The unbearable cluelessness of the rich

I think I could write something every day about the sense of entitlement of the well-to-do in the US and their obliviousness about how bad things really are and how obnoxious their behavior is. The latest example comes from California where the wealthy are balking at cutting back on water use in the face of the extreme drought. For them, money is the primary determinant of what can and cannot be done.
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Keeping track of the number of Republican presidential candidates

Yesterday Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. This may have surprised some since he seems to have been running for president for some time, creating Super PACs, raising money, hiring campaign staff, giving speeches, visiting early primary and caucus states, and all the other things associated with running. But this is American politics, where candidates start by first dropping hints, then forming what is known as an ‘exploratory committee’, and defer making an ‘official’ declaration for as long as they can to avoid being bound by campaign finance rules and to create suspense. So here is a summary of who is at what stage of the process.
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Is this the best propaganda they can do?

I wrote on Sunday about the article that appeared in the Sunday Times two days ago that made sensational allegations that Edward Snowden’s cache of documents had had their encryption broken by the Russian and Chinese governments and this had revealed the identities of British MI6 secret service agents who then had to be withdrawn from the field for their safety.
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Torture

John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight has another excellent report, this time discussing the Senate torture report and the gruesome details it describes of what was done and how it shows that torture does not work. Even Helen Mirren reading the report cannot hide the disgusting brutality of the practices that the US government carried out.

Mind you, this was just from the summary of the report. The government refuses to release the full report and you can be sure that it contains far worse material.
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Ben Carson’s evasions on discrimination against gays

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson was asked a straightforward question as to whether he thought that the LGBT community was discriminated against. But the party’s candidates are in the tough position of opposing same-sex marriage without wanting to be seen as anti-gay bigots. They seem to think that even conceding a simple fact like the existence of discrimination would make them seem to be too ‘soft’ on gays by their rabid base.
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A fundamental and shameful principle of western journalism

Glenn Greenwald gives yet another example of how journalists in establishment western media collude with their governments to spread propaganda against those whom the government perceives as its enemies, using as its favorite tactic information given to the media by officials who hide behind anonymity so that when their lies are exposed, they escape accountability.
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Republicans repeating errors of 2012

In early 2013, following their convincing defeat in the presidential elections in 2012, the Republican party commissioned a study to do some serious soul-searching as to what the problem was and what they needed to do to make their party more appealing, especially to the young, women, and Latinos. The result was a 97-page report (quickly dubbed an ‘autopsy’) that criticized the the party’s attitude towards those major demographic groups and recommended wholesale changes.
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