Terrorists to be tried in NY City

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others are going to be tried for their crime in New York City. It seems to me that this is a simple proposition: a crime was committed in the US, so the perpetrators of the crime should be tried in the US. Given that, we need to follow the rules of [...]

Rahm Emanuel and the Stimulus package

Via Kevin Drum, here’s Rahm Emanuel talkingabout Paul Krugman’s objection to the size and proportion of tax cuts in the Stimulus package passed:
“They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Timescolumnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to [...]

The end was near?

Via Pandagon , here’s a video that’s been making the rounds (although it was put up in January):

Here’s a bit of the transcript (from here):
It was about September 15th [sic]. … On Thursday at about 11 o’clock in the morning the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of, uh, money market accounts [...]

Ex-President Bush

Ex-President Bush. That sounds very good, wonderful. And President Obama isn’t bad either. I’ll add the new Whitehouse blog to my list.

A Sit-In in Chicago

Here’s another example of corporate compassion:
Fried said the company can’t pay its 300 employees because its creditor, Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America, won’t let them. Crain’s Chicago Business reported that Republic Windows’ monthly sales had fallen to $2.9 million from $4 million during the past month. In a memo to the union, obtained by the [...]

Tweeter Shafts Workers, Again

What is it with the company Tweeter? Last year they closed stores without paying severance that was promised workers and then tried to get bonuses for its executives. Yesterday they shut all their stores (they were being closed, but this was cut short) and:
The employees, including roughly 150 in Massachusetts, are still owed at least [...]

President Obama

That sounds very good after 8 years of having to say President Bush, although the next two and a half months are going to seem very long. Democrats also have increased their margins in the US House and Senate (but didn’t get the 60 Senate seats to get the filibuster proof margin).
Everything/everyone I voted for [...]

Rub Some Dirt On It

Another tale of the wonderful treatment of immigrants is out:
In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng’s lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. [...]

Why Don’t They Learn English …. umm

I find this case to be interesting:
Late yesterday, a federal court ordered Alaska’s state and local elections officials to provide effective language assistance to citizens who speak Yup’ik, the primary language of a majority of voters in the Bethel region of Alaska. The victory came in a legal challenge brought by Native American Rights Fund [...]

Poverty in the US

The Sabin Institute has a paper out about Neglected Diseases of Poverty (which I found via this). Here’s a bit from the press release:
Hotez notes that the common features of these neglected infections are their: 1) Highly disproportionate health impact on people of color and people living in poverty; 2) Chronic, largely insidious, and disabling features; [...]

Baseball in Mexico

In today’s Boston Globe there’s a review of the book ‘South of the Color Barrier’by John Virtue which looks at the heyday of the Mexican baseball league under Jorge Pasquel. It describes how Pasquel was able to lure players south because of the racism in the US and the reserve clause in baseball:
But a black [...]

US and China Defense Spending

I was reading about Defense Secretary Gate’s criticism of Burma:
”We have reached out, frankly, to Myanmar multiple times during this crisis in very direct ways,” the Pentagon chief said. ”It’s not been us that have been deaf and dumb in response to the pleas of the international community, but the government of Myanmar. We have [...]

Senator Kennedy Has Brain Tumor

It has now been reported that Senator Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant glioma, a tumor of the brain. The treatment or stage of the tumor has not been announced, but:
Median survival for patients with moderately severe (grade III) malignant gliomas is three to five years. For patients with the most severe, aggressive form [...]

Why Unions Still Matter

Lindsay at Majikthise has a story about Indian guest workers in New Orleans. Here is the worker’s statement:
New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice
 
Statement of Indian Workers’ Congress at Launch of Hunger Strike
May 14, 2008
We represent over 550 Indian guestworkers who were trafficked to the United States Gulf Coast in late 2006. Eighteen months after [...]

Loyalty Oaths in China and the US

I wrote an article where I looked at one of the reasons Tibetans rebelled: they are forced to sign loyalty oaths and participate in forced denunciations of the Dalai Lama. I would like to think that such things wouldn’t happen in a free society such as the US anymore, but I would be wrong (via Pam at [...]

Immigrant Deaths in Detention

The NY Times has a series of articles on deaths of immigrants in detention. As it notes, healthcare in any detention facility is iffy but here there’s an added dimension:
In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern [...]

Taxes For the Rich

Kevin Drum has a post talking about this Wall Street Journal article. He notes that the average AGI (adjusted gross income) of the top 400 IRS filers is now $213.9 million (it has increased fairly steadily from $17.4 to $57.3 in 1990 dollars) and the average tax rate has fallen from 26.38% to 18.23% (which compares [...]

The Sixties and Today

I like this article by Rick Perlstein about how the 1960s relate to today (via Jonathan Schwarz). It notes that this was a violent confrontation with both sides going to extremes. The rhetoric from the right is usually absent, but is here:
The right-wing populist rage of 1968 third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, who, referring to [...]

Primaries

Now that the first primary is out of the way, I will probably start to look at the election a bit more.
Today I looked at the exit polls from NH and, as usual, found some weird bits:

Clinton did better than Obama and Edwards for voters who were worse off (were not college graduates, made less [...]

Democrats Show Some Ineptitude

In a few bills today, the Democratic leadership showed they haven’t quite figured out how to get bills passed.

The worst showing was in the hate-crimes bill:

Worried that the Senate might not pass the proposal on its own, backers added it to the high-priority Pentagon bill and pushed it through the Senate and into final negotiations [...]