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…]

There were several items that I had noted and was planning to write about but found that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report had addressed them well. So I am handing it off to them. [Read more…]

I have been bemused by the efforts of Republicans to make the death of the US Libyan Ambassador and his associates at Benghazi into some kind of major scandal and cover up. You may recall that Mitt Romney tried to do so in presidential debate and got the wind knocked out of him. And yet, the search for the smoking gun continues. [Read more…]