There are more signs that the wheels may be about to fall off the economy and the Federal Reserve seems a bit nervous about how to best insure that doesn’t happen. The prevailing question at the moment centers on whether to continue the long string of rate hikes in order to keep inflation in check [...]

You know, it’s bad enough that my birthday falls the day after Sept. 11; talk about a buzzkiller.
Now there’s this:
Yisrayl Hawkins, well known Bible scholar and author, reports that the Bible predicts the exact date and the location that nuclear war will begin. Hawkins states that the current crisis in the Middle East will go [...]

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s ruling was in response to an ACLU lawsuit.
She said the taps violate free speech and privacy rights. I’m not so sure about the free speech argument. The privacy argument is stronger, though a lot of people argue that the idea of a right to privacy is a myth.
In any case, this [...]

A revised US-France ceasefire proposal has been submitted to the UN Security Council. A vote is expected later today.
It looks pretty good, to my mind.
sources close to the negotiations said the deal would create a 400-square-mile zone inside Lebanon from which Hezbollah militia would be excluded.
Under the draft resolution, the number of U.N. troops in [...]

Late breaking news on the latest terror plot foiled …
A plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” has been disrupted, Scotland Yard has said.
It is thought the plan was to detonate explosive devices smuggled in hand luggage on to as many [...]

The story on Cynthia McKinney.
The story on Joe Lieberman.
The Lieberman race has gotten a lot of attention as some sort of referendum on the “soul” of the Democratic party. But the McKinney race was another primary involving a high-profile Democrat, and it tells a different story.
In the first race, an antiwar upstart overthrows a moderate [...]

Having lost the Connecticut primary by only about 3 points, Joe Lieberman hits the ground running as an independent centrist, as “a uniter not a divider,” and against the polarizing partisan politics of “insults, not ideas.” He could have taken his playbook straight from Unity08, and I think that movement could both gain and [...]

I wrote earlier — and disapprovingly — about a suit filed by Texas Democrats to keep Tom DeLay’s name on the ballot.
Well, get this: they won.
The Texas Republican Party must keep Tom DeLay’s name on the November election ballot, even though the former congressman has dropped his re-election bid, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
DeLay, the [...]

If you wish, you can read about it here.

They got your information back, and it looks like nothing was compromised…
WASHINGTON, June 29 � The government has recovered a stolen laptop computer and external hard drive that contains the birthdates and Social Security numbers for millions of veterans and military personnel, the Department of Veterans Affairs said Thursday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in [...]

The big revelation in today’s papers are that the government has been monitoring a huge international database of financial transactions, looking for evidence of terrorist funding so they can trace it and shut it down.
The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing [...]

After four years of being jailed without charge, and multiple attempts by various prisoners, three inmates at Gitmo finally succeeded in hanging themselves over the weekend.
That might be controversial enough; I’ll get into the basic implications of the deaths a little later. But the U.S. stoked the flames of world outrage by dismissing the suicides [...]

I wondered what Rep. John Murtha’s motivation could possibly be for taking such an aggressive antiwar stance. Now I know, thanks to The Moderate Voice — he plans to run for Majority Leader (the No. 2 position) if the Dems take back the House.
Which probably just made it a little bit likelier that they [...]

Well here’s an interesting development. Wired Magazine has published the full text of some of the documents that Mark Klein has provided against AT&T. The court had placed a gag order on the Electronic Frontier Foundation to prevent the information from being released to the public, ostensibly because it contained proprietary technical information, [...]

Canada’s National Post is reporting that Iran’s parliament has approved a law that would require religious minorities to wear colored bands identifying their faith.
The law mandates the government to make sure that all Iranians wear “standard Islamic garments” designed to remove ethnic and class distinctions reflected in clothing, and to eliminate “the influence of the [...]

MSNBC host and former conservative, Reaganite, GOP congressman Joe Scarborough on the latest unconstitutional travesty:
“Big Brother is listening. No, really. . . . Whatever you consider yourself, friends [liberal or conservative] you should be afraid, you should be very afraid. . . this domestic spying program is so widespread, it is so random, it [...]

I see we’ve already got a couple of posts on the topic, so I’ll keep this short. If you’re interested in some more analysis of the NSA phone-call database, I’ve got a few thoughts over at Midtopia.
I’m also pleased to report that my local phone company is Qwest, so I’m off the grid! Well, except [...]

Back in 1999, I went on a seminary sponsored trip to Hong Kong and mainland China. We spent two weeks in Hong Kong and a week in Yunan Province in Western China. The purpose of the trip was to worship with Christians in small villages not far from the provincial capital of Kunming. [...]

(crossposted at Midtopia)
The planned 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York City is expected to cost — are you ready? — nearly $1 billion.
I’m not making this up.
Rebuilding officials concede that the new price tag is breathtaking â€â€? “beyond reason” in the words of one member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation board [...]

(crossposted from Midtopia)
In a report required as part of the renewal of the Patriot Act, the Justice Department said Friday that the FBI secretly sought information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents last year. The report covers some but not all National Security Letters, which let the government obtain records without a judge’s approval [...]