Group items tagged

And who will bear the brunt of these cuts? America's children. Now, politicians - and especially, in my experience, conservative politicians - always claim to be deeply concerned about the nation's children. Back during the 2000 campaign, then-candidate George W. Bush, touting the "Texas miracle" of dramatically lower dropout rates, declared that he wanted to be the "education president." Today, advocates of big spending cuts often claim that their greatest concern is the burden of debt our children will face. In practice, however, when advocates of lower spending get a chance to put their ideas into practice, the burden always seems to fall disproportionately on those very children they claim to hold so dear. Consider, as a case in point, what's happening in Texas, which more and more seems to be where America's political future happens first.

Aman Ullah Baloch PBBA, Habib Jalib Advocate High Court, Senator Kamran Murtaza Advocate SC, Arbab Ghulam Ali ANP in fresh episode of Live with Talat and discusses current issue with Syed Talat Hussain.

In the midst of fast-moving events in Syria and in the shadows of tyranny, oppression, lethality and massacres practiced by the Syrian regime, the Nation of Islam has been stabbed once again. Another waterfall of Muslim blood has been shed without any humanity. These stabs have been hurting the Muslim nation often and raise many questions about our disbanding and enemy's plots and plans from all sides. In the past weeks, Muslim advocates have been exposed to a gruesome massacre after being attacked by a Buddhist group that killed many Muslims. The media have posted terrible images of the victims of this massacre. The Myanmar government turned a blind eye, and it seems that they agree with the criminal killers. Things did not stop at this massacre but transcended to burn homes and farms of a large number of Muslims and killed dozens by fire. All this happened with the help of police junta Buddhism. On July 10, 2012 a curfew was imposed on villages that was inhabited by the Muslim minority, then the Buddhist groups covered by the Myanmar government started a campaign of ethnic cleansing and religious preference that killed 100 Muslims and injured about 300 people and burned nearly a thousand homes. Also, in this awful campaign they have been targeting scientists, doctors and intellectuals. Away from these events and tension, the main thing that everyone knows is that the Muslims there have been suffering for decades from the oppression and persecution of Buddhists via systematic violations. The group of Buddhists are committed against the Muslims there at different intervals, and force displacement, removal of citizenship, and the sophistication in the torture and "ethnic cleansing." Unjust arrests and the demolition of mosques and Islamic schools have deprived Muslims from the lowest human rights.

This article is talking about how the non-violent activists in the Oakland Occupy movement should've been more active in the beginning and should be more active now, not simply tearing eachother down about thorwing a can at a poliveman who shoots people, but making an example of non-violent resistance (and since it's in an Anarchist paper, I hope non-violent revolution). "Those who would condemn the actions of activist's violent responses to police brutality must show by example what a powerful non-violent response would look like. We must be there, on the front line, willing to sit down and refuse to move when tear gas, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades are going off all around us and injuring us. That is when the courage of our conviction to non-violence is tested and proven. That is when we prove the power of non-violence to oppose injustice. Until we, the advocates of a non-violent response, can show the power of our convictions through our actions, we have no room to condemn violent protesters, especially when we do so while not also condemning the violent actions of the police in the same breath...."

With the legislative calendar starting to dwindle, lawmakers are paying more and more attention to the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of the year. Republicans across the board are advocating for the extension of all the cuts, and have explicitly said that extending the cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans (which would cost $678 billion) does not have to be paid for.

There's no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles. Yet paradoxically, Fein has been, and remains, one of the most eloquent and incisive political voices over the last decade. He was one of the earliest and most emphatic critics of Bush and Cheney's radical abuses of executive power. Two weeks after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005, that Bush had ordered the NSA to illegally eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by law, Fein used his column in the right-wing Washington Times to warn that "Mr. Bush has adamantly refused to acknowledge any constitutional limitations on his power to wage war indefinitely"; to scorn as "war powers nonsense" the theories assembled "to defend Mr.

An innovative grouping of conservation scientists and practitioners have come together to advocate a fundamental shift in the way we view biodiversity. In their paper, which was published today in the journal Science, they argue that unless people recognize the link between their consumption choices and biodiversity loss, the diversity of life on Earth will continue to decline.

Examining WikiLeaks with a transparency advocate and harsh critic of the whistle-blowing site

"The Electronic Privacy Information Center and consumer advocate Ralph Nader are urging President Obama to review the administration's plans to install whole body scanners at U.S. airports. In a joint letter, Marc Rotenberg, the president of EPIC, and Nader asked the president to suspend deployment of the devices until a "comprehensive evaluation" of the effectiveness of the technology and potential health hazards, is completed."

It could be argued that the costs to the United States of providing such services for the rest of the world are modest, but that is ultimately a judgment call. To be sure, the dollar costs will not bankrupt us as a nation, but Americans spend $2,700 per person on our military, while the average European spends less than $700. The bottom line is that Europeans have little incentive to spend more because they don't feel particularly threatened, and they aren't anxious to take on responsibilities that are ably handled by the United States. The advocates of hegemonic stability theory would declare that a feature, not a bug. Mission accomplished. And that might be true, if the greatest threat to global security were a resurgence of conflict in Europe, and if it is truly in the U.S. interest to forever have allies with few capabilities and many liabilities. But that seems extremely shortsighted. The sweeping political and economic integration in Europe has dramatically reduced the likelihood of another European war. In the meantime, the fact that we have many allies with little to offer by way of military assets, and even less political will to actually use them, is forcing the U.S. military to bear the disproportionate share of the burdens of policing the planet. And in the medium- to long-term, while I doubt that we will be facing "a militarily superior, post-Soviet Russia," allies with usable military power might ultimately serve a purpose if Moscow proves as aggressive (and capable) as the hawks claim.

Lauren Conrad returning to The Hills is a long shot at best. But that doesn't mean fans wouldn't love it, former bosses aren't advocating it and the show's producers aren't trying to figure out some plan for it.

A proposal to help Bank of America destroy the group and its advocates reveal a deeply lawless mindset

Alex Seitz-Wald of Think Progress rightly takes Sen. Rand Paul to task for going on Sean Hannity's radio program -- one week after commendably leading opposition to the Patriot Act on civil liberties grounds -- and advocating the arrest of people who "attend radical political speeches."  After claiming to be against racial and religious profiling, Paul said:  "But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that's really an offense that we should be going after -- they should be deported or put in prison."  Seitz-Wald correctly notes the obvious:  "Paul's suggestion that people be imprisoned or deported for merely attending a political speech would be a fairly egregious violation on the First Amendment, not to mention due process." 

When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake."  This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued -- regime change through the use of military force.  We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West.  That's not even a debatable proposition at this point. What I suppose is debatable, in the most generous sense of that term, is our motive in doing this.  Why -- at a time when American political leaders feel compelled to advocate politically radioactive budget cuts to reduce the deficit and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war -- would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war?  Why is President Obama willing to endure self-evidently valid accusations -- even from his own Party -- that he's fighting an illegal war by brazenly flouting the requirements for Congressional approval?  Why would Defense Secretary Gates risk fissures by so angrily and publicly chiding NATO allies for failing to build more Freedom Bombs to devote to the war?  And why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?

That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly.  When an airplane was flown into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, it was immediately proclaimed to be Terrorism, until it was revealed that the attacker was a white, non-Muslim, American anti-tax advocate with a series of domestic political grievances.  The U.S. and its allies can, by definition, never commit Terrorism even when it is beyond question that the purpose of their violence is to terrorize civilian populations into submission.  Conversely, Muslims who attack purely military targets  -- even if the target is an invading army in their own countries -- are, by definition, Terrorists.  That is why, as NYU's Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language.  Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.

When President Obama took office, federal employees who had exposed wrongdoing or were considering doing so had reason for hope. Eight years of the Bush administration's relentless retaliation against whistle-blowers had ended, and Obama spoke encouragingly of transparency and due process. Since then, the administration has taken some positive steps for whistle-blowers, most notably in (unsuccessfully) advocating legislation to protect them and in loosening the government's grip on public information. However, its treatment of national-security and intelligence whistle-blowers - arguably the ones we need most - has been brutal. It has pursued multiple prosecutions of such whistle-blowers on espionage charges.

Open-source governance is a political philosophy which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open-source and open-content movements to democratic principles in order to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with a wiki document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry. The concept behind democracy, that the collective wisdom of the people as a whole is a benefit to the decision-making process, is applied to policy development directly

Senator Jhangir Badar Sec. Gen. PPP, Khuram Dastagir Khan PML-N, Hamid NAsir PML-Q, Ahmed Raza Kasuri Advocate SC, Raja Riaz Ahmed Sen. Provincial Min. Punjab, in Special episode of Live with Talat Discusses Currant Issue with Syed Talat Hussain and Khaild Jamil.

Advocate Ahmer Bilal Sufi Expert International Law, Qamir ur Zaman Kaira, Shahzad Roy Singer, in Fresh episode of Capital Talk and discusses with Hamid Mir.