day) have the right to sit at a lunch counter, or
stay at a hotel, the same way that a white person does? Should the
federal government insist on upholding such rights all over the
country?
Some agonizing disputes, in the media and on the ground, came to a climax with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Suddenly, after many decades of struggles against Jim Crow, federal law explicitly barred racial discrimination in public accommodations and employment. After President Lyndon Johnson signed the measure, saying “Let us close the springs of racial poison,” controversy faded about access to restaurants and hotels.
Some agonizing disputes, in the media and on the ground, came to a climax with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Suddenly, after many decades of struggles against Jim Crow, federal law explicitly barred racial discrimination in public accommodations and employment. After President Lyndon Johnson signed the measure, saying “Let us close the springs of racial poison,” controversy faded about access to restaurants and hotels.