Archive for December, 2006
Ten most
Rather untypical 2006 summary list: 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006. I completely agree that the philosophy - that suggest that the President, and his administration, has "inherent powers" - is the most dangerous attack on civil liberties by this administration.
(Via The Reason)
Technorati Tags: Human Rights - Military Commission Act - Bush - Cheney Civil Liberties - War on Terror
You
I like John Stewart’s take on Time’s man of the year choice:
Technorati Tags: Time’s man of the year - Old Media - The Daily Show
Evolution? more like devolution
While we are on the subject of the Nanny State, here is a poster I found and liked:
Technorati Tags: Big Government - The Nanny State - The Libertarian Party
Not only trans-fat
NY City council was very busy baning, or at least trying to ban, many things last year:
* Trans-fats.
* Aluminum baseball bats.
* The purchase of tobacco by 18- to 20-year-olds.
* Foie gras.
* Pedicabs in parks.
* New fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods).
* Lobbyists from the floor of council chambers.
* Lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency.
* Vehicles in Central and Prospect parks.
* Cell phones in upscale restaurants.
* The sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., because of a unionization dispute.
* Mail-order pharmaceutical plans.
* Candy-flavored cigarettes.
* Gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily.
* Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
* Wal-Mart.
busy year for the nanny state.
Technorati Tags: Big Government - NYC - Libertarianism - Trans Fat
Not who I had in mind
In my very simple litmus test of the 2008 presidential candidates John Edwards come as definite NO. His ideas about further involvement of the state in the practice of wealth distributation raising a big red flag. If the democrats will push candidated like Edwards they aren’t going to win the Libertarian votes, which might cost them a very good chance of taking the white house.
who’s next?
Technorati Tags: 2008 Presidential campaign - John Edwards - Big Governemt
Never again?
What did you do today to stop the genocide in Darfur ?
Technorati Tags: Darfur - Genocide - Never Again - The UN
Feed me, Saymour!
This is one of the rare news items that leave me speechless. The only thing that will be more shocking is that someone might think this is a good idea.
Technorati Tags: Big Government - Capitalism - The Free Market
Stop pretending
I guess this is not an issue the UN Human Rights Mockery Council would be concern with:
CAIRO: In a cramped jail cell in Alexandria, Egypt, sits a soft-spoken 22- year-old student. Kareem Amer was sent to prison for over a month for allegedly "defaming the president of Egypt" and "highlighting inappropriate aspects that harm the reputation of Egypt." Where did Amer commit these supposed felonies? On his weblog.
If the Alexandria prosecutors’ standards of censorship were applied in the United States or Europe, thousands upon thousands of bloggers would be behind bars. The basic right of individual free expression is sadly not respected in today’s Egypt. Yet the authorities’ decision to jail an obscure student for his writing reveals a larger struggle for free speech playing out between dissident bloggers and state prosecutors across the Middle East.
But why should it? If in one of its member states this practice is possible:
Regimes accustomed to control have struggled to respond. In Tunisia, a Web publisher, Zouhair Yahyaoui, was dragged from an Internet café by security forces and tortured into revealing his site’s password after he posted a quiz mocking President Zine Abidine ben Ali. In Iran, authorities arrested a student, Mojtaba Saminejad, after he condemned the arrest of several fellow bloggers and "insulted the Supreme Leader." Daif Al-Ghazal, an investigative reporter for the Web journal Libya Al-Youm, was found murdered in Benghazi — his fingers cut off as a warning sign to anticorruption online writers.
Here I intended to write a conclusion paragraph about the fact that the only hope for better Middle-East is more liberal democracy. But the problem isn’t just the regimes in that region, it is the fact that we are willing to accept them as our allies in the "war on terror" - where in fact they are, by oppressing their people, are a major cause for its existence. The problem isn’t only that Tunisian cannot mock their dictators, it is the fact that we agree that these tyrants will be a respectful member in the UN Human Rights Council.
Its time to stop pretending and to call tyrant for what they are.
Technorati Tags: UN Human Rights Council - The Middle East - Egypt - Liberal Democracy - Freedom of Speech - Tyranny
Inevitable decline?
The sad decline of newspapers:
One of the biggest believers in the newspaper field sold its largest paper yesterday, as McClatchy Co. agreed to sell the Minneapolis Star Tribune to private-equity firm Avista Capital Partners for $530 million.
The price is less than half of what McClatchy paid for the paper in 1998, when it bought the Star Tribune from Cowles Media for $1.2 billion. The value of papers has declined as they face declining readership and a fragmented media environment.
Many words can be written about this - how newspapers are archaic form of news reporting and journalism - and they will be mostly right. However, at least for me, the new technologies didn’t provide yet good replacement for newspapers.
Although I can read them online I’m still subscribing to the print edition of newspapers and magazines. I didn’t find a technology that will replace the gratifying experience of turning pages and I like the editorial choices of these newspapers and magazines - the combination of both keeps me as a paying subscriber.
Can newspapers survive? I’m surely hope so. Probably in smaller circulation, hopefully with more comprehensive coverage and better analysis of the events they cover.
Technorati Tags: Newspaper - Old Media - Technology - New Media
Wasting someone else’s money
The wall street journal has an important article about earmarks and their devastating effects. In its base earmarks funding bypassing proper public examination, proper legislation and is, by nature, against the spirit of the constitution .
Earmarks allow lawmakers to fund projects fast, with little public scrutiny. These days, their use is mushrooming. Congressional leaders are using them to help vulnerable junior colleagues curry favor with home-state constituents to boost re-election efforts. Earmarks grease the skids for important legislation — bills loaded with spending provisions that benefit numerous congressional districts tend to garner more votes. In recent years, Republican leaders have offered lessons for newly elected lawmakers in how to get earmarks.
In the 1980s, President Reagan vetoed a transportation authorization bill because it contained a few hundred earmarks. Last year’s version included more than 6,000, including $223 million for a bridge to a sparsely populated Alaskan island — the oft-mocked "Bridge to Nowhere." In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2005, there were 15,818 earmarks in all federal spending bills, up from about 3,034 in fiscal 1996, according to the research arm of Congress, the Congressional Research Service.
As always, such process - the ease of spending someone’s else money, is invitation for corruption. An invitation that is not remain un answered:
Earmarks made up about $40.8 billion, or 4%, of the roughly $1 trillion that Congress allocated in the 2005 fiscal year. Federal prosecutors in Washington, Los Angeles and San Diego are looking into potential abuses, including whether lawmakers have added earmarks to benefit political contributors, former staffers and friendly lobbyists. At least four congressmen, including Rep. Jerry Lewis, the current chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, are being investigated for their roles in earmarking or their ties to lobbyists specializing in earmarks.
A while ago CBS’ 60 minutes had a short segment about earmarks, watching it (you will need to scroll down to the segment: "Buried in the fine print") is a scary demonstration of how far we departed from the ideas of restricting government’s power and corruption.
I only hope that the pendulum start to swing back from this craziness soon.
Technorati Tags: Big Government - Earmarks - The Free Market - Libertarianism