Virtual Issues

Losing just one vote from the Democrats, the Senate approved Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, 63-37, Thursday afternoon.

Despite Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D-Nebraska) vote against her nomination, Kagan picked up five Republican backers: Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe and Judd Gregg. South Carolina’s Graham was the only Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to support the nominee.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) said the Senate made the right decision.

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A rumored deal between cellphone service provider Verizon Wireless and Internet giant Google that would give preferential speeds to Google properties such as YouTube on mobile devices has net neutrality advocates on edge. Details of the agreement, as first reported by The New York Times, has thrown net neutrality advocates in a tailspin. By creating a two-tier Internet system, advocates say it not only exploits mobile users trapped in service agreements, but also works around years of wrangling over what constitutes a fair playing field on the Internet.

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Washington – The 14th Amendment is a mighty sword, and U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker used it Wednesday to flay and shred all the specious arguments — and I mean all of them — that are used to deny full marriage rights to gay and lesbian Americans. Bigotry has suffered a grievous blow.

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Conservatives and "pro-family" groups like the American Family Association (AFA) are already criticizing the historic ruling made Wednesday against California’s ban on gay marriage. Right wingers claim the ruling violates the US Constitution and criticized Chief Judge Vaughn R.

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There are cracks in the earth and holes in our hearts. The gusher in the Gulf has dramatized in gut-wrenching fashion a set of values and outcomes that comprise the underlying foundation of our lives. This is no "reality TV" episode, even though the already-diluted news coverage increasingly makes everything appear that way. No, this is "real reality" – an edgy, in-your-face, unexpurgated reminder of what we have relentlessly wrought on the planet and ourselves.

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While the devastating ecological impacts of BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are obvious, the less visible but also long-lasting psychological, community and personal impacts could be worse, according to social scientists, psychologists and psychiatrists.

"People are becoming more and more hopeless and feeling helpless," Dr. Arwen Podesta, a psychiatrist at Tulane University in New Orleans told Truthout. "They are feeling frantic and overwhelmed. This is worse than [Hurricane] Katrina.

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Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week. He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site. "Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

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On last night’s "Colbert Report," an amazing moment occurred when Stephen Colbert raised a major social issue that US mainstream media assiduously ignore: the huge US prison population. The issue quickly disappeared due to the apparent ignorance of Stephen’s guest: Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner, in charge of "Democracy, Human Rights and Labor."

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New York – It’s the inner sanctum of Swiss banking — the heavily-guarded nexus between numbered Swiss bank accounts and their owner’s good names — and it’s the rare American that is allowed entry.

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Lefebvre described the right to the city as “the summation of other crucial rights” including the “right not to be alienated from the spaces of every day life” or deprived from the city’s “social, economic, and political goods” (Mitchell & Villanueva, 667). The struggle for the right to the city seeks to increase the autonomy of those who are currently disempowered by a hierarchy of rights where “the right to private property and the profit rate trump any other conception of inalienable rights” (Harvey 2003, 940).

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