I fear that today may go down as the day that democracy died in the United States:
Mr. Leahy said the bill as written would allow the executive branch to hold any lawful immigrant in the United States indefinitely without charge. “We are about to put the darkest blot on the conscience of the nation,” he said, charging that the push for quick passage was purely for political gain.“There is no new national security crisis,” he said. “There’s only a Republican political crisis.”
Can you please wake me up when the nightmare is over?
Update: The bill has passed with 12 Democrats rolling over to support it. I just hope the Reichstag doesn’t burn down anytime soon, or we’re all cooked.
Where our $600 billion in annual military expenditures is not going: clean water for children:
More than 1.5m children under five die each year because they lack access to safe water and proper sanitation, says the United Nations children’s agency.
In a report, Unicef says that despite some successes, a billion people worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water from protected sources.
This is the opportunity cost of the U.S.’s Cold War-centric (read: spend lots of money on expensive military systems and then blow people up with them) approach to fighting terrorism. If a mere fraction of our annual military budget were diverted to facilitating access to clean water, serious progress could be made toward the U.N.’s goal of halving “the number of people without access to clean drinking water and sanitation by 2015.”
And it just might help fight terrorism, as well. Even the administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism lists “the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms” as one of the key underlying factors behind the spread of the global jihadist movement.
The fact is, not only are we, as the wealthiest nation on the face of the planet, morally bound to love our neighbors in the developing world, but doing so, combined with international police work to stop terrorism, may be the only way to actually win the war on terror.
