Testifying before Congress yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress that it was time to eliminate military bases around the country that are no longer needed. Unfortunately eliminating such bases is always a political hot potato. Representative Rob Simmons (R-Connecticut) summed up the attitude that most members of Congress have toward military bases,…
June, 2001
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A group of at least eleven juveniles in New Jersey recently culminated a day of violence by beating to death a homeless man. The juveniles were black and the victim was Hispanic, and almost immediately there were cries on conservative sites like Free Republic about why the boys weren’t being charged with a hate crime.…
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Another person misreading the Appeals Court ruling is Dave Winer, but Winer has to go on and make one of his typically loopy suggestions, Now it seems the next step is for a new trial, and although I’m not a lawyer it seems only reasonable, given the number of violations of antitrust law that Microsoft…
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In May the National Rifle Association and Sen. John McCaine traded pot shots after the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre told ABC that the main purpose of McCain’s campaign finance reform bill was to short circuit the rights to free speech guaranteed under the Constitution. LaPierre said, It’s an American tradition that citizens … get to say…
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Dan Gillmor doesn’t have an e-mail address listed on his site or I’d e-mail him, but I think he and others who are trying to put an anti-MS spin on the Appeals Court ruling just don’t get it. The court’s treatment of “tying” Internet Explorer to the operating system is surprising, too, in that it…
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Wired News has an article on the Supreme’ Courts ruling on freelancer rights that backs up what I pointed out earlier — this ruling not only won’t help but actually hurts freelancers since it gives an incentive to media companies to force freelancers to sign away all rights. Kendra Mayfield writes, Since the mid-1990s, most…
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Bruce Brawer wrote an interesting review of Angela Dillard’s book, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America. According to Brawer’s review, Dillard attempts to explain away the existence of minority conservatives by relegating their ideas to the main evil of Western political culture — the emphasis on individualism. Brawer writes, This, she…
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For the past few years the United States has applied special tariffs to, of all things, imports of chilled or frozen lamb meat. In May the World Trade Organization ruled that the tariffs were inconsistent with the WTO agreement and gave the United States 60 days to lift the tariffs. Almost all lamb meat imports…
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For the past several years there has been a worldwide boom in farm crops, making it difficult for many American farmers to survive. And for the fourth year in a row Congress has done the single dumbest thing imaginable to deal with the plight of farmers — it passed a massive bill to provide emergency…
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Last year Hollywood heavily supported Al Gore and Sen. Joe Lieberman in their run for the White House. Now many of those same Hollywood folks find themselves under attack by Lieberman’s perennial support for censorship. Lieberman’s latest proposal is a bill that would grant the Federal Trade Commission to go after the entertainment industry for…