Link dump

[tangaroa]

• Wikileaks organizers report being followed by U.S. State Department officials, with one Wikileaks organizer "detained for 22 hours".
• In the U.S., Democrats have been the target of numerous death threats and acts of vandalism since passing a health insurance reform act.
• The Texas Board of Education revised its list of Enlightenment philosophers who influenced the revolutions after 1750 to remove Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, and replace him with theologists John Calvin and St. Thomas Aquinas.
• Steven Emerson reports that a U.S. House of Representatives session on "Working with Communities to Disrupt Terror Plots" is infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization.
• Venezuelan politician Oswaldo Alvarez Paz has been jailed for alleging that the government allows drug trafficing to take place in the country. Also, Venezuela arrested Globovision chief officer Guilliermo Zuloaga who is described as "the last opposition television owner" in Venezuela.
• Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the Armenians of commiting genocide upon the Turkish population of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and 1895. Every history I've read said it went the other way around.
• An Ecuador court sentenced El Universo columnist Emilio Palacio to three years of prison for insulting National Finance Corporation chief Camilo Saman.
• Fox News host Glenn Beck told viewers to boycott any church that practices Christianity.
• The New Yorker profiles U.S. Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, the centrist Republican who happens to be the least conservative member of the court.
• The U.S. supermarket tabloid New York Post claims that a 6-year-old returning from an Islamic school in Ireland learned that all Christians are going to hell and how to fire a gun and build pipe bombs to send them there.
• The Guardian's online censorship of pro-Israel comments, anti-terrorist comments, and historically accurate comments reached ridiculous levels leading to the transfer of executive comment editor Georgina Henry. Multiple problems here are that it lasted this long, it reached this extreme, and it is still ongoing.
• Cable News Network is promoting the racist myth of the all-powerful Jew Lobby.
• Saudi Arabia sentenced a Lebanese television psychic to death for sorcery after he entered the country to attend the Haj.
• A Pakistani Christian man was set on fire and his wife was raped by the police because he refused to convert to Islam.
• A short summary of the U.S. health care debate.
• The Attorneys General of the states of Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, and Washington have sued the U.S. government in an attempt to void sections of the recently passed health insurance reform bill as unconstitutional.
• The Socialist Party U.S.A. opposes the health insurance reform bill.
• The American Enterprise Institute fired David Frum, the former speech writer for George W. Bush and the inventor of the "axis of evil" phrase, apparently for saying that the Republican Party's failure to stop the health care bill was the Republican Party's "most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s" and for condemning the right wing's takeover of the Republican Party.
• The full text of the formerly secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement treaty has leaked onto the Internet. Related links:
  • Jack Goldsmith and Larry Lessig argue that the Obama administration's desire to adopt the ACTA treaty without Senate approval is unconstitutional.
  • Andrew Moshirnia also discusses the notion of "executive agreements".
  • Michael Geist says that ACTA may replace the World Intellectual Property Organization.