Chelsea Manning to be out of prison on May 17

In one of his final moves in office, president Obama has commuted the 35-year sentence that was given to Chelsea Manning to mostly the time already served and she will be released on May. Alex Emmons reports:

While serving as an army intelligence analyst, Manning sent hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic and military documents to Wikileaks, revealing, among other things, a dramatically higher civilian death count in Iraq and Afghanistan than the Pentagon revealed publicly, and the chilling video of a U.S. Apache helicopter gunning down journalists in central Baghdad.
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The strange Russian dossier story

While I was away for the birth of our grandchild, I could only follow the news in a cursory manner but what I could catch dealt primarily with two things: the confirmation hearings of the Trump administration nominees and the story of a dossier that detailed some bizarre activities by Trump while visiting Russia as well as claiming that Trump associates were working with the Russian government and intelligence agencies. While we now should not be surprised by bizarre and even repulsive behavior by Trump, the more explosive element of this story was that this dossier had been prepared as part of an ongoing attempt by Russian intelligence agencies to co-opt and assist Trump. That raised the seriousness of the issue to a far higher level.
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The end of ethics

There is a cliché that what is scandalous in Washington are not the things that are done that are illegal but the things that are legal. They system of laws that we have contain an inbuilt bias to protect and enhance the wealth of those who already have money and influence. It should be no surprise that with few exceptions, the halls of government have elected officials who are already wealthy or have become immensely wealthy as a result of what we euphemistically call government ‘service’. The hard edges of this system is softened by so-called ethics guidelines that supposedly bind legislators and limit how much influence-peddling they can be the recipients of while in office and how much they can do after they leave, but those guidelines can be circumvented by those determined to do so.
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The problem with repealing Obamacare

The health plan popularly known as Obamacare is clunky and confusing but the big benefit that made it worthwhile (at least as a stop-gap until a single-payer system was implemented) was that tens of millions of previously uninsured people were now able to get access to health care. Three other major benefits were that people could not be denied coverage for so-called pre-existence conditions (an appalling feature of previous plans that insurance companies heavily exploited to deny coverage for many people) children could stay on their parents’ plans until they were 26, and the expansion of eligibility for Medicaid.
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An American teenager was murdered by the US government for nothing

The number of civilians who have been killed by the US government in other countries using drones now runs into the many hundreds at least. I have written about some of them, in particular the murder in a US drone strike of 16-year old American Abdulrahman Awlaki while he was eating with two cousins at an outdoor café in Yemen in 2011. He was the son of Anwar al Awlaki a once Bush-supporting but later pro-al Qaeda imam who was also killed in a drone strike in Yemen two weeks before. The father had been estranged from the son and the son had been living with grandparents in Yemen while trying to contact him. The son had never been accused of any links to terrorism
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Reinforcing the ‘ugly American’ stereotype abroad

There have been so many reports recently of people going on racist rants that, sadly, it has ceased to be a novelty worth mentioning and is becoming a routine fact of life. But then I came across this one about a United Airlines flight from Sydney to San Francisco that had to be diverted to Auckland because a passenger objected to being seated between two people of apparently South Asian ethnicity.
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Are you a real child of god or merely an adopted one?

From time to time I come across theological debates of the kind I used to concern myself with during the time when I was a religious believer. Usually these are familiar ones that recycle old controversies but last week I came across one that was new to me that was prompted by an evangelical preacher named Paula White, yet another proponent of the infamous ‘prosperity gospel’ that tells suckers believers that if they ‘plant a seed’, i.e., send the evangelist money, they will reap financial rewards. White has been invited to participate at Donald Trump’s inauguration and some other evangelicals are criticizing that move, accusing White of promoting heretical views.
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And the beat goes on …

The Washington Post seems to have decided to send its credibility into the dumpster by rushing into print with alarmist headlines any story that suggests that Russia is pretty much waging cyberwarfare on the US without bothering to do basic journalistic due diligence. The latest is a story that had the headline “Russians hackers penetrate U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, official say”, an alarming claim if it were true. (It has now added a disclaimer that undercuts its own story and even changed the headline to make it less scary.)
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