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At a town hall meeting in New Jersey, a voter named Geoff Ginter gives an earful to his Republican congressperson Tom MacArthur for drafting and voting for the amended Republican health care bill. This kind of heated meetings have become commonplace but this one is exceptional because Ginter provides a passionate and articulate attack on the bill and an insightful analysis of what is wrong with the system in the US. I was highly impressed that although he was clearly extremely furious, he did not let his anger take over and lose control. He was very lucid and coherent and the congressperson had to just stand there and take it.
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The Comey affair

US news is all abuzz with the firing of FBI Director James Comey by Donald Trump and speculation is running rampant as to the possible motives and I thought I might as well put in my two cents. One thing we can ignore right off the bat are the rationales put out by the Trump administration for the firing because Trump is a petulant man-child who lies about everything and sees everything in terms of how it affects him. If he thinks that people are on his side, he praises them. If he thinks someone is disloyal to him, he attacks them viciously.
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The curse of blasphemy laws

The outgoing governor of the Jakarta in Indonesia, who is a double minority in that he is both Christian and ethnic Chinese in a country that has the largest Muslim population in the world and is 85% Muslim, was sentenced to two-years imprisonment for blasphemy. His crime? Quoting a verse from the Koran which he said that opponents were using to mislead people that Muslims should not vote for a non-Muslim.
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John Oliver issues another call to action to ensure net neutrality

He does a brilliant job of explaining why the fight for new neutrality is important for everyone to get involved in and how that neutrality is being threatened by the new FCC chairperson Ajit Pai. His show has set up a website gofccyourself.com to make it easy to go straight to the relevant FCC page. Once there, click on ‘express’ link at the upper right, and leave your comment telling thee FCC that you back strong net neutrality backed by Title II oversight of ISPs. I already did so.

They suspected their actions were illegal – but did them anyway

Alex Emmons writes about a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against two psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen who received lucrative government contracts to devise the most abusive torture methods used by the government. Their work was supervised by Gina Haspel who has been appointed by Donald Trump as deputy director of the CIA.
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Film review: Risk (2017)

On Friday I saw the new film Risk produced and directed by award-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, who won the Academy Award for Citizenfour, the film about Edward Snowden and his leaks. The focus this time is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and unlike the earlier one, the narrative structure of this film is, to say the least, a bit confused. But that is not due to the lack of skill of Poitras but due to the fact that after she started filming it, the story went off in many directions and she too became part of it.
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Republicans move towards their goal of depriving people of health care

So the Republicans in the House of Representatives managed to squeeze through their repeal of Obamacare by the thinnest of margins of 217-213 even though it did not undergo any of the normal scrutiny that a major bill should receive. But we do know that it seeks to deprive many people of basic health care protections and is a huge siphoning of money from the poor to the rich.
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