Ralph Nader recently sent a pointed letter to President Bush. The letter concerned a annual national tragedy of 58,000 of needless workplace deaths. Here is an excerpt (from Common Dreams): Dear President Bush: I was listening to your address before the self-described Conservative Political Action Committee gathering in Washington, D.C.…
Is anyone else struck by the irony that Homeland Security so often erodes First Amendment rights? Homeland Security has become obsessed about listening to personal phone calls and seizing people’s cell phones and laptops when they travel. Ironically, there is no security for the victims of gunmen who shoot up college campuses and city council meetings.
At 48 years old, I can remember attending high school and college without any fear that someone would walk in and begin blasting away. The recent stories on the news, starting with last year’s Virginia Tech shooting, followed by a local killing rampage at a Kirkwood City Council meeting (5 dead, 2 critically injured, one of whom was the city’s mayor), and yesterday’s deaths on the DeKalb campus of Northern Illinois University, has me wondering what has changed? Is it my level of awareness or is it a change in the basic behavior and beliefs of Americans?
Initially outraged by the extremely cavalier treatment of US citizens with Muslim backgrounds who attempt to travel out of the United States, I now find myself feeling deeply saddened and frustrated that innocent folks are uselessly harassed while others, intent on venting their rage, are so easily able to take many lives in a few short minutes. Is there a connection here? I think there is.
For eight years now we’ve lived in an atmosphere of fear, created by and fed by an embedded media that supports a President and a government that speaks of terrorism and …
It's easy to call Cookie Thorton a madman. No one in his or her right mind would walk into a civilized city council meeting and open fire - we can all agree on that. But by writing this week's shooting in Kirkwood off as the aberrant act of a crazed…
I just found another interesting article at the U.N. Observer. It reports on the recent dismissal of a suit for damages filed by prisoners being held at Guantanamo: In a 43-page opinion, Circuit Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its…
Personal anecdote time. Yesterday (Sunday) we went shopping. We stopped at Office Depot to buy a new chair. As we approached the entrance, I spotted a friend of ours and called her name. We gathered outside the entrance to chat. As we talked, a man approached us, begged our pardon,…