The coming Supreme Court vote on Obamacare

Sometime this month, the US Supreme Court will issue their opinion on whether the subsidies offered by the health exchanges set up by the federal government are consistent with the wording of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the official name of what has come to be better known as Obamacare). If they rule that they are not and invalidate the subsidies, this will result in tens of millions of people who now have affordable health insurance abruptly losing them. The elimination of the federal subsidies would be a serious, and some argue fatal, blow to Obamacare and thus on the surface Republicans should welcome an adverse Supreme Court opinion.
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The Fox News echo chamber

It is hard to imagine that Fox News only began operations in 1996, such has been its impact in shaping the political climate in the US, and not in a good way. There has been a lot of buzz recently about a paper published by Bruce Bartlett where he argues that Fox News has created a separate world for its viewers that is increasingly disconnected from the actual world and as a result is hurting the Republican party that has become joined at the hip to it.
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The Los Angeles Times shames itself

On the second anniversary of the Snowden leaks, the Los Angeles Times has published an extraordinary editorial trying to have it both ways: acknowledging that it was thanks to Edward Snowden that there have been any reforms at all in the way that the government has been sweeping up the private information of people all over the world, and then objecting to him being given a pardon and calling for him to return to the US and ‘accept the consequences’.
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Happy Anniversary, Edward Snowden!

On June 5, 2013, the first of the stories based on Edward Snowden’s documents were published, creating a firestorm of attention around what had been a vast secret data-gathering operation conducted y the NSA under the maxim of ‘collect it all’, where they sought to gather up everyone’s communications. I went back to my own archives to see what I had written then on June 6, June 6, June 7, and June 8 and it was clear from the very beginning that this was a major scandal. Snowden revealed his identity on June 9, surprising everyone by being a young, soft-spoken person with deep principles..
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War is a racket

A few days ago, I excerpted some of former president Eisenhower’s criticisms of the cost of war. What follows is an excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler of the United States Marine Corps, that goes even further.

War is just a racket.
…

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.
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Fighting wars by proxy is a dangerous game

As the Middle East continues to spiral into chaos as a result of the mess that the US has created in that region, it is remarkable that the very same people who were responsible for that disaster are being invited back by the media to provide analyses of what should be done now. And their advice tends to be uniformly the same: send more weapons to one of other faction in that conflict to fight on behalf of the US.
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Where Sanders and Clinton differ

The difficulty with election campaigns is that it is easy for candidates to promise the moon and then change their views when they get elected and it comes to actual implementation of policies. So comparing them is hard. But in the case of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, both have served at the same time in the US Senate from January 2007 to January 2009 and this gives us a good way to directly compare their records by looking at how they voted on the same issues.
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