Category: Civil Liberties

  • The madness of kinging George

    The capacity for Bush defenders (I can’t call them conservatives — not even sure they’re really Republicans anymore) to argue that up is down and black is white and violating the law is not violating the law has reached a crescendo. Glenn Greenwald explains cogently just how far out of line the defenses of warrantless…

  • Osama’s satellite phone

    With so many lies flying around about Bush’s warrantless wiretaps — even the lies have lies — one caught my ear the other day during Bush’s press conference and repeated by 9/11 commissioner Lee Hamilton in an article in today’s Times. The anecdote (much like Reagan’s false – but – still – believed – to…

  • Weighing Justices

    Justice may be blind and that’s for the good but what about those scales? When it comes to weighing one side against another I’m worried about size and heft overpowering brevity and thrift. Another way of imagining this concern is to place a bible on one side of the scale and the U.S. Constitution on…

  • language

    what today is dismissed derisvely as “politically correct” used to be called “being considerate.”

  • Chilling times

    According to an article on MSNBC.com, 44% of Americans “believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans.” Further: The survey showed that 27 percent of respondents supported requiring all Muslim-Americans to register where they lived with the federal government. Twenty-two percent favored racial profiling to identify potential terrorist threats. And 29 percent…