Donald Rumsfeld is the latest person edging away from criminal responsibility for the Iraq disaster but rather than shifting the blame to the rest of the Bush-Cheney regime for what was doomed from the start to be a quagmire, he, like other media commentators, is now trying to blame president Obama for the mess that he inherited and has led to the current state of affairs.
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In the absence of a clear statement by the US Supreme Court, a patchwork of decisions about same-sex marriage have been created all over the country, creating a great deal of confusion. Such marriages are currently legal in 36 states and the District of Columbia. Some states have legalized them by legislative acts, some by referenda, but most have been as a result of courts declaring that bans on such marriages were unconstitutional.
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Dan Froomkin writes:
Sometimes people ask me: Why do smart, elite journalists quote people who they know are lying, or being moronically stupid, but not call what they say lies and stupidities? Why do they engage in split-the-difference false equivalence in political coverage that leaves readers terribly uninformed about what’s really going on?
Some of you may have heard the appalling story of Kalief Browder, the young man who committed suicide on Saturday at the age of 22. Even though I thought I was aware of how bad some aspects of the criminal justice system in the US are, this story managed to surprise me by the sheer cruelty and injustice on display.
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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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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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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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The New York Times published an opinion piece by Edward Snowden on yesterday’s second anniversary of his revelations, where he justifiably expressed satisfaction at some of the changes his actions have wrought.
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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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