It’s that month again, and when the New York skies are clear, as they have been and were then, you gaze at the proud prow of Manhattan and still feel the absence, and perhaps you see once more those papers from the crumpled towers fluttering out across the East River to strange landings in Brooklyn.
...
That was a breaking point, dividing our lives into before and after, and the world into pre- and post-, and we’ve all had to succumb to the awful 9/11 shorthand that compresses the loss of almost 3,000 lives into a couple of digits, and the wider loss of America-as-sanctuary into a date.
...
The United States was not previously a homeland, it was just our land, and that unhappy neologism with its Orwellian echoes, its sense of exclusion rather than inclusion, its faint fatherland-like echoes, seems to capture the closing and the menace and the terror-terror refrain with which we have all learned to live.

That refrain, for Americans, but not only them, has a pursed-lipped face called Bush-Cheney, and the braggadocio-smirk of the bring-it-on duo has come to form yet another shorthand for a certain grimness, one as relentless as the U.S. national debt clock.

a nice essay
you can feel the humanity

The Breaking Point - New York Times

Pro-anorexia websites offering tips on extreme dieting are nothing new, but their growth on social networking sites is a disturbing new twist and brings them within reach of a wider audience.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Seeking 'thinspiration'

Representatives of Israel's 250,000 Holocaust survivors are to demand more state support in a protest outside Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's house.

maybe the survivors should get pensions from the UN. They were victims of crimes against humanity so maybe humanity should stand up and support the survivors.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Israel faces Holocaust protests

For tens of thousands of members of the National Guard and reserves who are called up to serve in Iraq, returning home safely may be the beginning -- not the end -- of their worst nightmare. Reservists lucky enough to make it home often find their civilian jobs gone and face unsympathetic employers and a government that has restricted access to civilian job-loss reports rather than prosecuting offending employers.

The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) protects members of the guard and reserves from job loss, demotion, loss of seniority and loss of benefits when they are called to active duty.

The act is supposed to protect reservists' civilian jobs for up to five years of military service. But the government has made it difficult for veterans to enforce their legal rights. Service members who return to find their civilian jobs gone also find that the burden is on them to prove that their jobs were taken away as a result of their military service and that there is no other reason that they could have been fired.

This onerous burden of proof discourages many from filing formal complaints.

Amy R. Gershkoff - Saving Soldiers' Jobs - washingtonpost.com

After a hearing lasting more than 40 days, Pakistan's Supreme Court on July 20th overturned the government's suspension of the court's chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

The court's ruling means that Mr Chaudhry is to be reinstated.

The decision is a major blow to General Pervez Musharraf, the president, and a tactical victory for the secular political parties, who have rallied behind the judiciary in protest at what they regard as an attempt to undermine judicial independence.

The ruling is also momentous because the Pakistani judiciary in the past has always been reluctant to rule against the military or a military-led government.

However, while the decision removes one source of political tension, it will do little to stop the terrorist violence now engulfing the country.

Justice wins

In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.

We lose yet another privacy right... they're falling like flies...

SAN FRANCISCO / Judges OK warrantless monitoring of Web use / Privacy rules don't apply to Internet messages, court says

“The Bush administration... has repeatedly supported a federal sentencing system that is distinctly disrespectful of the very arguments that Bush has put forward in cutting Libby a break,” said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University who writes the blog Sentencing Law and Policy.

The Libby clemency will be the basis for many legal arguments, said Susan James, an Alabama lawyer... “What you’re going to see is people like me quoting President Bush in every pleading that comes across every federal judge’s desk.”

Similarly, in a case decided two weeks ago by the United States Supreme Court and widely discussed by legal specialists in light of the Libby case, the Justice Department persuaded the court to affirm the 33-month sentence of a defendant whose case closely resembled that against Mr. Libby.

Read the article. The last line in it is, I think, the most important.

Whether the pardon was right or wrong is irrelevent. Whether or not the prosecution was politically motivated is irrelevent. Whether or not Libby is truely guilty is irrelevent. Whats important is that this decision runs against the grain of everything the Republican party claims to stand for.

Bush Rationale on Libby Stirs Legal Debate - New York Times

skullaria wrote

I don't think it is race related - I think it is class related. It is the POOR that don't matter.

Our prison rate is crazy. So much is crazy.

However, it makes sense to me that more blacks get caught in the class war, as minorities have less power and money to fight with.

i'm inclined to agree

RE: When Is Enough Enough? - New York Times

There comes a time when people are supposed to get angry. The rights and interests of black people in the U.S. have been under assault for the longest time, and in the absence of an effective counterforce, that assault has only grown more brutal.

Have you looked at the public schools lately? Have you looked at the prisons? Have you looked at the legions of unemployed blacks roaming the neighborhoods of big cities across the country? These jobless African-Americans, so many of them men, are so marginal in the view of the wider society, so insignificant, so invisible, they aren’t even counted in the government’s official jobless statistics.

And now this new majority on the Supreme Court seems committed to a legal trajectory that would hurl blacks back to the bad old days of the Jim Crow era.
...
If black people could find a way to come together in sky-high turnouts on Election Day, if they showed up at polling booths in numbers close to the maximum possible turnout, if they could set the example for all other Americans about the importance of exercising the franchise, the politicians would not dare to ignore their concerns.

For black people, especially, the current composition of the Supreme Court should be the ultimate lesson in the importance of voting in a presidential election. No branch of the government has been more crucial than the judiciary in securing the rights and improving the lives of blacks over the past five or six decades.

When Is Enough Enough? - New York Times

The Supreme Court ruled 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education is inherently unequal, and it ordered the nation’s schools to integrate. Yesterday, the court switched sides and told two cities that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together. It was a sad day for the court and for the ideal of racial equality.

Resegregation Now - New York Times