The ultra-conservative US Tea Party movement is taking a page from Stephen Harper's playbook: gutting the census. Last week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill that would shutter several Census Bureau projects and programs. Robert Groves is the Bureau's director: [Video link] My mother, a school board member in her tiny Maine town, had a bumper sticker that read, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." You might equally, if less pithily, say, "If you think the census is expensive, try not knowing what's happening to your country's population." Gathering statistical information about a country's demographics has been a hallmark...

13 May, 2012

For all its foreign policy lapses, the United States has long stood as a beacon of individual freedom. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights constrain government action against individuals to a degree unimagined elsewhere in the world. Even the most criticized parts of the Bill of Rights, like the Second Amendment guarantee of the right ro bear arms, are, in William O. Douglas's felicitous phrase, "designed to take the government off the backs of people." It is commonplace to observe that the September 11 attacks undermined those constraints. In the run-up to Christmas, Glenn Greenwald, Salon's tenacious legal affairs reporter, produced...

26 December, 2010

Contrarian reader Jon Coates of Halifax has no trouble with the kidnapping, rendition, and indefinite detention without due process to which Omar Khadr, a Canadian juvenile, has been subjected for seven years. He writes: [caption id="attachment_3064" align="alignright" width="231" caption="Omar Ahmed Khadr at age 14, one year before his capture and removal to Guantanamo."][/caption] I believe that Khadr is a prisoner of war and should stay right where he is until the war in Afghanistan has run its course, just like any other prisoner of war. As he is also being charged with criminal activity - killing an American medic, a non-combatant...

08 November, 2009