Bioethics Commission Failed Obama’s Mandate in New Report

by Cheryl Welsh, January 2012 President Obama directed his Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (Commission) to review human subject protections to “determine if Federal regulations and international standards adequately guard the health and well-being of participants in scientific studies supported by the Federal Government.” Obama ordered the report last year in response [...]

Schools more and more resemble maximum security prisons: schools without playgrounds, children without recess, and kids without play

  Picture of Thieves in Dante’s Hell   A new report from the American Academyof Pediatrics (AAP) indicates that children in poor urban neighborhoods need more chances for old-fashioned playtime in their daily lives.   A number of experts in the report have raised concerns that in the current climate of treating youth not as if [...]

Trampling Out The Vintage

By Saul Landau Frank Bardacke has written the comprehensive history of the United Farm Workers, a definitive biography of Cesar Chavez and a magnificent guide to the politics and sociology of the 1960s-80s. In the mid 1960s a nascent union of field workers transformed themselves into moral guideposts for middle class liberals as well as [...]

Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death: 2012 NDAA is “law”

video at source. The following “artistic liberty” is from Patrick Henry’s 1775 speech  after ten years of his government’s violations of  constitutional rights. The speech followed the first government attempts to use a standing army to disarm Americans. A standing army was in explicit violation of the English Bill of Rights. NDAA 2012 (National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012) [...]

Chief Justice Ducks Judicial Ethics Scandals In Annual Report

Federal courts function with integrity, according to a self-serving annual report on the judiciary that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued over the weekend. But he recommended nothing more for reform than current procedures for addressing increasing calls for recusal or even impeachment because of conflict issues.