ANDREW COHEN , Contributing Editor - The Atlantic
Stephan: Once again we are confronted with the growing trend of dismissing the needs of the poor. It is one of America's shames that legal protections mean one thing for the affluent, and quite another for the poor. We have endless money for wars, but only a mingy amount to assure Constitutional guarantees of fairness.
Andrew Cohen is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, 60 Minutes' first-ever legal analyst, and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. He is also chief analyst for CBS Radio News and has won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal journalists.
Citing both Robert F. Kennedy and Clarence Earl Gideon, United States Attorney General Eric Holder candidly acknowledged Friday in a speech at the Justice Department that the nation’s judges, lawyers, and politicians have broadly failed to meet their constitutional obligation to provide America’s poorest citizens with competent legal representation in criminal cases.
Framing the issue as a ‘moral calling’ that has gone largely unanswered by the rich and powerful, Holder urged legal and political stakeholders in Washington and elsewhere to ‘stand up for’ basic ideals of justice by ‘guaranteeing that every person in this country can access quality legal representation any time they come before the criminal justice system.’
Holder’s remarks came as he and other legal and political dignitaries marked the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, decided March 18, 1963, in which the justices unanimously declared that no citizen could get a fair trial in our criminal justice system without access to a competent lawyer. From the speech:
In the decades since this remarkable case — and Gideon’s retrial, at which he was found not guilty — public defender systems have been established in some states and strengthened in others. Additional […]
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BRAD MOON, InvestorPlace Contributor - Investor Place
Stephan: Here is the latest on the 3-D trend. And, once again, technology has outstripped the structure of the law.
Remember what it was like when consumers could open Napster and then download any song they wanted
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JILLIAN RAYFIELD, Assistant News Editor - Salon
Stephan: Nobody wants to talk about it, but a key part of the thinking that holds the Theocratic Right together is its racism, as this report illustrates. It is racism that is behind the anti-abortion movement, and the contraception movement. It is racism that leads the Christian Right to stress that couples should have as many babies as possible.
A panel hosted by the Tea Party Patriots, intended to teach CPAC attendees how to fight back against charges that they are racist, devolved quickly into the crowd shouting down a liberal black woman who repeatedly tried to ask questions.
The panel was run by K. Carl Smith, of the Frederick Douglass Republicans, who mostly advised the predominantly white audience that if they’re ‘sick and tired of being called a racist and a sellout
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Stephan: This, as far as I am concerned, is what is wrong with Islamic societies -- Turkey excepted. This is why these nations produce virtually no art, no technological breakthroughs, few patents, few books, and little of lasting significance. Why they are so backward and mired in self-pity. If you keep 50 per cent of your players (the women) off the field, and it takes, as it does, 7 to 12 per cent of the other 50 per cent (the men) to maintain this structure of oppression, then such a country only has about 35 per cent of its brain power doing anything useful. It is very important to understand why these countries live in such squalor, and why little is likely to change in the near term future.
The 57th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), taking place from March 4 to 15 at UN headquarters, seeks to ratify a declaration euphemistically entitled ‘End Violence against Women’.
That title, however, is misleading and deceptive. The document includes articles that contradict established principles of Islam, undermine Islamic ethics and destroy the family, the basic building block of society, according to the Egyptian Constitution.
This declaration, if ratified, would lead to complete disintegration of society, and would certainly be the final step in the intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries, eliminating the moral specificity that helps preserve cohesion of Islamic societies.
A closer look at these articles reveals what decadence awaits our world, if we sign this document:
1. Granting girls full sexual freedom, as well as the freedom to decide their own gender and the gender of their partners (ie, choose to have normal or homo- sexual relationships), while raising the age of marriage.
2. Providing contraceptives for adolescent girls and training them to use those, while legalizing abortion to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, in the name of sexual and reproductive rights.
3. Granting equal rights to adulterous wives and illegitimate sons resulting from adulterous relationships.
4. Granting equal […]
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SAMI RAMADANI , - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is what George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condaleeza Rice created for the U.S. It is hard to imagine how a less informed, stupider foreign policy could have been devised. It represents ineptitude at an almost surreal level. Is it any wonder that the people of the Islamic world hate us? If Iraq were the U.S. how would you feel?
It has always been painful for me to write about Iraq and Baghdad, the land of my birth and the city of my childhood. They say that time is a great healer, but, along with most Iraqis, I feel the pain even more deeply today. But this time the tears for what has already happened are mixed with a crippling fear that worse is yet to come: an all-out civil war. Ten years on from the shock and awe of the 2003 Bush and Blair war – which followed 13 years of murderous sanctions, and 35 years of Saddamist dictatorship – my tormented land, once a cradle of civilisation, is staring into the abyss.
Wanton imperialist intervention and dictatorial rule have together been responsible for the deaths of more than a million people since 1991. And yet, according to both Tony Blair and the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the ‘price is worth it’. Blair, whom most Iraqis regard as a war criminal, is given VIP treatment by a culpable media. Iraqis listen in disbelief when he says: ‘I feel responsibility but no regret for removing Saddam Hussein.’ (As if Saddam and his henchmen were simply whisked away, leaving […]
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