Today’s links to interesting news and analysis. If you find this useful, please pass it to a friend or colleague.
- “Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?“, Richard S. Lindzen (Prof MIT), presented at a conference on 29-31 August 2008
- Don’t try to prove police corruption. They will destroy you first. “Gone Rogue“, Michael May, Texas Observer, 29 April 2010 — “Police admired Barry Cooper when he lied to put drug dealers in prison. Then he flipped the game on them.”
- Useful information about the Pentagon’s new report about Afghanistan: “Pentagon map belies Taliban’s sphere“, Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service, 4 May 2010
- Brilliant analysis of the Tea Party movement: “The Tea Party Jacobins“, Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books, 27 May 2010
Feature article
“Fear Itself“, Scott Horton, blog of Harper’s, 6 May 2010
Senator Joseph Lieberman has developed a knack for craven fearmongering. His latest proposal was born from the police operation by New York’s finest that led to the capture of Faisal Shahzad last weekend. Shahzad, a financial analyst, is a United States citizen and, as a long-time resident of Bridgeport, one of Lieberman’s constituents, which Lieberman considers a troublesome complication. Lieberman says he will sponsor legislation under which the president will be given the power to deprive a person of his citizenship simply by bringing certain charges.
Lieberman is vague about the proposals, and he offers no explanation of how a citizen could be stripped of his citizenship by executive fiat consistently with the Constitution, a step that would have all the traditional badges of tyrannical government. He also apparently believes, incorrectly, that only U.S. citizens have a right to receive a Miranda warning.
… Lieberman believes that America’s Constitution and criminal-justice system are dangerous weaknesses. To this sort of thinking Abraham Lincoln had the right retort: perhaps Senator Lieberman would “prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
