I'd forgotten how refreshingly loud British government debates could be. Prime Minister's Question Time is a classic opportunity for any MP to question and challenge the Prime Minister directly. I wonder how the US congress or senate would handle such a debate. If CSpan was this much fun, it would be prime time TV. [viaAndrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish]
In an interview with The Washington Post, a U.S. Air Force counter-intelligence specialist explains that he was aghast when he saw how the U.S. was continuing to torture prisoners, even after he arrived in 2006. He further learned, based on first-hand interviews he conducted, that the torture committed by the…
Andrew Sullivan sums it up. Guantanamo has been an incredibly ghastly episode for America. If any other country had done half of what we have done, our government and media would have condemned its behavior nonstop from day one. Yet I constantly meet people who think that all of…
In the September 19, 2008 Editorial of Science (available only to subscribers online), Normal R. Augustine reports lots of sobering news regarding the state of science in the U.S. Here's a sampling: The United States ranks 16th and 20th among nations in college and high-school graduation rates, respectively; 60th in…
I don’t always agree with Ron Paul, but what he stated on October 3, 2008 to the U.S. House of Representatives, about the alleged “bailout” bill, rings true to me:
Madame Speaker, only in Washington could a bill demonstrably worse than its predecessor be brought back for another vote and actually expect to gain votes. That this bailout was initially defeated was a welcome surprise, but the power-brokers in Washington and on Wall Street could not allow that defeat to be permanent. It was most unfortunate that this monstrosity of a bill, loaded up with even more pork, was able to pass.
The Federal Reserve has already injected hundreds of billions of dollars into US and world credit markets. The adjusted monetary base is up sharply, bank reserves have exploded, and the national debt is up almost half a trillion dollars over the past two weeks. Yet, we are still told that after all this intervention, all this inflation, that we still need an additional $700 billion bailout, otherwise the credit markets will seize and the economy will collapse. This is the same excuse that preceded previous bailouts, and undoubtedly we will hear it again in the future after this bailout fails.
