Category: 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment

  • 30 Disgusting Facts from the CIA Torture Report

    It didn’t work. They covered it up. It’ll happen again.

  • The GOP Can't Control the Tea Party

    “the gop made the same mistake that some on the left did in their perception of the tea party – they thought it was a top down, cynical manipulation of people, similar to what the gop has accomplished with the evangelical vote – a demographic that could be farmed for votes without having to deliver […]

  • Dan Savage on Weiner

    “And here’s the inevitable “professional help” question: Is he going to seek professional help. Because horniness is an illness. Wiener is being asked to apologize to Andrew Brietbart… and he does. Ugh. A reporter asks if Weiner was drinking or using drugs—if he has a problem—because only a man who has a drinking problem or a […]

  • Justice Scalia and the Little Black Box

    “I’ve always wanted someone to run a black box experiment with all the SCOTUS justices. Here’s how it would work. Take any case, X. Break it down along ideological grounds… an opinion/ruling … favored a corporation over the consumer or the other way around; or expanded/upheld/restricted civil rights; expanded/restricted government power vs citizen rights, labor vs […]

  • Former Military Interrogator on How Torture Delayed Finding Bin Laden

    “One of the things that people aren’t talking about is the fact that one of the people that was confronted with this information that bin Laden had a courier is Skaykh al-Libi, who was held in a CIA secret prison and was tortured and who gave his CIA interrogators the name of the courier as […]

  • Potency of the Moment

    “The potency of the moment is Obama’s to lose. … So historic is the shift, in fact, that all Obama really has to do now is let the astonishing details of the clandestine operation trickle down and word of his direct, daring involvement penetrate the collective consciousness, and not only will any current agenda items […]

  • The Empty Pulpit

    “This has been the signature failure of the Obama administration. Instead of standing on principle, Obama’s modus operandi has been to accede before the battle has really been joined. We have seen this repeatedly in the major issues of his presidency: the emasculation of the so-called “stimulus package”; the abandonment of the health care public […]

  • American Shame

    Comparing unemployment, income inequality, democracy, food supply, life expectancy, prison population and student performance. New York Times

  • Michael Ratner on Prosecuting Bush for Torture

    Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights on the legal basis for investigating Bush for torture: Let’s correct one major misconception some have about the basis for this action and how it relates to the U.S. legal system at the outset. The Convention Against Torture, which mandates that Switzerland and 146 other countries including […]

  • School-Issued Laptops Photographed Kids As They Slept, Monitored IMs and Browser History

    The lawsuit is on: The system that Lower Merion school officials used to track lost and stolen laptops wound up secretly capturing thousands of images, including photographs of students in their homes, Web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats, says a new motion filed in a suit against the district. More than once, […]