Appeals Court rules against NSA’s bulk collections of metadata

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled unanimously in the case of ACLU et. al, vs. Clapper et. al. that one aspect of the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata (one of the secret programs revealed by Edward Snowden) “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized” under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. (You can read the opinion here.) The issue was whether the NSA’s collection of metadata was legal. A lower court had dismissed the ACLU’s claim but the Appeals Court overturned it and sent it back to the district court to be dealt with accordingly. Because they found it illegal under the law, they did not venture to decide on its constitutionality.
[Read more…]

A parade of clowns

The only interesting thing about the Republican primary process will be to see how extreme the candidates’ rhetoric will get before they get eliminated one by one and to predict who will be next to get the hook and be yanked off the stage. But of course, many of them will not see this as a humiliation. They are likely in this just to feed their egos, increase their public profile, and enhance their speaking fees. They probably see this a no-lose proposition.
[Read more…]

British elections and the role of third parties

After the pleasant surprise of the Alberta provincial elections in Canada that showed a swing to the left, the opposite happened in the UK in elections yesterday, with the Conservative Party surprising the pollsters by gaining an outright majority in the British parliament, winning 331 out of 650 seats, a gain of 28. The Labour Party lost 25 seats to end up with 232 and its leader Edward Miliband has resigned as party leader.
[Read more…]

Abortion, the death penalty, and the Supreme Court

The US Supreme Court ruled back in 1973 in Roe v. Wade that abortion is legal within certain limits and set in motion a prolonged campaign by opponents to overturn that ruling. What opponents have tried to do is rather than overturn that decision directly, to adopt a policy of trying to make it harder and harder for women to get one. This has taken the form of adding restrictions that make it difficult for clinics to operate, thus forcing many to shut down and forcing women to travel to distant locations.
[Read more…]

What the US considers a war crime

Omar Khadr is a Canadian who was captured by US forces in Afghanistan in 2002, tortured, and taken to Guantanamo at the age of 15 making him the youngest person there. (I have written about his case back in 2010 and 2012.) He then spent nearly 13 years there and was tortured repeatedly, then pleaded guilty to a war crime, and was then sent back to Canada to serve the rest of his sentence.
[Read more…]

Calling for genocide as a good career move

Last year The Electronic Intifada re-published a Facebook post by a 39-year old Israeli lawmaker named Ayelet Shaked who was first elected to parliament in 2012, in which she said that the entire Palestinian population was the enemy and Israel was at war with the “entire [Palestinian] people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure”, and made the case that their destruction was justified. She even referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes”.
[Read more…]

Texas is crazy

The election of a black president seems to have completely unhinged some people who are convinced that he is a Kenyan Marxist who seeks nothing less than to install a communist dictatorship. This is yet another even more extreme example of the white paranoia that I linked to yesterday and it is not limited to just a few crazy fringe elements. In certain parts of the country it has gone mainstream, as we see from the armed militias that have taken it upon themselves to prevent government agencies from doing their work.
[Read more…]