New York Public Library
Slavoj Žižek is back
[...]
"In 2011, we were witnessing (and participating) in a series of shattering events, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movements, from the UK suburban protests to Breivik's ideological madness. 2011 was thus the year of dreaming dangerously, in both directions: there were emancipatory dreams mobilizing protesters in New York, on Tahir Square, in London and Athens--and there were the obscure destructive dreams propelling Breivik and other racist populists all around Europe.
What is the meaning of these explosions? Do they have a common root?"
--Slavoj Žižek, Spring 2012
[...]
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Did Scalia Parrot Fox News During Health-Care Arguments?
Matthew DeLuca
The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/05/did-scalia-parrot-fox-news-during-health-care-arguments.html
The Supreme Court justice more than once cited arguments that are suspiciously similar to ones made often on the right wing’s favorite news source, writes Matt DeLuca.
Is Roger Ailes clerking for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia?
One might be forgiven for thinking so following last week’s oral arguments on the health-care law before the nation’s highest court.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, some of Scalia’s questions from the bench made use of the tone and even the diction of the attacks on the Affordable Care Act frequently heard on Fox News and conservative talk-radio shows.
After Scalia picked up on the idea that a government empowered to have its citizens buy health insurance or face a penalty may also strong arm them into buy some other good, such as broccoli, Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, told The Washington Post that the court was trumpeting “the most tendentious of the Tea Party arguments.”
[...]
The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/05/did-scalia-parrot-fox-news-during-health-care-arguments.html
The Supreme Court justice more than once cited arguments that are suspiciously similar to ones made often on the right wing’s favorite news source, writes Matt DeLuca.
Is Roger Ailes clerking for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia?
One might be forgiven for thinking so following last week’s oral arguments on the health-care law before the nation’s highest court.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, some of Scalia’s questions from the bench made use of the tone and even the diction of the attacks on the Affordable Care Act frequently heard on Fox News and conservative talk-radio shows.
After Scalia picked up on the idea that a government empowered to have its citizens buy health insurance or face a penalty may also strong arm them into buy some other good, such as broccoli, Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, told The Washington Post that the court was trumpeting “the most tendentious of the Tea Party arguments.”
[...]
US Government tightens lid on dolphin death probe
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/25/us-dolphins-gulf-idUSTRE72O3JO20110325
By Leigh Coleman
BILOXI, Mississippi
(Reuters) - The U.S. government is keeping a tight lid on its probe into scores of unexplained dolphin deaths along the Gulf Coast, possibly connected to last year's BP oil spill, causing tension with some independent marine scientists.
Wildlife biologists contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service to document spikes in dolphin mortality and to collect specimens and tissue samples for the agency were quietly ordered late last month to keep their findings confidential.
The gag order was contained in an agency letter informing outside scientists that its review of the dolphin die-off, classified as an "unusual mortality event (UME)," had been folded into a federal criminal investigation launched last summer into the oil spill.
[...]
By Leigh Coleman
BILOXI, Mississippi
(Reuters) - The U.S. government is keeping a tight lid on its probe into scores of unexplained dolphin deaths along the Gulf Coast, possibly connected to last year's BP oil spill, causing tension with some independent marine scientists.
Wildlife biologists contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service to document spikes in dolphin mortality and to collect specimens and tissue samples for the agency were quietly ordered late last month to keep their findings confidential.
The gag order was contained in an agency letter informing outside scientists that its review of the dolphin die-off, classified as an "unusual mortality event (UME)," had been folded into a federal criminal investigation launched last summer into the oil spill.
[...]
New York City Schools called hotbeds for luring young sex slaves
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/schools-called-hotbeds-luring-young-sex-slaves-article-1.1053977
[...]
Sex traffickers who coerce kids into prostitution are using the city’s schoolyards and playgrounds as recruiting offices.
It’s such a troubling problem that Brooklyn prosecutors have started training educators on how to spot kids in peril on their turf.
“It happens enough that I can say it happens a bunch,” Assistant District Attorney Lauren Hersh told the Daily News. “Many girls are forced to go to middle school playgrounds and recruit other young girls.”
Hersh, who runs a pioneering sex-trafficking unit for the DA’s office, has held several workshops and hopes to expand into as many schools as possible.
Last fall, pimp Abking Wilcox admitted turning girls as young as 15 into being sex slaves and making them recruit others in Bushwick and Brownsville middle schools.
Wilcox, who pleaded guilty in Brooklyn Criminal Court to three counts of sex trafficking, called it his “team.”
Hersh prosecuted another trafficker — a school parent, no less — after a guidance counselor at a Canarsie, Brooklyn, public high school blew the whistle.
At first, the counselor couldn’t believe the secret hell a 16-year-old student described.
But her tale of being forced to sell sex over the Internet by a classmate’s mom quickly rang true.
“She takes the guidance counselor to Backpage.com. She shows her, by plugging in a phone number, that these are in fact pictures of her that are being sold for sex,” Hersh said.
“And the phone number that was on Backpage.com was the mom’s phone number. When you looked on file at the school for the school’s contact information for the mom, it was that phone number.”
The counselor called police, and the mom later pleaded guilty.
In the year and a half that Hersh’s unit has been up and running, 32 defendants have been indicted.
Last year, there were nearly three times as many sex-trafficking arrests in Brooklyn than in any other borough — 23 compared with nine each in the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens, and none in Staten Island.
Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, which helps trafficking survivors, said recruiting is happening everywhere, including schools.
“Pimps go where young people are,” she said.
“Teachers may think, that’s something happening in Thailand. But there could be a girl sitting your class who is two weeks away from being recruited, or who has already been recruited . . . . we’ve got girls in junior high who’ve been through this.”
[...]
[...]
Sex traffickers who coerce kids into prostitution are using the city’s schoolyards and playgrounds as recruiting offices.
It’s such a troubling problem that Brooklyn prosecutors have started training educators on how to spot kids in peril on their turf.
“It happens enough that I can say it happens a bunch,” Assistant District Attorney Lauren Hersh told the Daily News. “Many girls are forced to go to middle school playgrounds and recruit other young girls.”
Hersh, who runs a pioneering sex-trafficking unit for the DA’s office, has held several workshops and hopes to expand into as many schools as possible.
Last fall, pimp Abking Wilcox admitted turning girls as young as 15 into being sex slaves and making them recruit others in Bushwick and Brownsville middle schools.
Wilcox, who pleaded guilty in Brooklyn Criminal Court to three counts of sex trafficking, called it his “team.”
Hersh prosecuted another trafficker — a school parent, no less — after a guidance counselor at a Canarsie, Brooklyn, public high school blew the whistle.
At first, the counselor couldn’t believe the secret hell a 16-year-old student described.
But her tale of being forced to sell sex over the Internet by a classmate’s mom quickly rang true.
“She takes the guidance counselor to Backpage.com. She shows her, by plugging in a phone number, that these are in fact pictures of her that are being sold for sex,” Hersh said.
“And the phone number that was on Backpage.com was the mom’s phone number. When you looked on file at the school for the school’s contact information for the mom, it was that phone number.”
The counselor called police, and the mom later pleaded guilty.
In the year and a half that Hersh’s unit has been up and running, 32 defendants have been indicted.
Last year, there were nearly three times as many sex-trafficking arrests in Brooklyn than in any other borough — 23 compared with nine each in the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens, and none in Staten Island.
Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, which helps trafficking survivors, said recruiting is happening everywhere, including schools.
“Pimps go where young people are,” she said.
“Teachers may think, that’s something happening in Thailand. But there could be a girl sitting your class who is two weeks away from being recruited, or who has already been recruited . . . . we’ve got girls in junior high who’ve been through this.”
[...]
Five New Orleans police officers sentenced in hurricane Katrina killings
Four officers, along with a fifth who helped cover up the 2005 crimes, are sentenced to between six and 65 years in prison
Chris McGreal, guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/04/new-orleans-police-officers-katrina
Four New Orleans police officers have been sentenced to decades in prison over the killing of two people and wounding of four others fleeing the massive flooding of the city by hurricane Katrina.
A fifth officer was sent to jail for his role in a web of fabrications to cover up the true circumstances of the shootings on the Danziger bridge in 2005. The shootings came to symbolise the behaviour of a police force regarded as out of control in the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane which claimed nearly 2,000 lives and flooded about 80% of New Orleans.
The policemen were prosecuted in federal court after Louisiana state authorities declined to charge them. The federal investigation revealed a coverup that involved planted evidence, invented witnesses and falsified police reports that prosecutors said exposed a culture of corruption and a code of silence in the New Orleans police department.
[...]
Chris McGreal, guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/04/new-orleans-police-officers-katrina
Four New Orleans police officers have been sentenced to decades in prison over the killing of two people and wounding of four others fleeing the massive flooding of the city by hurricane Katrina.
A fifth officer was sent to jail for his role in a web of fabrications to cover up the true circumstances of the shootings on the Danziger bridge in 2005. The shootings came to symbolise the behaviour of a police force regarded as out of control in the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane which claimed nearly 2,000 lives and flooded about 80% of New Orleans.
The policemen were prosecuted in federal court after Louisiana state authorities declined to charge them. The federal investigation revealed a coverup that involved planted evidence, invented witnesses and falsified police reports that prosecutors said exposed a culture of corruption and a code of silence in the New Orleans police department.
[...]
Friday, April 6, 2012
USA High Court’s Supremely Unethical Activists
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_high_courts_supremely_unethical_activists_20120404/
By Joe Conason
How the Supreme Court majority will rule on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act may well have been foretold months or perhaps years ago—not so much by their questions during argument this week, as by their flagrant displays of bias outside the court, where certain justices regularly behave as dubiously as any sleazy officeholder.
While the public awaits the high court’s judgment on the constitutionality of health care reform, it is worth remembering how cheaply Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in particular have sullied the integrity of their lifetime appointments, and how casually Chief Justice John Roberts and their other colleagues tolerate such outrages.
[...]
By Joe Conason
How the Supreme Court majority will rule on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act may well have been foretold months or perhaps years ago—not so much by their questions during argument this week, as by their flagrant displays of bias outside the court, where certain justices regularly behave as dubiously as any sleazy officeholder.
While the public awaits the high court’s judgment on the constitutionality of health care reform, it is worth remembering how cheaply Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in particular have sullied the integrity of their lifetime appointments, and how casually Chief Justice John Roberts and their other colleagues tolerate such outrages.
[...]
Koch-Funded ALEC Behind State Attempts To ‘Reclaim’ USA Public Lands
By Public Lands Team
By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.
http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/04/03/457463/koch-funded-alec-behind-state-attempts-to-reclaim-your-public-lands/
In the last few months, Republican presidential candidates from Mitt Romney to Rick Santorum have shown their ignorance about the value of public lands. And recently a handful of states have joined the fray, with state legislators introducing bills that demand Congress turn over millions of acres of public lands to the states or face a lawsuit. Utah has taken this idea the furthest, where two weeks ago Governor Gary Herbert (R) signed a bill into law demanding that Congress give 30 million acres of federal land located in Utah to the state by 2015 or it will sue.
But buried under the headlines is the fact these bills are being quietly drafted and promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing corporate front group that provides draft legislation to state lawmakers and is funded by some of America’s biggest corporations including Koch Industries, BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.
As the Associated Press reported:
Lawmakers in Utah and Arizona have said the legislation is endorsed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that advocates conservative ideals, and they expect it to eventually be introduced in other Western states.
And in January, Utah Pulse noted that:
Lawmakers in four western land states will be running similar bills in their legislative sessions this year – Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Idaho. Ivory’s bill will be unique to Utah, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has turned his bill into model legislation that other western land states can use. While ALEC is a conservative legislative/business group, Ivory says he hopes to get Utah Democrats onboard with this new effort.
[...]
By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.
http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/04/03/457463/koch-funded-alec-behind-state-attempts-to-reclaim-your-public-lands/
In the last few months, Republican presidential candidates from Mitt Romney to Rick Santorum have shown their ignorance about the value of public lands. And recently a handful of states have joined the fray, with state legislators introducing bills that demand Congress turn over millions of acres of public lands to the states or face a lawsuit. Utah has taken this idea the furthest, where two weeks ago Governor Gary Herbert (R) signed a bill into law demanding that Congress give 30 million acres of federal land located in Utah to the state by 2015 or it will sue.
But buried under the headlines is the fact these bills are being quietly drafted and promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing corporate front group that provides draft legislation to state lawmakers and is funded by some of America’s biggest corporations including Koch Industries, BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.
As the Associated Press reported:
Lawmakers in Utah and Arizona have said the legislation is endorsed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that advocates conservative ideals, and they expect it to eventually be introduced in other Western states.
And in January, Utah Pulse noted that:
Lawmakers in four western land states will be running similar bills in their legislative sessions this year – Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Idaho. Ivory’s bill will be unique to Utah, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has turned his bill into model legislation that other western land states can use. While ALEC is a conservative legislative/business group, Ivory says he hopes to get Utah Democrats onboard with this new effort.
[...]
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