The war on women’s right to choose has been waged relentlessly, and many of its most vocal leaders have been men.

In the light of all that we have learned in the last few months, let’s recap where we are: We have a government that collects everyone’s communications data in secret and stores them, justifying the practice by using secret interpretations of the law and getting authorization to do so from a secret court that issues secret rulings, telling a handful of congresspersons in secret just a little of what they are doing, and putting people on secret kill lists and secret no-fly lists on the basis of criteria that are secret. [Read more…]

Reports are emerging that the Geneva talks were preceded by many secret meetings between representatives of the Obama administration and the Iranian government, facilitated by the Sultan of Oman, of which the Europeans and Israel were informed only in late September of this year. (Here is a fact sheet on the deal put out by the White House.) [Read more…]

Much of the recent conversation amongst the political chattering classes in the US media has been about the partial elimination of the filibuster rule in the US Senate. This change in one of the many arcane internal rules of the Senate has been hyped by the chronically hyperventilating US media as if we have just witnessed a major political cataclysm. [Read more…]