The phoniness of ‘being presidential’

It was disgusting to see how the media fawned over Donald Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress. Simply for acting like a normal human being for a brief time, they gushed that he had suddenly become presidential. But as Trevor Noah astutely pointed out, Trump knows exactly how to fake the media into thinking he is presidential and has mocked them in the past about how easy it was to fool them. In the speech, he did exactly what he said he would do and they still fell for it.
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WikiLeaks releases blockbuster ‘Vault 7’ documents on CIA spying

WikiLeaks has issued a blockbuster press release today along with a tranche of documents that were leaked to it that describe the CIA’s efforts to infiltrate people’s communications systems. The documents reveal that the CIA targeted smartphones and computers and turned so-called Smart TVs into eavesdropping devices. The documents allege that the CIA then lost control of this spying arsenal which means that others may now possess these same capabilities, which would constitute a massive breach in its security systems.
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The five filters that shape the media narrative

In the groundbreaking book Manufacturing Consent published in 1988 by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, they proposed a model of how the media in the US is used by the establishment as a means of control of the population. This works less overtly than in openly authoritarian countries where state dominance over the media is obvious. In the US, control of the media is not by the state but by an establishment elite. This control is hidden and achieves its effects more subtly and this feature actually makes the propaganda more effective because people do not realize that their opinions are being manipulated.
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Looking for Republican unicorns

The administration of Donald Trump careens all over the place and his behavior continues to be erratic, leading to an explosion of palace intrigue and gossip. Take this story:

With the White House struggling to gain its footing almost two months into Donald Trump’s presidency, administration officials are increasingly putting the blame on one person: Reince Priebus.

In interviews, over a dozen Trump aides, allies, and others close to the White House said that Priebus, the 44-year-old chief of staff, was becoming a singular target of criticism within the White House.

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The latest Trump squirrel

So now Donald Trump is charging that last year his phones were illegally tapped by Barack Obama. It is now clear, thanks to the Edward Snowden revelations, that the Obama administration presided over a vast intelligence gathering operation that vacuumed up the communications of pretty much everyone, and it is undoubtedly the case that Trump’s communications are somewhere in the NSA computers storage facilities.
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Apartheid in Israel? It’s been there for ages

It was not that long ago that using the word ‘apartheid’ to describe the conditions of Palestinians in the Israeli occupied territories would arouse indignant responses and charges of anti-Semitism would be leveled against the speaker. But those days are long gone as the state of affairs has become more widely known and the realization has sunk in that the label accurately captures it. Even people like former president Jimmy Carter and South African archbishop Desmond Tutu and many others use the term.
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Winning elections at the local and state levels

Amy Howe explains the significance of an opinion handed down on Wednesday by the US Supreme Court concerning the way that electoral districts were drawn in Virginia.

This morning the Supreme Court handed a partial victory to a group of Virginia voters who argued that the 12 state legislative districts in which they live were the result of racial gerrymandering. The justices agreed with the challengers that a lower court had applied the wrong legal standard when it upheld all 12 districts, and the court ordered the lower court to take another look at 11 of those districts. This means that the battle over the redistricting maps that were drawn for Virginia’s state elections after the 2010 census will continue on well into this year, even as the state prepares to hold new elections in November.
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Who actually reads political memoirs?

Reports have emerged that the bidding war for the rights to publish memoirs by both Barack and Michelle Obama have reached the stratospheric level of $65 million for the two-book contract. While this is particularly high, book publishers seem to be willing to shell out big bucks advances for books written (usually ghost written) by prominent politicians. This raises once again in my mind a question that I had been idly pondering for a long while, and that is who actually reads such books? After all, the publishers are obviously hoping to recover the costs in sales. At (say) a discounted price of $10 per book, we are talking about millions of books sold.
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How the US almost went to war with Iran last month

In all the chasing after squirrels during the tumultuous first days of the Trump administration, Mehdi Hasan writes that one big story that has been largely ignored is how the US almost went to with Iran at the start of February by planning to board an Iranian vessel that was in international waters, a move that was averted at the last minute when news of the impending operation was leaked.
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