Why would a LGBTI person set up a business when they’ll be filtered out of the internet?

Helen Belcher | Gay Star News | October 28, 2014

At the end of 2013, internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK bowed to government pressure and agreed to introduce default filtering.

Immediately there were reports that a number of LGBT sites were being blocked. With this in mind, Julian Huppert MP convened a meeting in Parliament in January 2014 to discuss issues around internet filtering.

At that parliamentary meeting I raised a specific question about what would happen if a business whose owner happened to be LGBT found that their website was blocked, with supplementaries around how businesses are supposed to monitor this. It didn’t feel like anyone else had even thought of that possibility. There were vague assurances this would never happen.

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US Court of Appeals for Fifth Circuit sets January date for Texas and Louisiana gay marriage cases

Greg Hernandez | Gay Star News | October 28, 2014

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit announced on Monday ( 27 October) that oral arguments in the appeals of same-sex marriage rulings from Texas and Louisiana have been scheduled for January.

The cases will be closely watched because in the Louisiana case, US District Judge Martin Feldman in September upheld the state’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriages performed legally in other states.

Feldman was the first federal judge to uphold a ban since the US Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act in June 2013.

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A survival guide for Christians fighting gay marriage

Rob Watson | Gay Star News | October 28, 2014

Many of us have been in the marriage equality war for a long, long time. I remember a drag queen host taking the microphone at San José Pride about a dozen years ago.

She saw a group with ‘Freedom to Marry’ t-shirts, and with a twinge of sadness remarked: ‘Oh honeys, they are NEVER going to let us get married, ever. You may as well give that one up right now.’ She was wrong.

As in all wars, there is a foe. In the United States the foes tend to call themselves ‘Christians’ and root their obsessive opposition in their particular interpretation of the Bible.

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Guess How Much America’s War Against Isis Costs Every Single Day?

AFP | AlterNet | October 28, 2014

The Pentagon has revised its estimate of the cost of the US air war in Iraq and Syria, saying the price tag for the campaign against the Islamic State group comes to about $8.3 million a day.

Since air strikes began on August 8, the campaign — which has involved about 6,600 sorties by US and allied aircraft — has cost $580 million, said Pentagon spokesman Commander Bill Urban.

The Defense Department had previously put the average daily cost of the military operation at more than $7 million a day.

The higher figure reflected the increased pace of air strikes and related flights, a defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

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Why Doesn’t a Cop Go to Jail for Shooting Mentally Ill Man 14 Times?

Terrell Jermaine Starr | AlterNet | October 28, 2014

A white Milwaukee cop has been fired, six months after shooting and killing a 31-year-old mentally ill black man, the Associated Press reports.

Dontre Hamilton, who suffered from schizophrenia, was sleeping in a city park last April when Officer Christopher Manney approached him around 3:30pm. Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn said Manney was responding to an earlier voicemail, not knowing that two police officers had already checked on Hamilton twice that afternoon.

Flynn said Manney identified himself, asked Hamilton to stand and began a pat-down search, according to WISC 12. Allegedly, Hamilton began fighting with Manney during the search. The officer tried to subdue Hamilton with his baton, but he was able to take it and struck Manney. Manney then used his service weapon and fatally shot Hamilton.

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What Has Greed Cost the United States?

The Daily Take Team | The Thom Hartmann Program | October 28, 2014

“There should be no place for raw, naked greed in in the US.” (Image via Shutterstock)

 

Gordon Gecko was wrong.

Greed is not good. It’s very, very bad.

And, it’s destroying the US a little more each day.

This morning on MSNBC’s conservative “Morning Joe” show, rock icon Graham Nash had this to say about the Koch brothers.

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Higher Education and the New Brutalism

Henry A. Giroux | Truthout | Truthout | October 28, 2014

In any democratic society, education should be viewed as a right, not an entitlement, says Henry A. Giroux. (Image via Shutterstock)

Across the globe, a new historical conjuncture is emerging in which the attacks on higher education as a democratic institution and on dissident public voices in general – whether journalists, whistleblowers or academics – are intensifying with sobering consequences. The attempts to punish prominent academics such as Ward Churchill, Steven Salaita and others are matched by an equally vicious assault on whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden, and journalists such as James Risen. (1) Under the aegis of the national surveillance-security-secrecy state, it becomes difficult to separate the war on whistleblowers and journalists from the war on higher education – the institutions responsible for safeguarding and sustaining critical theory and engaged citizenship.

Marina Warner has rightly called these assaults on higher education, “the new brutalism in academia.” (2) It may be worse than she suggests. In fact, the right-wing defense of the neoliberal dismantling of the university as a site of critical inquiry in many countries is more brazen and arrogant than anything we have seen in the past and its presence is now felt in a diverse number of repressive regimes. For instance, the authoritarian nature of neoliberalism and its threat to higher education as a democratic public sphere was on full display recently when the multi-millionaire and Beijing-appointed leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, told pro-democracy protesters that “allowing his successors to be chosen in open elections based on who won the greatest number of votes was unacceptable in part because it risked giving poorer residents a dominant voice in politics.” (3)

Offering an unyielding defense for China’s authoritarian political system, he argued that any candidate that might succeed him “must be screened by a ‘broadly representative’ nominating committee, which would insulate Hong Kong’s next chief executive from popular pressure to create social provisions and allow the government to implement more business-friendly policies to address economic” issues. (4) This is not just an attack on political liberty but also an attack on dissent, critical education and public institutions that might exercise a democratizing influence on the nation. In this case the autonomy of institutions such as higher education are threatened as much by corporate interests as by the repressive policies and practices of the state.

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How Chris Christie Destroyed New Jersey’s Economy and Middle Class

Carl Gibson | Reader Supported News | October 28, 2014

ew Jersey governor Chris Christie is “tired of hearing about the minimum wage.” That wasn’t a campaign slogan for his re-election last year, but something he confided to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – the DC lobbying arm of multinational corporations. Oligarchs like the Chamber’s members love Christie so much, they already threw their weight behind him in the prelude to the 2012 elections, despite Christie turning down Mitt Romney’s offer to be his running mate. But Christie, the virulent class warrior who bestows bountiful gifts upon his rich benefactors and calls the Koch Brothers “great Americans” while simultaneously punishing the middle class, represents the new face of the GOP – hard-nosed, stubborn, and eager to blame drastic economic conditions on those preyed upon by his biggest campaign donors.

Pundits who have predicted the end of Christie’s presidential potential forget the short-term memory of American voters. Those pundits have forgotten that Americans re-elected George W. Bush to a second term despite Bush acknowledging Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and Bush’s Secretary of Defense acknowledging that his claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to use against the U.S. were completely unfounded. Christie is certainly a top contender for the 2016 nomination, and he’ll be running on his alleged economic acumen. However, electing Christie based on the success of his economic policy would be like electing George W. Bush on the success of the Iraq War. Despite over 70 percent of Americans supporting President Obama’s proposal to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, Christie steadfastly refuses to give the smallest wage increase to his constituents. Christie vetoed a very modest proposal to increase New Jersey’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 an hour and index it to inflation, over a three-year period. The MIT living wage calculator shows that for a single adult with a child living in New Jersey, a living wage – one that allows a family to maintain a modest lifestyle and pay their bills on time – would be $22.01 an hour. Christie claims increasing the minimum wage would kill jobs, but ignores economic data showing that every state that has increased the minimum wage is seeing a faster rate of job growth than states that haven’t, and lower unemployment rates as a result.

What Christie won’t do for minimum wage-earners, he’ll gladly do for multinational corporations. Since being inaugurated in 2010, Christie has given out $4 billion in corporate tax breaks in just 4 years. That’s more than all the previous governors of New Jersey combined have given out in New Jersey’s history. Yet for all of his corporate handouts, Christie has very little to show for it in terms of job growth. Under the Christie administration, job growth is the second worst in the nation, with only Alaska doing worse. Through Christie’s budget cuts, the public sector has been forced to endure salary freezes and mass layoffs, killing jobs as a result of more people spending less money.

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Authorities Think About Telling You If You’re Watchlisted from Warrantless Spying

 Cora Currier | The Intercept | October 1, 2014

David McNew

The Obama Administration might have to start letting people know when they’ve been flagged for terrorist connections based on information picked up from secret NSA spying programs.

That could potentially affect the tens of thousands of individuals on the government’s no fly list, as well as those people and groups that the Treasury Department designates as foreign terrorists, The New York Times reported yesterday.

According to the Times, administration lawyers are debating whether the NSA’s warrantless programs are covered by a provision in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that requires the government to disclose the use of electronic surveillance in any “proceeding” against someone.

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“Second Snowden” targeted in FBI raid