Mr Toledano : America the gift shop

Rallies Nationwide on ‘Bill Of Rights’ Day Dec. 15 | Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement. Congress is today attempting to bury the Bill of Rights. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) includes language proposed by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin and Republican Sen. John McCain that allows for the arrest and indefinite detention of U.S. citizens by the military, on U.S. soil and without the right of trial.  This is an egregious violation of our first amendment rights and comes at a time when we are witnessing unprecedented attacks on our civil liberties.

For God or for Fame? The Making of a Teenage Bomber | Culture | Religion Dispatches. Ironically, while Mohamud lamented how unrepresented he was by American Muslims and Somalis, his arrest has become fodder for speculations about what it tells us about the nature of these communities.

Unfit for Democracy? – NYTimes.com. We Americans spout bromides about freedom. Democracy campaigners in the Middle East have been enduring unimaginable tortures as the price of their struggle — at the hands of dictators who are our allies — yet they persist. In Bahrain, former political prisoners have said that their wives were taken into the jail in front of them. And then the men were told that unless they confessed, their wives would promptly be raped. That, or more conventional tortures, usually elicited temporary confessions, yet for years or decades those activists persisted in struggling for democracy. And we…