Tag Archives: politics

Free Speech, Safety and the Triumph of Neoliberalism I’m reading another article about debates over free speech on campus, this time at Williams College, an elite school in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts.  A faculty petition asks to formalize and tighten the college’s policy on free speech by adopting the Chicago Principles, which state that “concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off...

Trump Drops The Other Iran Oil Shoe US SecState Pompeo announced early today that the waivers granted to 8 nations allowing them to continue to import oil from Iran will not bee renewed when they expire in early May.  I am not sure of the identity of three of those nations, but the big five are China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey.  None of them have made any public statement so far, nor has Iran.  It has been announced that Saudi Arabia and the...

Married male with children, who was asked to write on three different subjects concerning women’s healthcare by the ConsumerSafety.Org . Although I have worked in the healthcare product industry, I am not a doctor. All three of the healthcare issues I discuss scream for solutions as to what has been done, what should have been done, and how they impact women. I have no doubt if these problems impacted men as much as they do women, a Congress made up...

This is a follow up on my post on joy and sorrow. I feel great joy at having found the ultimate abyss of idiocy, but I fear http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2017/10/mysterious-ways.html The competition for worst possible argument was provoked by the fact that former White House counsel Don McGahn told Mueller’s team that (sadly) current President Donald Trump twice told him to get Mueller fired and then told him to deny that “fake news” when it was...

That One Sentence On March 25, Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone: On Sunday, Attorney General William Barr sent a letter to Congress, summarizing the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The most telling section, quoted directly from Mueller’s report, read: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”...

What Is The “Collusion Delusion”? The Trump crowd has long claimed that there was “no collusion, ” repeatedly in many venues.  Somehow the MSM picked up on this screed, and so it is out there that indeed that the Mueller Report  declared that there was “no collusion,” a phrase that somehow Trump himself long put out there for his followers long before the Mueller Report came out. But, in fact up front in the Mueller Report they made it clear that they...

Childrens’ Day And The UN Convention On The Rights Of Children Associated with the UN Convention on the Rights of Children is a Universal Childrens’ Day.  It is November 20, the date that in 1959 the UN adopted the first version of the Convention, which had 10 articles.  It is celebrated in many nations, but not in the US. A competitor is International Childrens’ Day, also called the International Day for the Protection of Children.  This is June 1 and...

What would it take to save a scab industry from leaving the market place? The sorcerous of Grand Rapids Betsy DeVos has the answer. Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education reversed the Obama-era crackdown on vocational and career schools thereby allowing new and inexperienced entrants into the field and alleviating pressure on old participants to have meaningful programs leading to “gainful employment in a recognized position” for which they were trained....

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child After Peter Dorman’s latest post this seems appropriate to follow up.  Very recently I was at a talk where somebody spoke on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.  A theme of the talk was how few Americans know about this UN Convention while most reasonably well informed people in virtually the entire rest of the world know about it.  A first version of it was passed  by the UN in 1959.  A...

This tidbit was reported in an October 13, 1989 Los Angeles Times. In a June 21 (1989) legal opinion requested by Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, Assistant Atty. Gen. William P. Barr reversed a ruling dating back to the Carter Administration denying the FBI authority to take unilateral action overseas in what was then referred to as the President’s snatch authority. The earlier Carter ruling had also warned federal agents could face kidnaping charges abroad...