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and Chinese governments and this had revealed the identities of British MI6 secret service agents who then had to be withdrawn from the field for their safety.
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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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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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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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Pope Francis is due to issue an encyclical (a kind of letter from the pope to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics) this coming Thursday where he is expected to call on Catholics all over the world to act to stop global warming and address climate change and inequality.
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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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He realized that his interview 2011 with Donald Rumsfeld when he was plugging his memoirs was absolutely awful, allowing Rumsfeld to evade all responsibility for his lies and crimes. I panned Stewart for that interview at the time and said that it was symptomatic of a general failing of his, that he seemed to let politically powerful people off the hook when he was talking directly with them, unlike when he was taking about them in their absence.
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I have mentioned that although opponents of same-sex marriage are threatening to defy any decision by the US Supreme Court that says that bans on same-sex marriage violate the constitution, they have been vague about what specific actions they might take. From North Carolina comes one possible tactic. Their Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that said that magistrates and clerks can choose to not perform same-sex marriages. The governor of the state, also a Republican who opposes same-sex marriage, had vetoed the bill on the grounds that employees of the state who have taken an oath to carry out faithfully the duties of their office should not be allowed to pick and choose whom they serve. But the legislature overrode the veto and this policy is now law.
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The entry of Bernie Sanders into the Democratic party primary race has had some on the left speculating that his role is not to try and win the nomination nor to even try and shift the debate towards more progressive policies but to essentially keep progressives within the Democratic party fold and prevent them from not voting or going to a third party.
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We have heard dire warnings from people in the US, even Republican presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, that they will defy any attempt to put same-sex marriage on a par with opposite-sex marriage. These warnings have come in anticipation that the US Supreme Court might rule this month that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional.
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