There were some good views tonight.
Look below if you would like to see fifteen more in five stages from tonight’s Bronx sunset.
April 2010 archive
Apr 28 2010
Be careful if you have to visit that country next door. They’re crazy!
The immigration issue between Mexico and the United States is just exploding.
What is a citizenry to do when the country next door has gone haywire? Well, the population should at least be warned that those people on the other side of the border are capable of any manner of craziness and they can’t be trusted.
A responsible government has an obligation to warn its people that the place is just downright unstable right now and to be careful if they go there.
Apr 28 2010
Vermont legislature passes bill that could pave the way for statewide public option or single payer
Crossposted at DKos and other blogs
Once again, the states are leading the way on health care reform. This past week, the Vermont House and Senate passed two versions of a bill that would essentially get a consultant to design three systems for health care in Vermont: something similar to Canadian single payer, something similar to a private system with a public option, and something similar to the recently passed federal health insurance bill.
Apr 28 2010
Marriage Equality: Details You Should Know to Make it Happen
Cross Posted from SumofChange.com
Also from the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit (paprogressivesummit.com), I’d like to bring you a few videos form a panel simply entitled ‘Marriage Equality’. On this panel, the speakers discussed the benefits, issues, and consequences or allowing homosexual couples marriage rights equal to those of heterosexual ones. The panelists and approached the topic from a variety of angles. Some spoke about the legal issues equality, both in the PA state legislature and in the constitution, others talked about the religious aspects, especially from the Christian and Jewish traditions, and others talked about the moral and human rights aspect of the debate.
The clips below go into many of the arguments against marriage equality and gay marriage and why most of them struggle for validity. The first video, PA state senator Daylin Leach, who sponsored a bill in the PA state legislature in support on marriage equality, goes into many of the arguments against gay marriage that he has heard while debating the bill. As he says, no one has debated him twice, because no one has presented him an argument with any validity. The second video looks at many of the religious issues brought up by the marriage equality debate. Many think that religion has no part of the legal debate over gay marriage and often when religion is invoked, it is done so incorrectly. Finally, the last clip discusses why marriage equality supporters should want legalized gay marriage and not civil unions. Civil unions seem like an acceptable compromise, but really they are impractical and still discriminatory.
For more videos from the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit, go to SumofChange.com/paprog
For more info on the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit and it’s organizer, Keystone progress, please go to paprogressivesummit.org and keystoneprogress.org
Apr 27 2010
Afternoon Edition
Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Chaos in Ukraine parliament as Russia deal ratified
by Anya Tsukanova, AFP
2 hrs 19 mins ago
| KIEV (AFP) – Ukraine’s parliament erupted into chaos on Tuesday as deputies scuffled and hurled smoke bombs during a tumultuous session that ratified a bitterly contested deal with Russia extending a naval base lease.
Despite the extraordinary scenes that saw parliament — the Verkhovna Rada — filled with smoke, lawmakers ratified the deal to extend the stay of the Russian Black Sea fleet until at least 2042, denounced by the opposition as a sell-out for Ukraine. The uproar started when the parliament speaker, Volodymr Lytvyn, was pelted with a volley of a dozen eggs, forcing him to duck for cover behind black umbrellas held by two aides. |
Apr 27 2010
Greenwald: Obama DoJ prosecutes Bush corruption whistleblower, but not Bush war crimes
The Obama Justice Department (on April 15th 2010)* announced that it has secured a ten-felony-count indictment against Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency during the Bush years.
~snip~
(T)he DOJ alleges “that between approximately February 2006 and November 2007, a newspaper reporter published a series of articles about the NSA,” and it claims “Drake served as a source for many of those articles, including articles that contained classified information.”
~snip~
Although the indictment does not specify Drake’s leaks, it is highly likely (as Shane also suggests) that it is based on Drake’s bringing to the public’s attention major failures and cost over-runs with the NSA’s spying programs via leaks to The Baltimore Sun.
Bold text and some editing* done by the diarist
The indictment of Thomas Drake has NOTHING to do with the illegality of the Bush warrantless wiretapping program, rather, it has to do with Drake’s uncovering of major failures and cost over-runs within the domestic spying program. As Greenwald writes . . .
I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct. But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush’s term (though several were threatened ). It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake.
Bold text added by the diarist
Wait, wait, wait! If Obama’s DoJ is prosecuting crimes from the Bush era isn’t that an act of “Looking backwards, not forward”? ( and yes, revealing state secrets, even if done for the good of the public as whistleblowers do, is still illegal. )
More below the fold
Apr 27 2010
Beware of Greeks bearing debt
The news started today with S&P downgrading Greek bonds to junk. It wasn’t just the sovereign debt that became junk, but also the debt of many of the major Greek banks as well.
This dramatically increases the risk of default because junk rated bonds cannot be swapped for Euro-backed bonds, and this has markets very worried.
Investors in Greek bonds may get back between 30 percent and 50 percent of the value of their holdings should the government default or restructure its debt, S&P said.
Apr 27 2010
America’s Elite Are Immoral
Yes it is true.
America’s Financial Elite are immoral and avaricious. Willing to kill people rather than pay for them to be healed, willing to throw people out of their homes as they bet against, and thus effect, the economy that puts the food on our tables for our children to eat.
Apr 27 2010
The Hypocrisy of Arizona and the South West
It’s beyond bad enough to see what Arizona has done and listen to the arguments, especially from certain corners of this society, justifying the Jim Crow or Nazi like ruling. Why Nazi, because it quickly comes to mind the Laws passed in Germany as to the Jews and other groups back when. Jim Crow should already be well understood in this country, unless from Texas as they seem to like re-visionist history writing.
But lets look at what’s well known about the South West and the present, especially coming out of Arizona.
Apr 27 2010
Arizona: All Hail The Emerging Police State
Arizona has apparently decided to use its police force as an instrument to oppress and harass Mexican appearing people within its borders. And, as you might expect from a police state, it is doing so at the expense of protecting citizens and diverting law enforcement from its traditional functions, enforcing the penal laws.
Linda Greenhouse, who usually writes about the Supreme Court for the New York Times, had an op-ed yesterday, “Breathing While Undocumented,” that captures Arizona as the emerging police state it truly is:
What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?
And in case the phrase “lawful contact” makes it appear as if the police are authorized to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime, another section strips the statute of even that fig leaf of reassurance. “A person is guilty of trespassing,” the law provides, by being “present on any public or private land in this state” while lacking authorization to be in the United States – a new crime of breathing while undocumented. The intent, according to the State Legislature, is “attrition through enforcement.”
The rest of the op-ed is definitely worth reading. But there’s another point that deserves to be made about the Arizona statute.