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POPSSend Karl Rove to Jail Not a joke, this is a real option available to our House committee members! Contact them now to hold him in contempt! Pass it on!
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POPSHamas Children's Show Discusses Severing Hands.... We surely have different cultures and this explains a lot and is foreboding for the future in the area. The last comment is probably applauded by some. :~( Teaching children to kill. How sad is that? Americans can get in trouble for spanking.
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POPSSentient Beings Protected I'd say it's high time that we got off our high horse and recognized other sentient beings that we share the earth with and grant them limited rights such as freedom from torture. Ethically, it is the right thing to do. In part, we can blame religion for this ethical blunder.
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POPSWhen Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated. Meanwhile, even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to many humans: children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may not vote, philosophers who slip into dementia may be lashed to their beds, courts can order surgery or force-feeding. Spain’s Catholic bishops attacked the vote as undermining a divine will that placed humans above animals. One said such thinking led to abortion, euthanasia and ethnic cleansing.
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POPSThe Real-Life '24' "We are once again distracted and unprepared while the Taliban and bin Laden’s minions multiply in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This, no less than the defiling of the Constitution, is the legacy of an administration that not merely rationalized the immorality of torture but shackled our national security to the absurdity that torture could easily fix the terrorist threat. That’s why the Bush White House’s corruption in the end surpasses Nixon’s. We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all."
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POPSBaltimore's Capital Punishment Policies Back in the good old days, Baltimore had a smaller percentage of residents living in poverty (22.7%) than the nation as a whole (27.8%), and a greater percentage of families (23.1%) earning a middle-class income of at least $44,600 in today's dollars than the rest of the country (19.1%). Today, the city has a population that is almost 50% smaller, and about 40% of families with children live at or near the federal poverty line. Among the country's 100 most populous cities, Baltimore ranks a shameful 87th on median household income. There are now at least 30,000 housing units in Baltimore that are abandoned and waiting to be demolished, while even old, upper-crust neighborhoods now have a seedy look. Property taxes are so high – as well as the strong likelihood they will soar even higher in the future – that even maintenance, no less capital improvements, are a losing proposition.
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POPSObama's Supreme U-Turns The Supreme Court also looked at a Louisiana law extending the death penalty to the rape of a child. In another 5-to-4 decision, the Court ruled the Constitution doesn’t permit capital punishment for raping a child. The majority opinion argued the death penalty for that crime “poses risks of over-punishment.” Senator Obama criticized the decision: “I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution.” Like many Americans, I agree with that. The problem is that Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter don’t. All of them voted to overturn the death penalty for child rapists.
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POPSCrazy Indonesian man kills 42, but a human rights agency tries to save him from the death penalty.
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POPSLike I said, we won't need SCOTUS no mo'!
If one more "R" gets on SCOTUS we can all say TOOTLES to civil liberties & HELLO to Fascism. A statement from an everyday Alarmist? No its serious! The court now in lockstep with the "R" ideology which protects the wealthy and gives a nose-thumb at those who need help. The kind of social order they wish to spread across our land, is not democracy. Not with, cruel punishment for those who can't pay their way out of a guilt accusation. Not with, melt down of habeas corpus. Not with, stripping a woman of her right to choose what's best for her body & circumstances. Not with, laws, claiming Voter Id's before one can vote. Not with, reducing punitive damages to large corp. who will become more reckless not having to face large losses to their beloved capital. Not with, dismantling gun-control laws putting all at risk of being murdered by the disgruntled, the disturbed who should never possess lethal weapons. Remember 1 or 2 more "R" justices and you can kiss your, you-know-what bye-bye:-(
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POPSKennedy's shame
The vaporous slogan posing as a standard is the spoon full of sugar that helps the Court’s enlightened medicine go down. The handiwork that results is not a reflection of our evolved values; it is five lawyers dragging the benighted masses kicking and screaming toward its Utopia — where brutalized eight-year-old girls, like murdered innocents and terrorized cities, are not flesh-and-blood but the props by which we measure how “maturely” we indulge their tormentors. And now, it turns out, so brazen was Kennedy’s power grab that the usual veneer — cloaking judicial tyranny in a self-celebration of societal “progress” — couldn’t even make it through two weeks. The evolving standards Justice Kennedy purported to find stemmed from what he took to be a national “consensus” against capital punishment for child rape. The furious public outcry after the ruling was a pretty good sign that something was amiss in the majority’s survey. Nevertheless, the Court observed that of the 36 states t
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POPSPsychiatric Emergency Rooms are Appalling My dissertation research uncovered dozens of stories of abusive and incompetent psychiatric emergency rooms. I hope at least these woman's death will draw attention to an invisible and longstanding American problem.
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POPSObama courts conservatives with new faith program “While I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I went out and did the Lord’s work,” he declared. Oh, GREAT! Another Fairy tale believer in the WH! Sweet Jeebus and Ramona. What a revolting development this is.