Scalia On Court Politics
By Stephen Macklin03/16/2005
How many lawyers does it take to govern a nation? It seems that recently policy decisions in this country are ultimately made by a mere handful of them. Having abandoned the notion of ruling on the law The Supreme Court has taken to setting policy. Political policy decisions on matters such as crime and punishment are handed down by five unelected and unaccountable justices.
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Scalia on Psychological Advocacy
By Dennis Fox03/16/2005
Dissenting from this month's Supreme Court decision ending the death penalty for juveniles who commit capital crimes before their 18th birthday, Antonin Scalia blasted not just the 5-4 Roper v. Simmons majority but the American Psychological Association. It is inconsistent, Scalia said, for the APA to argue today that 16- and 17-year olds are not yet capable of the kind of mature decision-making that would justify a death sentence when the APA claimed in 1990 that juveniles are mature enough to decide, without notifying their parents, whether to have an abortion.
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Bin Laden's address to Americans during election time
By Alexander Rai03/13/2005
On the eve of October 29 last year, as the mandate for Iraq hung in balance and between Senator Kerry’s promises of “killing terrorists” by “organizing summits” and President Bush’s reassurances of “hard work,” a new and unprecedented voice addressed the American people: one from America’s public enemy number one, his eminence, Mr. Osama Bin Laden.
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Social Security Disability Politics
By Dennis Fox03/02/2005
Although most public attention to the Social Security Administration now focuses on President Bush's plan to scare American workers into privatizing the retirement system, I was glad to see the Boston Globe examine the agency's disability program instead. The availability of benefits for sick and injured workers, with accompanying benefits for their minor children, is generally ignored by those who want to move their payroll deductions from the government into the stock market. It's easy for those who are young and healthy to overlook the possibility that they might, tomorrow, become too disabled to work.
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Ward Churchill, Scapegoat
By Dennis Fox03/02/2005
Ward Churchill, Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the latest target of right-wingers trying to force American universities to better serve conservative and corporate interests. Churchill's characteristically undiplomatic language in an essay he wrote shortly after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center makes it easy for his critics to win public support for clamping down not just on this professor's radical activism but on every other left-oriented academic. The supposed focus on Churchill himself -- his specific word choices, his academic credentials, his personal background -- masks the right's broader effort to rid higher education of anyone who rejects mainstream conventionalisms.
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