Whereas in the 70s, the City passed a law which banned sitting or lying down on city sidewalks in response to a call to remove hippies who were sitting on sidewalks in the Haight District of San Francisco, and whereas law enforcement personal ultimately selectively used these powers primarily against mostly gay men who were sitting on sidewalks in the Castro District, usually outside of bars (which lead to an incident in 1974, wherein City law enforcement personnel beat up a young gay man outside of a bar in the Castro, and arrested 18 others for “obstructing” the sidewalk). The gay community, led by Harvey Milk, rallied to their cause and against police harassment. One year subsequent to Harvey Milk’s death, the sit-lie law was found to be unconstitutional.
The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they’d seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.
In the United States we hear that capitalism is wedded to democracy, hence the phrase, “capitalist democracies.” In fact, throughout our history there has been a largely antagonistic relationship between democracy and capital concentration. Some eighty years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship April 4, 2010 Forty-two years ago, on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee. To those of us who were alive…
The baseless harangues by anti-convention screamers only act to maintain the political status quo and perpetuate the fiction that elections can succeed in sending enough radically different people to Congress and the White House to really reform and fix our nation. These people want to preserve their own organizations as means to oppose and fix the political and government system. They want to protect and retain their own perceived power and influence. They have had enough time and failed. Now it is time to use the Article V convention option.
The Civil War ranks as the most costly of US wars, with 625,000 deaths and a comparable number of injuries. Now the Republican Party is stoking the fires of insurrection and for thousands of right-wing zealots a new civil war seems a political necessity. As increasing numbers of Democratic politicians are threatened, how long will it be before domestic terrorists use their weapons?
The expression was more accurate than we knew. This month, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a pastoral letter of apology — of sorts — to Ireland to atone for decades of sexual abuse of minors by priests whom those children were supposed to trust. To many people in my homeland, the pope’s letter is an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our faith and to our country. To understand why, one must realize that we Irish endured a brutal brand of Catholicism that revolved around the humiliation of children.
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