Caveat Emptor

New York Post -- By Peter Schweizer
Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive Marc Rich continues to pay big

Fifteen years ago this month, on Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive Marc Rich. It would become perhaps the most condemned official act of Clinton’s political career. A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of presidential power.” The usually Clinton-friendly New Republic noted it “is often mentioned as Exhibit A of Clintonian sliminess.”

“Rich’s business partners, lawyers, advisers and friends have showered millions of dollars on the Clintons in the decade and a half following the scandal.”

International NYT -- David Segal
What Donald Trump’s Plaza Deal Reveals About His White House Bid

“He has the ability to imagine what the other party wants him to be and then be that person,” said Michael D’Antonio, author of “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success.” “He presents the Trump that will work in the moment.”

Martin Luther King and our Primary Moral Concept of Equality

Breitbart.com -- by JARRETT STEPMAN
MLK Day:
The Enduring Power of the Declaration and American Ideas

King explained how equality before the law that Lincoln and the United States stood for had not been accomplished, that a century after the Emancipation Proclamation it was time to fulfill the promise of liberty and equal rights for all Americans.

“In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” King said. “…I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

By framing his argument in the natural rights tradition of the United States—and placing it within the context of the long history of American ideas—King was able to reach many who might not be initially amenable to his views. In many ways this was a rebuke to the idea that the American republic was originally founded on racist premises and prejudice.

But as King, Lincoln, and Jaffa argued, the Declaration’s statement that “all men are created equal” really did mean all men regardless of race—that racial equality before the law was a continuity with the American philosophical tradition, not a break from it.

The Far Center -- James Rutherford
Equality as an Affirmation of our Common Humanity

Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much. Public opinion, or any subject, always has a “central idea, from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That “central idea” in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, “the equality of men.
                                                                      — Abraham Lincoln 1856

See Also

• United States Constitutional Democracy and American Exceptionalism
• The Moral Foundations of United States Constitutional Democracy:
  An Analytical and Historical Inquiry into the Primary Moral Concept of Equality

The Death Penalty End Game

International New York Times -- Editorial Board

Now there may be an answer in the case of Shonda Walter, a 36-year-old black woman on Pennsylvania’s death row. On Friday, the Supreme Court met to discuss whether to hear a petition from Ms. Walter, who is asking the justices to rule that in all cases, including hers, the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

In the past 14 years alone, the Supreme Court has barred the execution of several categories of people: minors, the intellectually disabled, and those convicted of a crime other than murder. In that last case, decided in 2008, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court, “When the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the constitutional commitment to decency and restraint.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, in a long dissent from a 5-to-4 ruling that allowed Oklahoma to proceed with its inhumane lethal-injection drug protocol, suggested he would be open to a case challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty itself.

Another Blow against the Death Penalty

Supreme Court deals blow to Florida's death sentencing system
Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

“The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Florida's system of letting judges, not juries, decide whether convicted criminals deserve the death penalty.”

“In Florida, judges can impose the death penalty even if the jury has not ruled unanimously or agreed on any aggravating circumstance. If the jury has issued a recommendation, the judge doesn't have to follow it. No other state gives judges such discretion.”

Courts, States put Death Penalty on Life Support
Richard Wolf and Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

"The imposition and implementation of the death penalty seems capricious, random, indeed arbitrary,'' Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said in dissenting from the court's June decision allowing the continued use of a problematic sedative for lethal injections. "From a defendant's perspective, to receive that sentence, and certainly to find it implemented, is the equivalent of being struck by lightning."

An Epidemic of National Drug Overdose Deaths

WP -- Fareed Zakaria
America’s self-destructive whites

“The main causes of death are as striking as the fact itself: suicide, alcoholism, and overdoses of prescription and illegal drugs. “People seem to be killing themselves, slowly or quickly,” Deaton told me. These circumstances are usually caused by stress, depression and despair.”

Drugabuse.gov
National Overdose Death Rates

Goodbye to 2015, a year of absurdity and overreach

WP -- George Will
Goodbye to 2015, a year of absurdity and overreach

“The American Council of Trustees and Alumni reported that 48 of the top 52 liberal arts colleges and universities do not require English majors to take a Shakespeare course.”

“A young girl was sent home with a censorious note from her school because her Wonder Woman lunchbox violated the school ban on depictions of “violent characters.” An Oregon eighth-grader, whose brother served in Iraq, was suspended for wearing a T-shirt that depicted an empty pair of boots representing soldiers killed in action. The school said the shirt was “not appropriate.” A Tennessee boy was threatened with suspension from elementary school because he came to school with a military-style haircut like that of his stepbrother, a soldier. A government arbitrator prevented the firing of a New Jersey elementary school teacher who was late to school 111 times in two years.”

A Series of Three Articles on US Foreign Policy Related to the Sunni

Romancing the Sunni: A US policy tragedy in three acts; Act I
Asian Times -- BY ANGELO CODEVILLA on DECEMBER 21, 2015

“To understand why hopes for help from the Sunni side are forlorn, we must be clear that jihadism in general and Daesh in particular are logical outgrowths of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s (and the Gulf monarchies’) official religion, about how they fit in the broader conflict between Sunni and Shia, as well as about how the US occupation of Iraq exposed America to the vagaries of intra-Muslim conflicts.”

Romancing the Sunni: A US policy tragedy in three acts; Act II
Asian Times -- BY ANGELO CODEVILLA on DECEMBER 23, 2015

“Daesh/ISIS attracts and inspires by combining orthodox Sunni Islam with very spectacular brutality. Inflicting pain, humiliation and death on captives or vengeance on presumed enemies has characterized some cultures. In all cultures throughout the ages, some individuals have relished these practices. Embedding brutality in ritual enhances its power to attract practitioners and to bind them to the group. Daesh/ISIS draws and inspires by dispensing the right and duty to engage in it.”

“It does so in the name of Allah with the prophet Muhammad’s own words. The methods– knives for beheadings, formulae for humiliating victims, etc. — it prescribes minutely by Sunni Islam’s authoritative Hadith. In contrast to the Nazi authorities who used to tell the Holocaust’s murderers that theirs was a somber though noble task, the Hadith spells out that those who kill and torture in Allah’s name should do so joyfully, with mirth, and that they should take pleasure in the fruits of their victories including the use of slaves, especially sex slaves.”

Romancing the Sunni: A US policy tragedy in three acts; Act III
Asian Times -- BY ANGELO CODEVILLA on DECEMBER 28, 2015

On Jan. 1, 2015, Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al Sisi told Sunni Islam’s leading scholars gathered at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, its leading temple of knowledge, that they had been leading Islam on a course disastrous for itself and leading to war with the rest of the world.

He said : “ You, imams, are responsible before Allah … that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years … is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world … Is it possible that 1.6 billion [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution.”

That is reality. It is also reality that no such revolution is in the works, in part because the West continues to deal with the Sunni world by trying to appease it, romance it, seduce it.

Thomas Jefferson and Religious Freedom

Virginia Historical Society
Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

II. Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities. The third paragraph reflects Jefferson's belief in the people's right, through their elected assemblies, to change any law. Here, Jefferson states that this statute is not irrevocable because no law is (not even the Constitution). Future assemblies that choose to repeal or circumscribe the act do so at their own peril, because this is "an infringement of natural right." Thus, Jefferson articulates his philosophy of both natural right and the sovereignty of the people.

Wikipedia
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.[4]

Christian Post
USCIRF Report Shows Islamic Countries Are Worst Violators of Religious Freedom; 12 Muslim-Majority Nations Top the List

The annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom shows that 12 of the 17 nations with the worst record of religious freedom are Islamic or Muslim-majority countries.

The trend of Islamic and communist persecution of religious denominations, particularly Christian minorities, continues, but the intensity of attacks on Christians and others has increased.

See Also

• ISIS and Religious Persecution
• United States Constitutional Democracy and American Exceptionalism
• The Evil That Cannot Be Left Unanswered

The Evil That Cannot Be Left Unanswered

International New York Times -- Roger Cohen
The Evil That Cannot Be Left Unanswered

“Across the wide area of Syria and Iraq that it controls, the Islamic State enacts its nihilistic death cult drawn from a medievalist reading of the Koran. They slit throats at public executions, butcher “infidel”’ communities like the Yazidis en masse and turn women and children into sex slaves as they build a self-styled caliphate based on oil revenue, absolutist zealotry and digital slickness.”

At the Yazidi refugee camp, Anter Halef said to me, “We no longer have a life in this world. It’s empty.” He was broken, but at least, unlike his children, he had lived his life. “ISIS has no religion,” he went on. “No sane man would slaughter a child. In one night, they killed 1,800 people.”

For evil, unmet, propagates. To allow Islamic State to consolidate its hold over territory and minds over the coming year is to invite, or at least to accept, an inevitable replay of the Paris or the San Barnardino slaughters. It is to accept that the Syrian debacle will worsen for another year. And that, in turn, will further exacerbate the anxiety and fears on which nationalist, often Islamophobic politicians in Europe and the United States thrive.

Follow the Money

WSJ -- Kimberley A. Strassel
Justice’s Liberal Slush Fund
Legal settlements are being used to funnel millions to left-wing activists like La Raza.

This scandal comes courtesy of the Justice Department, which for 16 months has engaged in a scheme to undermine Congress’s spending authority by independently transferring dollars to President Obama’s political allies. The department is in the process of funneling more than half-a-billion dollars to liberal activist groups, at least some of which will actively support Democrats in the coming election.

It works likes this: The Justice Department prosecutes cases against supposed corporate bad actors. Those companies agree to settlements that include financial penalties. Then Justice mandates that at least some of that penalty money be paid in the form of “donations” to nonprofits that supposedly aid consumers and bolster neighborhoods.

ISIS and Religious Persecution

RealClearPolitics -- Michael Novak
The Tragedy of Christian Persecution

“If you are going to read only one book on the most massive violations of religious liberty -- happening today, even as you read this -- or you feel it's your duty to read only one thing in solidarity with this immense suffering, Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy by George J. Marlin is the one to keep at hand.”

“The chairman of Aid to the Church in Need covers eight nations of the Middle East, from Turkey to the Sudan, in some painful detail. Behind this detail, lie many hundred thousands of Christian families faced with instant death (or sexual enslavement) or two other choices (1) renounce their hard-won historical faith and submit to the authority of Allah, or (2) enter intodhimmitude, that half-life of paying fines for just being allowed to live and of keeping one's faith completely private, invisible and silent.”

“Then, summarizing the findings of the Muslim director of Yafa Center for Study and Research, Nasry lists five aims of terror in Islam. In cruelly brief form they are: (1) to punish infidels for unbelief (2) to frighten infidels into keeping their treaties with believers (3) to be a definitive tool of divine might. Q8:12 "I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them." (4) to cut as a two-edged sword: striking fear into infidels, and protecting believers from their evils and (5) to put an end to oppression, tumult, and division. Fr. Nasry applauds those who try to bring Islam "up-to-date, but regrets that they have so far been very broadly rejected.”

See also:

• Religious Persecution of Christians and the Silence of Obama
• What ISIS Really Wants
• Foreign Policy -- Debate -- Can the wave of violence sweeping the Islamic world be traced back to the religion's core teachings? An FP debate about the roots of extremism.
  
  • Islam Is a Religion of Violence -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  • Islam Is a Religion of Peace -- Manal Omar

Another result of the corruption in the Chicago Democratic political machine

The Corrupt System That Killed Laquan McDonald
The Atlantic -- Conor Friedersdorf

In short, Chicago does an atrocious job of identifying and disciplining bad cops. And this failure appears to have directly contributed to the wrongful death of McDonald—Van Dyke had 18 civil complaints filed against him, but had never been disciplined. “The Independent Police Review Authority, the civilian board that handles the most serious cases, doesn't take into account previous complaints against the same officer when investigating a new one,” according to a Tuesday editorial in the Chicago Tribune. “11 officers racked up a combined 253 complaints that resulted in a single five-day suspension. Come on. What does it take to flag a problem cop?”

If police shooting video had been released sooner, would Emanuel be mayor?
Chicago Tribune -- John Kass

Would Mayor Rahm Emanuel have been re-elected if voters had seen the video of Laquan McDonald's execution?

No.

Rahm would have lost the election. Why? Because he would have lost Chicago's black vote.

"No," said the alderman, meaning no, Rahm would not have won the election. "But you already knew that. Why are you asking us?"

American Universities Begin to Implode

American Universities Begin to Implode
Real Clear Politics -- Dennis Prager

“For over half a century, American universities, with few exceptions, have ceased teaching and begun indoctrinating. In the last few weeks, this downhill spiral has accelerated. The university is now a caricature of an educational institution. It is difficult to come up with an idea or policy that is more absurd than the ideas and policies that now dominate American campuses.”

“The University of California, once an elite public institution, now circulates a list of "microaggressions" that students and faculty must be careful to avoid lest they engage in racism and bigotry. Some examples: "There is only one race, the human race." You read that right. The denial of the significance of race in favor of the primacy of the individual and the affirmation of the equality of all human beings -- one of the noblest achievements of liberal Western society -- is now officially listed by the University of California as a racist statement. It is a pure expression of moral inversion.”

America’s higher education brought low -- WP - George Will

“People who are imprecisely called educators have taught, by their negative examples, what intelligence is not.”

The Yale Problem Begins in High School
HeterodoxAcademy -- Jonathan Haidt

“After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.”

Kunduz Hospital Tragedy

Not just a tragedy but also a lost opportunity to declare and covey our values

ABC News -- LUIS MARTINEZ -- 'Human Error' Cited in Mistaken US Airstrike on Kunduz Hospital

The accidental bombing of the Doctors without Borders hospital in Northern Afghanistan was a tragedy. This is especially so because Doctors without Borders represents in practice the primary moral concept of our government of equality understood as a respect for human dignity and our common humanity.

President Obama says that we have to fight radical terrorists with better ideas and values. Our government, the academics, the media, and even those running the presidential primaries, however, have focussed almost entirely on freedom rather than equality understood as a respect for an inherent personal dignity and our common humanity. What a lost opportunity to describe and garner global support for Doctors without Borders and to convey our primary value of equality.

My work The Moral Foundations of United States Constitutional Democracy: An Analytical and Historical Inquiry into the Primary Moral Concept of Equality can be freely accessed at www.moralfoundations.com See Also the my blogs on the following:

• Equality as an Affirmation of our Common Humanity
• What Medical Ethics has to offer the Larger Fields of Moral and Political Philosophy

George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation

George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation

"NOW THEREFORE, I do recommend and assign THURSDAY, the TWENTY-SIXTH DAY of NOVEMBER next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be..."

The Gene Hackers

The Gene Hackers
A powerful new technology enables us to manipulate our DNA more easily than ever before.
The New Yorker -- MICHAEL SPECTER -- Annals of Science --NOVEMBER 16, 2015 ISSUE

A technical but very informative article on the research in genetics.

It didn’t take Zhang or other scientists long to realize that, if nature could turn these molecules into the genetic equivalent of a global positioning system, so could we. Researchers soon learned how to create synthetic versions of the RNA guides and program them to deliver their cargo to virtually any cell. Once the enzyme locks onto the matching DNA sequence, it can cut and paste nucleotides with the precision we have come to expect from the search-and-replace function of a word processor. “This was a finding of mind-boggling importance,” Zhang told me. “And it set off a cascade of experiments that have transformed genetic research.”

With CRISPR, scientists can change, delete, and replace genes in any animal, including us.

There Should be Zero Tolerance for Heroin in Law Enforcement

Cleveland.com -- Jeremy Pelzer
Ohio's heroin epidemic gets national exposure in new '60 Minutes' segment

“A record 2,482 Ohioans died of drug-related deaths in 2014, according to preliminary statistics from the Ohio Department of Health. About half of those deaths – 1,177 – involved heroin, which many addicts have turned to as a cheaper and more available alternative to prescription pain pills.”

When I was an orthopedic resident in New York City from 1969 until 1973 there was a heroin epidemic. The police station in the South Bronx was called “Fort Apache” because it was surround by crime and and communal decay. It was the subject of the movie Fort Apache: the Bronx. Ten years later President Carter visited this area which had burned out and been abandoned and the police station at that time was known as “the little house on the prairie.” A study during that time showed that a mainline heroin addict committed 250 felonies a year to support such their drug habit. Heroin addicts discard their needles and make parks and public green spaces for children unsafe. There were 1,177 heroin related deaths in just Ohio in 2014. There is a very clear health hazard with the risk of AIDS and hepatitis. The emergency rooms are now commonly treating infections and abscesses from heroin injections. There should be zero tolerance for for heroin in law enforcement for a heroin epidemic will destroy individual lives and and it has the potential to destroy a community.

Opinions Gradually Changing in Ohio on the Death Penalty

Columbus Dispatch
Worth the trouble?
Problems surrounding the death penalty show no sign of abating

"But how about the argument that the death penalty is just too difficult to impose and trying to make it work uses up too much time, energy and money to be worthwhile?"

Death Penalty Information Center
Florida Acquits Death Row Inmate

“On October 12, 2015, the Circuit Court for Pascal County, Florida, entered a judgment of acquittal and the Florida Department of Corrections released Derral Hodgkins from custody after the Florida Supreme Court denied the prosecution's motion to reconsider its June 18, 2015 decision acquitting Hodges of all charges in the stabbing death of his former girlfriend.”

Sen. Ted Cruz is Far from the Center

Politico -- By Burgess Everett
How McConnell outfoxed Ted Cruz
Cruz can't get the best of the GOP stalwart.

“The breaking point came in July, when Cruz called McConnell a liar for holding a vote on the Export-Import Bank, which many conservatives vehemently oppose.

Even then, McConnell bit his tongue, quietly urging senators not to take the floor in his defense, wary of giving Cruz a bigger platform for his GOP primary run.”

Real Clear Politics -- By Mark Salter
What Ted Cruz Really Stands For

“Then again, I can’t recall any senator who was as nearly universally loathed by his colleagues as Cruz. There have been others who weren’t likeable. There were plenty who were self-interested and who preened and blustered as often as Cruz does—and who routinely elicited senatorial smirks and rolled eyes. There have been senators who frequently forced their colleagues to cast difficult and unpopular votes. And, of course, there is a long list of senators who ran for president and treated the Senate floor as a campaign stop. (And for some of them it worked). But no senator in my memory did all that with such abandon and was disliked with as much intensity as is Ted Cruz.”

National Review -- ELIANA JOHNSON
When Cruz Makes His Move, Watch Out

“Cruz has proved to be an ambitious and serious campaigner, devoted to doing the hard and unglamorous work required of presidential candidates.”

An Interesting Juxtaposition

States Scramble for Drugs Used in Executions, Causing Delays
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

“death-penalty states are finding it harder to carry out executions as they struggle to obtain and properly use limited supplies of ever-changing combinations of suitable drugs.”

California governor signs bill legalizing physician-assisted suicide SACRAMENTO, CALIF. | BY SHARON BERNSTEIN

"There is a deadly mix when you combine our broken healthcare system with assisted suicide, which immediately becomes the cheapest treatment," said Marilyn Golden, a senior policy analyst at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund in Berkeley. "The so-called protections written into the bill really amount to very little."

Capital Punishment's Fatal flaws

Aljazeera America -- Lauren Carasik
Glossip case highlights capotal punishment's fatal flaws

In denying his request for a reprieve on Sept. 28, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals was deeply divided. Three judges held that new evidence merely expanded on previous theories and did not warrant overriding the principle of final judgment. The panel’s remaining two judges supported a stay of execution and a hearing on Glossip’s innocence, with one arguing the state would not be harmed by a delay and that it had “no interest in executing an actually innocent man” and the other lamenting that his “trial was deeply flawed.” As his defense attorney Don Knight said, “We should all be deeply concerned about an execution under such circumstances.”

“Glossip’s conviction rested almost entirely on the testimony of Justin Sneed, a 19-year-old drug addict who worked at a hotel owned by Barry Van Treese, in exchange for room and board. Sneed confessed to murdering Van Treese but avoided the death penalty by implicating Glossip, a manager at the hotel, as the crime’s mastermind. Glossip was first convicted and sentenced to death in 1998, but the verdict was overturned on appeal in 2001 because he received ineffective assistance of counsel, including his attorney’s failure to show the jury the tape of Sneed’s interrogation, which would have provided ample fodder to impeach his credibility — an obvious blunder. Glossip was found guilty at a second trial in 2004 and sentenced to death again after his lawyers inexplicably failed to present the evidence whose egregious omission justified overturning his previous conviction.

A Climate of Blaming America First does not Provide a better Global Vision

The Orange County Register -- Joel Kotkin
Becoming America the not-so-beautiful

“Virtually all the leading reformers in our history – Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, the Roosevelts and Martin Luther King – couched their proposals in terms of fulfilling American ideals. Throw out the ideals, and those who originally formed them, and we lose the precious ability to meld our traditions with change. We are left simply with a postmodernist battle of interest groups, with no unifying or moderating principle.”

The Los Angeles Times -- Joseph J Ellis
Op-Ed -- The Founding Fathers: Demigods or scoundrels?

“In the case of the founders, such disavowals also provide therapeutic opportunities to transform U.S. history into a morality play with a ready-made cast of villainous dead white males, thereby obviating the need to encounter history's ironies and paradoxes or to comprehend its intractable tragedies.”

International New York Times -- GARDINER HARRIS and ERIC SCHMITT
Obama’s Call at U.N. to Fight ISIS With Ideas Is Largely Seen as Futile

“This means defeating their ideology,” he said. “Ideologies are not defeated with guns. They are defeated by better ideas — a more attractive and compelling vision.”

Equality as an Affirmation of our Common Humanity
James Rutherford -- The Far Center Blog

“We are missing a defining opportunity in the history of the moral and political philosophy of the liberal tradition; first, by not defining our primary moral value as equality, understood as a respect for the dignity and worth of our common humanity; and second, by not defining our government as a constitutional democracy, which is the only way to convey both the substantive and the procedural concepts of equality that it incorporates.”

Widespread Corporate Corruption is Just the Cost of Doing Business

If we are not going to bring criminal charges in these types of cases then personal fines or rescinding bonuses should maybe be part of these settlements.

Huffington Post -- Steven Brill
America’s Most Admired Lawbreaker

“It’s their cost of doing business,” the analyst added, perhaps unintentionally echoing the view of one senior J&J lawyer who told me that the cases against his company are the unavoidable price of dealing with a litigation system easily abused by those targeting big corporations.

“True, eight of the other nine largest pharmaceutical companies in the world have settled federal claims over the last decade related to allegations similar to what Johnson & Johnson was accused of in selling Risperdal”

Houston Chronicle -- Tom Hays and Tom Krisher, Associated Press GM will pay $900 million over ignition switch scandal

“The twin agreements bring to more than $5.3 billion the amount GM has spent on a problem authorities say could have been handled for less than a dollar per car. Those expenses include fines, compensation for victims and the recall of millions of vehicles.”

The Republican Primary Rules May Favor Donald Trump

International New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JONATHAN MARTIN

Party Rules to Streamline Race May Backfire for G.O.P

“If Mr. Trump draws one-third of the Republican primary vote, as recent polls suggest he will, that could be enough to win in a crowded field. After March 15, he could begin amassing all the delegates in a given state even if he carried it with only a third of the vote. And the later it gets, the harder it becomes for a lead in delegates to be overcome, with fewer state contests remaining in which trailing candidates can attempt comebacks.”